Today Bard Press is an award-winning publishing house that produces cutting-edge business books that sell extremely well. Most of its business books sell five times the average national sell through rate (the average is 5,000) through all sales channels during the lifetime of the book. Bard Press sells, on average, 15,000 copies through retail sales for each book, often within the first few months of publication.

Last fall, Bard Press placed three books on business best-seller lists, competing against such New York heavyweights as John Wiley and McGraw Hill. The three best-sellers are Play to Win, The Wizard of Ads and Customer Satisfaction Is Worthless.

Bard has also met his most important goal of publishing quality books: Play to Win was chosen as the Book of the Year for the business category in ForeWord Magazine‘s first annual book awards competition. The award was announced in January of this year.

Bard Press’s spring catalogue includes a powerful line-up of business books. Spring 1999 titles include Talk Is NOT Cheap! Saving the High Costs of Misunderstandings at Work and Home by Beverly Inman-Ebel and the second edition of The World’s Best Known Marketing Secret: Building Your Business With Word-of-Mouth Marketing (the first edition has sold more than 30,000 copies).

Bard is a 25-year veteran of writing, producing, and publishing books and multimedia materials. In 1972, he established and directed a small press to the million-dollar-sales level before selling it to a subsidiary of the New York Times. Bard began his namesake press in 1986.

Over the past 12 years, Bard has produced and packaged books for major publishers in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, as well as helping start-up presses nationwide. In the early years, Bard Press wasn’t strictly business. But as the company narrowed its focus, Bard Press expanded its team with strong full-time freelancers who provide quality developmental editing, copyediting, proofing, and design services.

Although Bard is geared toward a corporate audience, several of the press’s publications could be better described as self-improvement. Titles such as Out Front Leadership, The How-To of Great Speaking, Doing It All Isn’t Everything, and 101 Simple Ways to Enjoy Life’s Simple Pleasures are a few of the publications whose purpose is to help the person inside the business uniform.

Bard speaks on a variety of publishing topics, including: What does it takes to make a best-seller?; What are the steps involved in writing, co-authoring, or creating new books?; and What does it take to be successful publisher today? To arrange a speaking engagement featuring Bard, call Phenix & Phenix Literary Publicists at 512/478-2028 in Austin, Texas.
This article is from thePMA Newsletterfor April, 1999, and is reprinted with permission of Publishers Marketing Association.