Publishing illustrated books

'The investment in an illustrated book, the picture acquisition cost, the production, the design, is much, much greater than, let's say, a novel, where if you don't sell a single copy, and it's a first novel, where you might not have paid a huge advance, the actual cost of the paper and production is very slim. Whereas, if you get it wrong with a big art book, you will feel it financially. That's one of the reasons why so few illustrated art books work with just the domestic market in mind. With some few exceptions, it just isn't big enough. So the way that we endeavour to make it work is to have a team of people whose job is to set up international editions, translations, co-editions, which we will then print in French, German, American, Hungarian, Korean - it's about getting up to a large enough print run, defraying some of the risk because of the co-publishers in other countries.'

Jamie Camplin of Thames & Hudson, in Publishing News