It’s Only a Book!
- David Salariya
- Jan 8, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 5
David Salariya on a publishing rollercoaster ride with 1200 books
"It's only a movie, Ingrid."
Alfred Hitchcock once reassured Ingrid Bergman with that line during filming. Sweet sentiment, Hitch — but for authors, illustrators, publishers, and book creators, “It’s only a book?” feels quite different.
We know better. It’s never just a book.
When Books Are Your Lifeblood
In the world of publishing - the selling of book ideas, the rights eightsome reel - every step matters. Every fair, every pitch, every deadline. Books become your lifeblood, drawing you into a swirling vortex of edits, rewrites, cover mocks, and the relentless forward march of “What are we publishing for Bologna 2025?” “What about Frankfurt 2026... or 2027?”
I confess - I had a non-fiction/fiction addiction. I’ve launched over 1,200 titles across the globe. Spring meant the Bologna Book Fair. Autumn, Frankfurt. In between? London, Istanbul, New York, Washington, Delhi, Hong Kong, Beijing, Buenos Aires... you name it, I’ve likely tried to sell a children’s book there.
A New Chapter Begins
As 2024 begins, I find myself turning a page.
The Salariya Book Company - which occupied much of my professional life for over three decades - is now part of the past. Like many businesses that reached the pandemic years, its final chapter unfolded amid illness, supply-chain disruptions, delayed shipments, and the peculiar logistical knots that seemed to appear everywhere at once during that time.
It was not the tidy ending one might script in advance.
But careers in publishing rarely unfold according to tidy scripts.
Books are, after all, living things. They move through time, through different hands, through different editions and interpretations. Businesses change, markets shift, and eventually one chapter concludes and another begins.
For me, the blank page has appeared once again.
And blank pages have always been irresistible.
Fortunately, health has returned, energy has returned, and the notebooks on my desk are once again filling with sketches, ideas and half-formed concepts. Ideas, like eggs, require patience: they must be turned, tested and occasionally discarded before something worthwhile emerges.
So I am curious to see what may hatch next.
Credit Where Credit Is Due
History offers many curious parallels to modern life.
The ancient Egyptians practised a form of symbolic erasure when rulers fell out of favour. Names would be chiselled from monuments so that a person might disappear not only from political life, but from memory itself - a practice historians later termed damnatio memoriae.
Publishing has its own, gentler version of historical amnesia.
When the intellectual property of a company changes ownership, books are sometimes republished with slightly changed covers, new marketing language, and a new sense of origin. In the process, the network of people who originally created those books - the writers, illustrators, designers, editors and researchers - can quietly fade from view.
It is seldom dramatic. It is usually administrative. While the physical task of altering history (such as deleting names, modifying records, or "removing credits") is carried out in Orwell's 1984 by the Ministry of Truth, doublethink is the psychological method that ensures this manipulation is effective.
Yet books have long lives, and publishing history has an interesting habit of reconstructing the past. Librarians catalogue, scholars investigate, collectors compare editions, and the genealogy of books tends to reappear over time.
The making of books, like the making of buildings or films, is rarely the work of a single individual. It is a collaborative craft, built from many imaginations working together.
Why Acknowledgement Matters
Those small credits printed in the front or back of a book may seem modest, but they form part of the cultural record.
They tell future readers - and future historians - who made the work and how it came into existence.
Behind every finished book lies a small ecosystem of creativity: the writer shaping the narrative, the illustrator interpreting it visually, the designer structuring the pages, the editor refining the ideas, the production team transforming the concept into a physical object.
To acknowledge these contributions is not simply a matter of courtesy. It is part of how the history of publishing is preserved.
Books themselves endure for decades. Sometimes centuries.
And with them, the quiet stories of how they were made.
To My Fellow Book-Makers
So I raise a glass - metaphorically speaking - to the many people who bring books into the world.
To the writers, illustrators, designers, editors, printers and publishers whose work fills our shelves.
To the wild ideas that begin in notebooks.
To the long nights before deadlines.
And to the particular satisfaction that comes when a finished book finally finds its reader.
For my part, the next chapter remains unwritten.
But that, of course, is the most interesting part.
After all, every new book - every new project - begins with the same slightly unnerving thought:
It’s only a book.
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