Still nonchalantly beautiful at 64, Liz Calder is relaxing on the sofa of her Soho office. It is a surprisingly modest room for a woman who has helped build the most successful independent publishing house in the country. Separated from the open plan office only by walls of bookshelves, this arrangement is typical of Bloomsbury’s ethos: warm and approachable, while maintaining high quality and innovation. Calder is surrounded by the things she loves: Bloomsbury books, pictures of Brazil (where she has a home), family photographs and portraits of authors. These are the things she has devoted her life to and, surely, the motivation behind her formidable drive to achieve?

“I must be ambitious but I’ve never really stopped to think about it. I didn’t get into publishing till my thirties. I’d left university, got married and had children quite quickly, which was a struggle, so I was terribly pleased to be doing a proper job. And I’m still pleased to be part of the big cog that makes the world go around. But I didn’t have a vision. The only thing that I had wanted to do was to be a part of something new, to see how it worked. If there was an opportunity presenting itself to me, I wasn’t slow in picking it up. Rather than having ambitions and going all out for something, it’s been more a question of pushing at what I’m doing and seizing the moment. I think that’s important. You’ve got to learn to grab at opportunities.”

But Calder created her own opportunities by recognising and promoting some of the world’s best writing. She is, after all, the woman who discovered Salman Rushdie and Julian Barnes. Like many other highly successful people she relies on optimism and places trust in her gut instincts to point her in the right direction.

“I’ve always had a fairly optimistic view of the world and I think optimism is essential in publishing. It’s nine-tenths optimism and one-tenth good luck. You have to believe that the next thing you read is going to be something wonderful. And after a while I learnt to trust my instincts. My confidence grew because some of the things that my nose had twitched over were pretty successful.”

For a woman with a love of fiction it is appropriate that Calder’s childhood and early life were extremely colourful. Her father was a grocer and at the outbreak of World War II became a conscientious objector, which inevitably brought its own brand of tensions. Later, after emigrating to New Zealand via America, he became a sheep farmer. At university, Calder met and married an engineer, and went on to teach in Derby. When her husband took up a new posting in Washington, Liz arrived with their two children during the week of Kennedy’s funeral and then, to amuse herself during a posting in Brazil from 1964-68, turned successfully to modelling.

Craving broader horizons, she finally split from her husband and began working as a reader for MGM’s story department. In 1970 she moved on to become publicity manager for Victor Gollancz and since, by then, she was living in Manchester with an academic and her two children, she commuted to London and lodged with the then unknown Salman Rushdie. In 1978 she was poached by publishing giant Jonathan Cape. It was there that she really proved she had a nose for winners when, having taken Rushdie and Anita Brookner with her, they won the Booker Prize. She stayed at Cape, nurturing both her authors until one day Nigel Newton, then deputy managing director of publisher Sidgwick & Jackson, asked her to lunch. He told her about his idea to set up a new publishing company.

“Of course I knew at the time that it was a big risk. I’d be leaving a very established company and throwing my lot in with something new and uncertain. Even the concept of striking out on our own went against the grain of the times because it was the 1980s when the business vogue was to conglomerate small companies under one big roof. Independent companies were very thin on the ground then, but we broke away.”

The four founders were very clear about what they wanted to do. They would set up an independent medium-sized publishing house and become general publishers of quality fiction and non-fiction. Calder was to be publishing director (with special responsibility for fiction). And so, with £2.2m raised in venture capital, the Bloomsbury Four surrendered their enviable top- industry positions and in 1986 began running the company from an office above a Chinese restaurant in Putney.

“We had no furniture at all except what was in there. After a month we rented some rooms in Bloomsbury Square. By then there were 15 of us – including newly appointed sales people, a production person and some assistants, but we still only had one phone! You had to queue up to use it. And we didn’t have a photocopier or fax machine, and of course there were no emails or mobiles back then. The only thing we bought of note was a boardroom table. I remember thinking 'well, if we go bust, we can always sell the table and start again.’ But we still have it, and we’re very proud because back then was a tough time in publishing. There was much more contraction than expansion going on so we had to go through some pretty difficult toiling up the mountainside at the beginning of each year.”

Despite the day-to-day challenges of building a business, Bloomsbury was also intent on challenging received wisdom about the trade and on determining for itself what would and wouldn’t work. One aspect of publishing which Calder was determined to challenge was the industry’s detached treatment of authors. She wanted to get authors involved in all the processes – including design and production – from the outset.

