The radical route: Giles O’Bryen

"I’ve always regarded myself as a political radical," he says. "The chance to work somewhere that regards it as part of its business to propose alternatives to the limited, unimaginative and self-serving opinions that get aired by our politicians and media is very attractive."
Such radical impulses are paired with a robust business brain. Since arriving at Verso, he has helped pull the publisher out of loss-making territory and back towards breaking even.
"At the moment we are probably the most important publishers of radical politics and philosophy in the English language," he says--but in 2004, with Penguin, Pluto Press and Saqi all edging ahead, "we were barely clinging onto that boast".
When O’Bryen joined, three months after predecessor Guy Bentham left, he took the reins of a skeleton organisation. "It had lost a lot of longstanding staff and wasn’t publishing very well."
Last year was spent swelling staff numbers to 12 (eight in London, four manning the company’s US marketing and distribution operation in New York) and trimming costs. "2005 was about getting the company excited about itself again," he adds.
With that mission accomplished, the aim for the next three to five years is to grow turnover from £1.7m to the £3m mark. Verso’s claim that it is the most important publisher of its kind should be "indisputable", he says.
O’Bryen’s circuitous career path gives a hint of his intentions. He landed his "first proper job" as editorial assistant at Michael Joseph, where he rose to commissioning editor. When it became part of Penguin in 1987, he took the role of editorial director at Fourth Estate.
After over a decade in trade editorial, O’Bryen made an impulse decision to leave publishing for an MSc in Information Systems. "I don’t know where the interest in computers came from, but I just followed my nose," he says.
His career took in project management roles at STM and legal publishers Thomson and Butterworths, then magazine group Emap, and finally the Courtauld Institute, where he oversaw a £1.6m project to digitise its photographic archives.
Then it was time to get back to books. "Since the MSc, I was waiting for when the new things I’d learnt would be useful to the industry I’d started in," he says. "That has only really come about in the last year or so."
Digital investment is not a standard route for small independents, but O’Bryen believes Verso’s profile lends itself well to a web presence. "We have a coherent and addressable market in the way that a biography of Freddie Flintoff just doesn’t," he says. "Digital is a godsend for us if we want to dig channels to sell to that market."
O’Bryen envisages a "suite" of Verso and New Left Review web services, including discussion forums and new author content, to be "properly integrated with a call to buy". "People feel that by buying from us they are staying within the Verso universe," he says. "Our recommendations hold weight."
The other plank supporting Verso’s new plan is its backlist. O’Bryen aims to set up print on demand facilities and just in time fulfilment, to keep its backlist earning without crippling print bills. He also plans to nearly double its publishing programme over the next three years, moving from 50 to 60 titles a year to nearly 100, mined largely from the backlist.
This repackaging is in full swing with the Radical Thinkers series, although O’Bryen is frank that there was no radical thinking involved: "It’s an almost direct rip-off of Penguin’s Great Ideas," he says. A series of classic texts by notorious dictators is planned to follow.
Meanwhile, Verso’s new titles are moving into genuinely commercial territory. Lined up for March is Mike Davis’ examination of urbanisation, Planet of Slums, told in "exhilarating slash-and-burn prose style", and for April, George & Martha, a satirical fantasy based on the supposition that George Bush and Martha Stewart are having an affair.
Verso’s mission is to be at the intersection of academic and trade markets. O’Bryen makes no bones that this is an elusive spot, but is doing his best to get close. "You need either a great piece of packaging, a great subject, or a great author. Here we have examples of each of these."