About us
A small editorial team, a slow catalogue
We have been in Palmi since 2018 and we publish few titles a year: the ones we can follow one by one, from the first reading to the launch in the bookshop.
Scenari began in a room above a courtyard, with three people, a table that was far too big and a box of proofs someone else had turned down. We had no business plan: we had a list of books that seemed to us to be missing, and the idea that someone was waiting for them.
The first title came out in the autumn of 2018, in a thousand copies, and for two weeks we posted them by hand. That is where we learned the thing we have never changed since: the number of books we can publish is the number of books we can see all the way through.
The name says the method. A scenario is not a plot: it is the place where a story can happen — a valley, a provincial town, a hospital room, a line drawn on a map. We look for books that look at where people are, and not only at what people do.
Every book goes through two editorial readings, a long revision with the person who wrote it and a press proof that five of us examine together, at the same table. It is a slow way of working, and now and then it puts a publication back by a year. We have not found a better one.
We have stayed small by choice. It means that a year's releases can be counted on one hand, that the books come out as paperbacks on matte paper with wide margins, and that anyone who writes to this publishing house gets an answer from a person, signed. Of the books we have made we can tell you everything, one by one: it is the only boast that interests us.
Mission
Three commitments, to those who write and those who read
The mission, put plainly: make few books and make them well, and treat the people who write them and the people who buy them as the two people who keep this trade standing. Three commitments follow from that, and all three can be checked.
Revision is done together
An accepted text does not go into the workshop to come back changed. Every proposed cut or rewrite arrives with its reason, and the last word belongs to whoever wrote the book: if a sentence stays as it was, it stays as it was.
The terms are stated first
Percentages, print run, term of rights and payment times are in the first email and then in the contract, not at the end of the road. We ask for no contribution and we do not charge for reading: if a book convinces us, the risk is ours.
A book stays in the catalogue
No title is pulped because it stopped selling quickly. We reprint a few copies at a time, and for as long as the publishing house exists the book can be ordered in any bookshop.
Milestones
From 2018 to today
The first title
Three people, a table that was far too big and a thousand copies printed. No imprints: only a book that seemed to us to be missing.
The year the bookshops closed
Launches moved to the telephone. We called the booksellers one by one, and that is how we came to know them.
Fiction and Non-fiction begin
The scattered titles of the early years found two imprints, and the catalogue began to read as a conversation instead of a list.
The first reprint
A novel went back on press for another five hundred copies. Hence the rule: reprint a little and often, not a lot and only once.
Poetry begins
Small print runs, wide margins, no hurry to cover the costs. The imprint people most often ask us to keep going.
The first prize
Submissions reopen
One reading window a year, with a signed reply to everyone who writes to us.
Editorial team
Who works here
Giuseppe Orefice
Redazione
Segue le revisioni: è la voce al telefono quando un capitolo non sta in piedi.
Francesco Vicari
Redazione
Segue le revisioni: è la voce al telefono quando un capitolo non sta in piedi.