“Things have changed but back then in publishing it was unheard of to allow the author to have a say in the jacket design. They’d say, 'Don’t let the author near the jacket. It’ll just cause trouble. The authors think they know, but they don’t.” This seems outrageous now but that was what people said. We took a great deal of care with production, introducing things like a reader’s ribbon and more elegant author photographs. We sold at the top end of the retail price but we were aiming to give value for money. It was probably quite a controversial business decision at that point. I think some people thought we were wasting money. But it got us attention and brought us recognition because we were making a big thing of it. We wanted people to be able to pick up a book and just by the look and feel of it to instantly recognise it as a Bloomsbury book.” Looking fondly at her bookshelves she says with a modesty that only confidence affords, “I think we succeeded.”

Bloomsbury also set up an “author’s trust” so that when the time came to float the company on the stock market each author would receive some money in direct relation to their royalties. “Yes. It was a little bit of a come on” says Calder with a smile. “But I don’t think anyone actually believed that they’d get a slice of the action. Someone said to Martin Amis, 'Don’t you want to go to Bloomsbury? You might get some extra money eventually’, but he said, 'I don’t really believe that’ll happen’. So I think most people were sceptical about it but in fact we did pay out a lot of money to the authors involved.”

But first of all, they had to collect a whole new list of authors. And although Calder had managed to lure a few of her authors from Cape, many of them didn’t follow her. “The ones I thought would, didn’t. And all the ones I didn’t think would follow, did. So it was very unpredictable. Naturally I’d have loved to have taken Julian Barnes, Rushdie or Anita Brookner but they liked being at Cape and it meant more to them than following their editor, so I said fine. It was Julian Barnes who said to me, 'Well you’re leaving me. I’m not leaving you.’ He remains a good friend, but I think you have to protect yourself to a degree because discovering authors is a bit like falling in love.”
Undaunted by having no books to publish when they set up Bloomsbury, Calder concentrated on finding new novelists. “It was a shock because having worked for a company that had a big stable of authors, with every week bringing a delivery of wonderful new books, suddenly I was having to scrape around to dig up new talent. I went to America during the first few months looking for writers. Just as I was returning empty-handed to the UK somebody gave me a manuscript by Scott Turow called Presumed Innocent. It turned out to be a huge bestseller. So that was another stroke of good luck. But it was hard work because building up a list is a very slow business. It’s widely held that it takes five years to really develop a list from scratch into something of quality.”

There were also moments of worry, but Calder’s enthusiasm pulled them through. “The first thing is about enthusing your colleagues, and if you can’t do that you’re stuck at first base. I remember one time where I said, 'I want to publish this book on Frida Kahlo and everyone said, 'No way! No-one’s heard of her. We’ll never sell a copy.’ But that book has been in print ever since and the recent film Frida was based on it.’”

Since living there in the 1960s, Calder’s love affair with Brazil has remained a life-long passion which she has successfully indulged through publishing, making Bloomsbury the top publisher of Brazilian literature in the UK. Last year Calder rolled up her sleeves once again and initiated an annual international literary festival in the old colonial town of Parati. The festival catered for 600 visitors and so, understandably, Calder was overwhelmed to discover that the brand-new three day festival drew 6,000 and stole the front pages of every national and local newspaper.

And it seems that Calder’s Midas touch is still going strong. Only 17 years since Bloomsbury began they remain one of only two highly successful independent publishing companies in the country. The cherry on the cake was the Harry Potter phenomenon whose books have added vastly to profits since Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997. As well as the publication of the fifth Harry Potter this year other recent high-profile titles have included Sophie Dahl’s The Man With The Dancing Eyes, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex, Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake, which was short- listed for this year’s Booker, and Donna Tartt’s long-awaited The Little Friend. Such successes have brought substantial financial gains; the Chairman’s statement for Bloomsbury’s Interim Report 2003 shows that fortunes in the first half of last year remained rosy. “Turnover for the six-month period increased 18.2% to £29m (2002, £24.54m). Excluding acquisitions, turnover increased 13.9% to £27.95m (2002, £24.54m).”

Calder reflects; “When we started out I think a lot of people thought, 'Well, let’s see how this new company does. They might fall flat on their faces. They might not be there in a year’s time.’ But that was the element of risk. Twenty years on we’re in a very different state. We’re now one of the well-established houses and we walk with a big stick these days. We’re not the publishing house that’s dodging, ducking and diving. And although that’s good, I do miss it.”

FIVE THINGS I WISH I’D KNOWN BEFORE I STARTED
1. For a clear head and a clear desk, get into the office one hour before everyone else... you’ll accomplish two hours’ worth of real work.
2. When choosing staff look around in other professions or departments. Great book editors, for example, are often former journalists, publicists or marketing people.
3. Be prepared to trust your instincts.
4. Don’t let setbacks break your heart. Or only allow it to happen once… get tough after that.
5. Be prepared to admit when you’re wrong – nobody’s perfect!