Q: On your website, you mention that each title you publish “bears the unique aesthetic of the Sutherland House brand.” Can you describe your brand and what you are looking for in a manuscript?
A: SutherlandHouse publishes narrative nonfiction for intelligent general readers. So we do history, biography, memoir, essays, journalism, investigations, science writing, and other story-based forms of nonfiction writing. We tend not to do self-help or how-to or guide books or reference books. We like stories and good writing. We put a lot of work into the visual presentation of our books, the typesetting and design. We have consistent art direction across our list by the talented Lena Yang, and there are specific things we do in every book we publish to make them more attractive to readers, most notably our decorated endpapers, which elaborate on themes introduced by the cover art.
Q: Sutherland House was started in 2017. What has been the biggest lesson you’ve learned since launching?
A:The biggest lesson we've learned is that we never know half as much as we think we do, or nearly as much as we need to know. We're constantly learning and experimenting, looking for new and better ways of doing things, whether that's choosing which book to publish or finding new efficiencies in our production system. We've found that we make much better decisions when we reach out to as many people as possible and gather all available information. For instance, we have a panel of experts--booksellers, former publishers, authors, publicists, book marketers--that we reach out to about our acquisition decisions. We find it more reliable than relying entirely on our individual judgement.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about the Sutherland House Nonfiction Prize? How was this prize established and what do you hope will come of it?
A: We're only as good as the books we publish, and we can only publish manuscripts we see so Sutherland House works hard to keep its doors open to writers. We don't require agents. We'll look at anyone's proposal. We actually advertise for submissions. As far as we're concerned, we can't look at enough projects or talk to enough writers. The prize is another way of introducing us to talent that otherwise might not find us. There's only one winner but it starts a lot of new relationships for us.
Q: Can you share a forthcoming Sutherland House title that you are excited about and why?
A: I've just finished editing a book called Fashioning the Beatles. Initially, I was skeptical. What's left to say about the Beatles? In fact, quite a lot. They were just as important to the fashion world as they were to music. Almost everything that happened in both men's and women's fashion in the Sixties was influenced by how they (and their wives and girlfriends) presented themselves--from the mop-top Mod look, through the Sgt. Pepper and psychedelia phases, right up to their extremely hairy jeans-and-sneakers rebellion against fashion at the very end. The Beatles were obsessed with clothes. How they looked mattered as much to them as how they sounded. Everyone in the fashion world was watching them then, and generations of designers have used them for inspiration ever since. It will be a beautiful book.
