Mare Nostrum Group in the News
At Mare Nostrum Group (MNG), we pride ourselves on our engagement with the wider publishing industry. We believe that collaboration and contribution is paramount to the continued development of a thriving sector able to evolve and adapt to changing times. As such, we have been delighted to be featured in some recent flagship publications.
In September, under enormous pressure from the EU parliament and business lobbies, the EU commission proposed delaying the implementation of the EU’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) for the second time. In The Scholarly Kitchen, MNG’s Executive Project Manager, Sam Thornton, explained the impact of the legislation on the publishing industry, and why it simply is not fit for purpose.
Thousands, more likely millions, of titles will cease to be available in Europe overnight. Whilst “Florida book bans” get significant press coverage, there is a deafening silence on what the EU is putting into force, even though the EU is effectively banning a far broader range and number of books. When people hear ‘the EU is putting in laws to stop deforestation,’ they think ‘Oh good, maybe that will stop evil corporations from cutting down the rainforest to plant palm oil trees’ and not ‘The textbook that’s recommended for my university course is now illegal.’
A recent edition of The Bookseller included an insightful feature on the evolving partnership between university presses and physical bookshops. In the article, MNG’s Senior Marketing Manager, Rachel Shand, and Publicity and Marketing Manager, Nicola Mann, discuss the crucial role these relationships play in our curated approach to the promotion and sales of our UP clients’ titles.
MNG’s appearance at the [Edinburgh] Radical Book Fair was part of its boots-on-the-ground approach to its UP business, explains the group’s senior marketing manager Rachel Shand. She says: “We are kind of a bespoke service. We work incredibly hard, and it’s labour intensive to support our presses and their missions. But the presses are all different, so we can’t have a one-size-fits-all; they each publish in different fields with different numbers of titles. So we apply our marketing and sales strategies to them as individual publishers, rather than just across the whole 67.