By John Eckberg
The Cincinnati Enquirer

EAST WALNUT HILLS - The employees at Emmis Books were glued to Amazon.com one morning last month.

Their company, a division of Indianapolis-based Emmis Communications, had just released the book Barry Sanders: Now You See Him...($29.99), an autobiography of the media-shy Detroit Lions running back.

Emmis Books President & Publisher Richard Hunt, Sales Director Katie Parker, Editorial Director Jack Heffron, Design Director Dana Boll, administrative intern Hannah Crum, and Publicity Director Howard Cohen. (Glenn Hartong photo)

As the sales meter at Amazon clicked away, the staff could only marvel. The book started off as the 2.1 millionth most-sold book at the Web retailer.

Within minutes it blew through 100,000th most popular book, then zoomed to 1,300th and 600th until finally it crested at 82nd most popular book.

Emmis Books, founded in a former firehouse on Madison Road in February, had its first book that appealed to a national audience, and this crew of five suspected it would not be their last.

A radio and television giant with a corporate footprint in 24 communities, the publicly traded parent company could have created a publishing division just about anywhere. But Emmis chose Cincinnati, where it also owns Cincinnati Magazine.

"Cincinnati is the No. 10 most literate spot in the country. It was once a national center of publishing. Our parent company said 'Find the best people, find a place to work, get going,' " said Richard Hunt, president and publisher.

The publisher plans to support the Emmis family of magazines by publishing works created by the company's stable of magazine writers. But Emmis also plans to take on books from a variety of authors across a range of nonfiction topics.

At a time when publishers are consolidating due to losses, founding a publishing company is a risky proposition.

This is a field where gone today, here tomorrow is a sobering reality.

That is, books go out to bookstores at great expense to the publisher. When they do not sell, the books are returned before being sent to an unprofitable burial in some discount bin.

"One of the things we are being very careful about is that if you print way too many books and they are in the warehouse, or you are way too enthusiastic, it can snakebite a good year," Hunt said.

"We'd rather be reprinting once a year than to think we'll save a extra nickel on two year's worth of inventory."

The company is targeting Midwestern book buyers, whose interests are often neglected by major publishers on the East and West coasts.

Kit Spring, the Denver-based vice president of equity research with Stifel Nicolaus & Co., has been covering Emmis since 1996. He was not surprised that Emmis created a book-publishing wing. After all, it only takes one mega-seller such as Who Moved My Cheese? for a book company to get a taste of filet mignon instead of lunch meat.

"Emmis is a company that likes to grow, likes to be creative," Spring said. "They've apparently identified a niche that isn't being served well by major book publishers. Time will tell if they are successful."

Stifel Nicolaus & Co. has no equity interest in Emmis and neither does Spring.

While the Sanders book is clearly in a sports biography category, other offerings target coffee-table book buyers. Corn Country: Celebrating Indiana's Favorite Crop appeals to farmers and corn lovers.

Another book, American Pride: Famous Americans Celebrate the USA, will be touted on Hollywood Squares next spring with guests drawn from the pages of the book.

The Queen City location is not lost on the staff, whose combined experience editing, designing and publishing books totals 100 years.

"We hope to produce two to four books a month," Hunt says. That's a far cry from the 100 books a month that cascaded from the Bantam Doubleday Dell group, where Hunt worked from 1982-1997.

Cincinnati has a rich vein of artists, writers, photographers and page designers, too, and that will be reflected in many of the books produced, said Dana Boll, design director.

"We're trying to integrate as much of that talent as we can," Boll said. "While our coffee table books are very, very visually driven, we can take on any kind of project and we plan to give them the best treatment possible."

Emmis Books at a glance

• The publishing company at 1700 Madison Road employs five full-time staffers who handle book concepts, editing, design and marketing.

• Parent company Emmis Communications owns 32 radio stations or networks, 16 television stations and six magazines. Two of its radio stations are overseas, in Argentina and Hungary.

• Emmis Communications reported revenue of $562 million for fiscal year 2003, which ended in February.

• Emmis means "truth" in Hebrew, which is reflected in the book division's mission statement: "This unabashed attachment to an ideal provides the standard against which we measure everything we do."

• Emmis titles include the autobiography Barry Sanders: Now You See Him..., American Pride: Famous Americans Celebrate the USA by Jill Liberman, the upcoming Your Negro Tour Guide by Kathy Y. Wilson, a CityBeat columnist, and Ain't It Funny: A Tribute to Willie Nelson by the editors of Texas Monthly.

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E-mail jeckberg@enquirer.com