Rewriting the rule book

The London Times, May 13 2009

Rewriting the rule book makes a publishing success story

You can have a book that helps

Publishing is not, perharps, the most obvious business opportunity in Colombia. Every man, woman and child reads an average of 1.1 books each year, including school and university textbooks, and pirated novels can be found at most street markets. The numbers are intimidating ­– where, you might ask, can you count on finding a profit? – yet Andrés Barragán has made them add up.

To do so, the chief executive of .Puntoaparte Editores – and the winner of this year’s British Council International Young Publishing Enterpreneur award – has found a different way to look at books. His idea has been to use books as a way for companies to strengthen their brands.

After leaving university, where he studied industrial engineering and literature, Mr Barragán, 32, supported himself by teaching poetry, while researching Colombia´s publishing market. “We found that a fifth of the books were made not by publishers but by people who did not know how to make books,” he said. “They were to do with anniversaries, corporate things, manuals, and that is where we saw a niche.”

Forget, for a moment, the conventional view of books, as objects that deliver entertainment or information, something to read on the train. Mr Barragán looked beyond the end product. A newly published book can be a huge event that, in turn, can be used to gain media coverage or as a way to get important people into a room together. Even the writing process can be used as a marketing exercise, as .Puntoaparte’s work with Sika, a company that makes waterproofing products for the construction industry, has demonstrated.

Not all of Mr Barragán’s projects involve straightforward commercial branding; a number are developed to raise cash or publicity for non-profit organizations. For example, the Colombian Opera Company made more money from a book that told its history – and carried discreet logos from its sponsors – than from any opera season, while a book produces in conjunction with the World Bank is drawing attention to some of the forgotten voices in Colombian history.

“Nobody tells the stories of victims (of violence and conflict),” Mr Barragán said. “Colombia is a country with no memory… somehow we end up doing the same things all over again.”

Telling such stories is more difficult than simply finding the money to fund the books, he discovered. When he founded the company, he got involved in the hands-on interviewing and writing needed to create a book, but after working on a project about prostitutes with an NGO he decided to step back a little. “I love interviewing, but there comes a point where the story is too hard, too saddening. You end up crying and you cannot sleep at night. I couldn’t do it any more, so I started hiring people to do it.”

.Puntoaparte uses more than 70 freelancers, some of whom shortly will start work on a book designed to strengthen business links between Colombia and Venezuela, a year after tensions between the countries sparked talk of war. “What I love about this project is that you have a book that might, in a very small way, actually help as a diplomatic project against war and rivalries,” he said. “This is why I got into this in the first place – to make books that have an impact.”

— Carly Chynoweth

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