BUSINESS
Book it! America’s top Black publisher has celeb friends, but the focus is budding authors
BY TOM SCHUMAN
Y
VONNE ROSE WAS A VERY reluctant author three decades ago when she penned the first stanza of a book she didn’t think she wanted
to write. Today, the Province resident remains a prolific ghostwriter and is the longtime head of Quality Press, the nation’s largest Black book packaging company for self-publishers. The year was 1995. After a long and successful career in modeling — on the runways and as an instructor and fashion editor — Yvonne put together a pamphlet for those looking to break into the industry. “I never thought about doing a book,” she recalled. “But my husband Tony said, ‘Yvonne, you’re going to write a book.’ Tony got all the how-tos on writing a book, but I wasn’t interested. He made it easy, though. He packed a picnic, and we went to the beach. We talked and wrote together.” Two years later, the pair — married for 43 years, living in Arizona since 1996 and Maricopa for the past two years — teamed to publish Is Modeling for You? The Handbook and Guide for the Aspiring Black Model . The flagship title of Amber Books, founded by Tony Rose in 1998, generated sales of more than 80,000 copies. Three years later, Quality Press was born to fill a need in the packaging end of the business for authors and the rest, as they say, is history. But the story runs much deeper. Tony Rose was coming off a standout two-decade career in the music business, and he was ready to apply his acumen to the publishing world. “He drove across the country, stopping at all the Black bookstores and newspapers from California to New York,” Yvonne said. “That’s how we began in the publishing business. My husband’s entrepreneurial spirit kicked in. Others saw what we had done, and they asked us to do it with their books. “Tony had put his own record label together. He knew how to do that, and he wanted to own his own book publishing company.”
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Yvonne Rose, co-founder of Quality Press, at her home in Province.
“But you could count on one hand the number of Black authors,” she pointed out. “Tony pulled together some people and started the African American Pavilion, which attracted the likes of former NBA star Magic Johnson and longtime sports broadcaster James Brown.” The Pavilion featured thousands of Black publishers and industry professionals as attendees and exhibitors.
Amber Books published some 60 titles in its first five years. The focus then shifted to assisting other authors in a new way as the self-publishing world began to evolve. That didn’t happen, however, without another entrepreneurial push. BookExpo America was a large annual book trade fair held in various American cities. Yvonne said it was where everyone — authors, librarians and others — came to market their product or find new literature to get lost in.
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InMaricopa.com | December 2024
December 2024 | InMaricopa.com
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