Each year the SDSHS Press publishes a catalogue of books that lists all our titles in print and explains a little bit about each one. Everyone is familiar with such catalogues, but lately I’ve started to ponder whether a standard catalogue of books is the best way to go about things.
We see a ton of book catalogues in this office; we receive them from fellow publishers, primarily as a way for our journal editor to see which books she would like to have reviewed in South Dakota History. However, we share them around the office, looking at them with a critical eye, seeing what other presses are doing in our field, as well as looking to see how they are laying out and producing their catalogues.
These other presses produce their catalogues in a dizzying array of styles, shapes, paper weights, formats, etc., but all are essentially along the same lines as the one we publish each year. But is that they best way they can be? At about this time each year I start to begin the preliminary work on our catalogue, and this year I’m going to reconsider ours from top to bottom. Should we use a different shape? paper? style? We’ve had the same basic design for the past 3 years…is it time for a change? Would a “magazine” format work better? Would people read a catalogue if it was presented as a small book or magazine? Would that idea give people more information than they would really like or would it present them with something more tangible and relevant than a simple listing of the books we publish? I’m tempted by the idea of presenting each book in an “article” format, with the pages laid out in a fashion that resembles something more like a magazine. I think such an approach is at least worth considering, but I don’t yet know if I’ll definitely move the project along those lines or not. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
In the meantime, if you have a thought or suggestion along these lines feel free to share it in the comments!
