Peter Workman, the founder of Workman Publishing, whose knack for landing best-selling trade books like “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” and “The Silver Palate Cookbook” made his company one of the few remaining independent book publishers in the country, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 74.
The cause was cancer, a company spokesman said.
Mr. Workman was known in the publishing world as a genially offbeat entrepreneur of nonfiction, with an on-base percentage — in publishing terms — worthy of Cooperstown: one of every three books issued by Workman sold 100,000 copies or more. His successes included blockbusters like “The Official Preppy Handbook” in 1980 and Patricia Schultz’s “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” in 2003, as well as lesser-known but perennial sellers like Richard Hittleman’s “Yoga: 28-Day Exercise Plan,” the company’s first published book, which is still in print.
Mr. Workman also created “Brain Quest,” a popular learning card game for children, and the “Page-a-Day” desk calendar, said to have been the first of its kind, with its 365 tear-off pages and a different image on each page. Workman Publishing first marketed it in 1979.
Publishing about 40 books a year, Mr. Workman was known for working closely with authors and editors (more so than they might like; he often changed cover designs and details at the last minute) and for promoting his book list relentlessly.
When the cartoonist B. Kliban’s first “Cat” book was published in 1975, for example, sales were anemic until Mr. Workman sent his staff to the Madison Square Garden cat show to peddle copies and had poster-size versions of Mr. Kliban’s richly detailed cats printed for bookstore displays. Sales picked up, and Mr. Workman, an early believer in merchandising, soon followed with Kliban-cat-printed pillows, mugs and calendars.
In 1984, Workman published “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” a practical guidebook to pregnancy, written by Heidi Murkoff, Arlene Eisenberg, Sharon Mazel and Sandee Hathaway. It too sold poorly at first, until Mr. Workman sent the authors to speak at physicians’ and nurses’ conferences, and offered discounts to bookstores for multiple sales. It has sold more than 15 million copies and inspired a veritable library of books about pregnancy, including “Eating When You’re Expecting,” “What to Expect the First Year” and “What to Expect Before You’re Expecting.”
In 1999, a Good Housekeeping magazine survey reported that among pregnant or nursing women who had read any book about pregnancy before giving birth, 93 percent had read “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”
Peter Israel Workman was born Oct. 19, 1938, in Great Neck, N.Y., to Jeanette and Bernard Workman. His father was a milliner. After graduating from Deerfield Academy and receiving his bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1960, he worked as a newspaper copy boy and bookstore clerk for several years before joining the sales department of Dell Books.
He started Workman Publishing in 1967. The company originally packaged books for other publishers and began publishing its own nonfiction list in 1972. Workman has published a number of books in conjunction with The New York Times, including “The New York Times 1,000 Gardening Questions and Answers” (2003) and two collections of obituaries: “The Obits” in 2011 and “The Socialite Who Killed a Nazi With Her Bare Hands” in 2012.
“He never looked at demographics; he trusted his instincts,” said Mr. Workman’s wife, Carolan. There had been pregnancy books and cookbooks aplenty before the titles he published, she added, but “the difference was in his approach; once he decided to publish a book, he got involved in every detail.”
Besides his wife, Mr. Workman is survived by two daughters, Katie and Elizabeth, and four grandchildren.
Mr. Workman was reticent in public. In one of his few press interviews, he told The Washington Post in 2000 that he believed in the profit potential of every book he published. “Failure is nonproductive,” he said, adding, a bit cryptically, “We stick to our knitting.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/business/media/peter-workman-book-publisher-with-an-eye-for-hits-dies-at-74.html?partner=rss&emc=rss