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Esther Margolis of Newmarket Press Wins the Poor Richard Award
The New York Center for Independent Publishing (NYCIP)has honored Esther Margolis, founder of Newmarket Press, with the Poor Richard Award.The Poor Richard Award is a prestigious honor, named for the famous almanac published by Benjamin Franklin, the renowned Founding Father and independent publisher. The Award is given to a publisher who has made an outstanding contribution to the field of independent publishing. The path forged by Esther Margolis and Newmarket Press, innovative and entrepreneurial, truly embodies the spirit of the Poor Richard Award. Previous pre-eminent awardees have included Peter Mayer, Morgan Entrekin, Peter Workman, André Schiffrin and Barney Rosset. The award was presented to Esther Margolis by Daisy Maryles, Executive Editor of Publishers Weekly.
Esther Margolis is president, publisher, and majority owner of Newmarket Press, now in its 26th year with over 300 books published since its first list in 1982. She founded Newmarket as a publishing and communications company, with Newmarket Press as its publishing arm, after 17 years at Bantam Books, where she started as a promotion assistant. She became Bantam’s first publicity director, later its first woman vice president, and ultimately a senior vice president, one of Bantam’s five top officers, and its first division head for marketing, publicity, and communications worldwide.
Esther’s Bantam experience led her to establish her own company with an eye toward identifying unique books and authors and to publish them with strong, continuing publicity and marketing support. She was the one to discover and, with her expert staff, successfully publish the first books by Dr.Georgia Witkin, Suze Orman, Gene Hackman and Dan Lenihan, Stuart Avery Gold, and Daphne Oz. Early on, she acquired Lynda Madaras’s fourth book from a proposal for a “girl’s book on puberty”, which together they built into the acclaimed What’s Happening to My Body? evergreen series of books on puberty for boys and girls. In 2006, she quickly recognized the SuDoku fad and Newmarket became one of the first U.S. publishers of SuDoku puzzle books. Her understanding of the cross-media and cross-marketing benefits of working with the Hollywood film community led to Newmarket becoming a leading filmbook publisher, with its acclaimed series of Newmarket Shooting Scripts and Pictorial Moviebooks.
Newmarket Press now publishes about 30 mainly non-fiction books a year—about half in the area of entertainment, mainly on film and television, and half in the areas of childcare & parenting, psychology, business, health & nutrition, biography & memoir, personal finance, and popular self-help & inspiration. Newmarket Press is distributed to the trade by the Perseus Distribution Group.
Also a committed educator, Esther has lectured on publishing, publicity, and marketing at the University of Denver, Radcliffe, Stanford, New York University, and CUNY, and is the co-founder and co-director of the University of Michigan Introduction to Book Publishing Workshop. She serves on the Trade Executive Committee of the Association of American Publishers and the American Advisory Committee of the Jerusalem International Book Fair. She is a member of the Women’s Forum, the Women’s Media Group, and Writers Guild of America.
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The NYCIP’s mission is to help independent publishers reach a wider audience, encouraging public awareness to their unique offerings. NYCIP supports excellence and free expression in publishing through workshops, lectures, book fairs, exhibits, and its reference center on writing and publishing. The Center is an educational program of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, a non-profit organization, dedicated since 1785, to the mission of providing educational and cultural resources.