Cover Story : Quill's Will

Quill Driver Books Founder Steve Mettee says all publishers need two things to succeed. He's got them both ... and a lot of persistence to boot.

“A publisher requires two things,” he says. “One is passion, and the other is optimism. If you haven’t got passion and optimism, then you shouldn’t be in this industry. When I get passionate about something, I can get behind it. I think about it when I’m driving down the street. It’s almost like I can will it to happen.”

Of course, after 14 years at the helm of his Sanger, Calif.-based publishing company, Mettee knows that willpower alone cannot make a book sell. (“I miss as much as I hit,” he confesses.) But his instinct and tenacity lie behind all of Quill Driver’s successes, from the recent New York Times best-seller “Dr. Gott’s No Flour, No Sugar Diet” to the trend-defining survey of social-network marketing, “The New Influencers.”

A Quill Driver health book, “Could It Be B12?” was “overlooked by everybody” when released four years ago, he says. He continued to push the exposé of misdiagnosed B12 deficiency, which now is selling steadily, with a second edition in the works. “It became our mission because I believed in it,” he says. “I feel like we sell each one of those books one at a time.

“Certainly the large publishers have a reputation for putting a whole bunch of books out, and the ones that are not quick to come out of the gate get kind of ignored,” Mettee says. “As an independent publisher, we only do so many titles. We need all of our books to sell, so we’re out there battling. We will work a title for a year or two before it finds its market.”

He compares the process to filling a bucket with an eyedropper until it finally overflows, at which point momentum takes over. “You would think the media would like to write about something new, but it doesn’t,” he says of fighting pop culture inertia. “It likes to write about what everybody else is writing about.” On the other hand, the right author at the right time can “fill the bucket” immediately, which is why Mettee is always on the lookout for what he calls “the good platform,” an author with a built-in fan base or other surefire credentials.

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