By Elizabeth Demers and Jenny Keegan

At the 2025 AUPresses Virtual Annual Meeting, the “Trade Books 201: Secrets of Creating a Thriving Gift Books List” session, designed for university press professionals who publish or would like to publish gift books, elicited enormous interest. In it, panelists Jenny Keegan (acquisitions editor, Louisiana State University Press), Stephen Hull (director, University of New Mexico Press), and Natalie O’Neal (senior acquisitions editor, University of Kentucky Press) discussed the “trade secrets” involved in planning a gift books list from snout to tail—or, from market research, audience, and P&Ls, through acquisitions editorial, production, marketing, and sales.

Key takeaways:

1. Be Bold. Creating a successful gift book list might mean going outside your comfort zone. Do your research and proceed with confidence.
2. Be Beautiful. Strong, engaging covers are a key component for success.
3. Know Your Market. The extra time you take to do market research before publishing will pay off later.
4. Be Regionally Proud. Most panelists found that playing to their regions’ strengths was another key secret to success.
5. Plan Way Ahead. Panelists noted that planning a successful gift book often doubled the time to publication at least, due to commissioning, market research, permissions, subventions, and other factors.
6. Engage your Author. An energetic and involved author can be the X factor for success.

Since time ran out before we could answer all of the attendees’ wonderful questions, session moderator Elizabeth Demers followed up with panelist Keegan to extend the conversation:

ED: What advice would you give to a press considering starting a gift book list?

JK: My biggest piece of advice is to play to your existing strengths! And I mean that in a few different ways:

Build on relationships you already have with trade outlets, indie bookstores, and local event planners. Not only can these relationships offer you possibilities for marketing and selling your gift books, but you can also use feedback from your contacts to help shape your acquisitions strategy. What books get a lot of pick-up from customers? Are there types of books customers regularly ask for that you don’t have? What sells best during holiday seasons?

Think about your press’s existing areas of strength. LSU Press has a strong regional trade list as well as a strong identity for publishing scholarly regional books. These lists can cross-pollinate! Some academics are itching for a lighter, smaller project between their scholarly books (and, importantly, can write for trade audiences). If you already publish, and have a reputation for publishing, in a certain subject area, gift books in that subject area are more likely to find their audience–you’ve already built it!

ED: Are illustrations or commissioned photographs contracted by or through the press?

JK: As far as I’m aware, my press does not contract images directly. There have been a few occasions where we’ve managed maps in-house, but by and large, we try to give authors the best recommendations and resources we know, and then set them free to handle the image programs themselves, whether that means commissioning images themselves or collecting from existing archives and collections.

ED: What makes a gift book successful or unsuccessful, and has your thinking about that changed over time?

JK: We’ve gotten much more cautious about photo books / coffee table books in the time that I’ve been at the press. Anyone with a good-quality smartphone can take a beautiful photograph now, and everyone is on Instagram. So a proposal for a photo book needs to have a really distinct, unique point of view, and our bar for that is set pretty high. When we do produce photo books, we lean toward making books that feel more high-end and deluxe, which of course means a higher price point—so we want to make sure that what we’re giving to readers justifies that higher price point. It’s also even more important for these more expensive books that the authors have a following or can get out there and promote the hell out of the book.

ED: At what step in the process do you start to consider a trade book as a gift book? Would you redesign a backlist title to re-release as a gift book if that strategy was not selected during the initial release process?

JK: I love the idea of plumbing the backlist for potential gift books! It’s not something we’ve done very often, but this question made me want to go backlist-diving to see if anything has potential. In the acquisitions process, I want to start thinking very early on—at the proposal stage—if a book is going to be a gift book. That decision affects so many things about if and how we move forward with the project.

For instance, it becomes crucial that the author be able to provide high-quality, professional-looking images. We need a longer runway for all the elements of production. I’m more likely to send the full set of images out with the manuscript for review (something I rarely do with less heavily illustrated books). I also like to have buy-in from marketing and production colleagues early on, if a book is planned as a gift book. As an acquisitions editor, I don’t want to make it all the way through the process of peer review, then spring a gift book on marketing and production colleagues, and learn at a late stage that they don’t feel like they can price it and sell it where it needs to go.

Elizabeth Demers is director at Michigan State University Press. Jenny Keegan is trade editor at Louisiana State University Press.