How to Submit an Idea

Books, calendars, trends. Workman is a publisher that's always around big ideas. B. Kliban's Cat, The Official Preppy Handbook, The Silver Palate Cookbook, the original Page-A-Day® Calendars, the What to Expect books, BRAIN QUEST--landmark bestsellers such as these reflect a knack for publishing books and calendars that lead.

And a commitment to publish them with a mixture of care and innovation. From our first book in 1968--the Yoga 28-Day Exercise Plan, currently in its twenty-eighth printing--to our most recent, each title embodies a style of publishing synonymous with the Workman name. The bright, appealing trade-paperback format. High standards of design and production. Authors who are authorities, who tour extensively and are spokespeople for their subjects. Unexpected formats. The packaging of books with objects. And above all, value through conscientious, aggressive pricing.

Then once a book is published, we stay after it through promotion and publicity. Take, for example, the case of The Official Preppy Handbook, and how an idiosyncratic bestseller was transformed into a phenomenon, complete with posters and stationery--even pins and nightshirts. Or What to Expect When You're Expecting, which started with a modest 6,700-copy advance in 1984 and has grown into America's pregnancy bible, currently with 10 million copies in print.

Perhaps more telling is the fact that over two-thirds of all the books we've published in the last twenty-eight years are still in print. Actively so. With a fair share of titles that have over one million copies in print, including BRAIN QUEST, The Silver Palate Cookbook, The New Basics Cookbook, All I Need to Know I Learned from My Cat, The Magic Locket, and The Bones Book & Skeleton.

We're equally passionate about our calendars: lush wall calendars, desk diaries, and the groundbreaking Page-A-Day® calendar line. It was years ago that Workman followed the 1975 bestseller Cat with the 1976 bestselling B. Kliban's Cat Calendar. Then a few years later we completely changed the business with the introduction of the chunky, irresistible, boxed Page-A-Day® calendar.

Today we're still growing, evolving, innovating. Our calendar list is bigger, our business more established. But look at our offerings and you'll see not a company running on past successes, but one that works just as hard to launch the new idea as it does to keep the proven title selling--a company that works as hard to publish the best calendar as it does to publish the best book.