Special treat this Friday lunchtime! Andrew Goodfellow (@aagoodfellow), deputy publisher at Ebury Publishing, talks us through the Lives Less Ordinary ebook series, the challenges of imprint identity online and the significance of the digital short.

We publishers tend to set a lot of store by our imprint identities. Sat high in our offices, we like to think they are an immediate guarantor of quality and representing a certain kind of publishing. Within the industry that may be true but to the average reader they often signify next to nothing. So is it all just vanity or even worse a missed opportunity? When I was thinking about Ebury's writing in the digital world I started to ponder exactly what it was that Ebury Publishing’s narrative non-fiction had to offer that might make sense to Dave in Dagenham or Paula in Peterborough. While Ebury does many things for many different audiences a core phrase that I kept coming back to was ‘extraordinary lives’ or Lives Less Ordinary.

Memoir is such a retiring literary word for the mind-expanding, adrenalin-pumping, life-affirming experience that is at the core of so much non-fiction storytelling. Other people’s lives are interesting for two reasons: you read them to see what you share with them and you read them to see where they’ve been beyond your own experience.  We all learn most about life, the universe and everything when we test the boundaries of our lives – either literally or psychologically. It follows that as a reader we learn more from those authors who in one way or another have pushed the boundaries of human experience.  That might be the limits of physical and mental endurance – an explorer or a sports person - or the limits of what makes us human – criminal behaviour, mental collapse – or just the extremes of rock’n’roll or celebrity experience that the average person doesn’t have access to. The 10 shorts that make up the opening salvo in the Lives Less Ordinary series all have a simple How To title. The first selection includes How to Escape a Taliban Ambush, How To Win the World’s Greatest Road Race (by green jersey winner Mark Cavendish) and How To Hunt an LA Gangland Killer, with more comic pieces from the likes of Stuart Maconie (How To Survive on Tour with a Band) and Danny Baker (How To Understand Paul Gascoigne).

Both the short form and engaging content of Lives Less Ordinary is designed to attract people who might often find books a struggle. The statistic is that only 40 percent of us finish the books we buy and many people increasingly prefer short-burst writing that fits in with their daily commute or generally demanding and distracted lives. As someone who found books dull and difficult when younger, who has taken so much pleasure from them since, I know first-hand that the unconverted can be reached. The foreboding nature of the written word means it always suffer in terms of barrier to entry when compared to film, TV, music, gaming or social networking, but, once you’re in, it will inevitably trump any of them. It can get you deeper in and closer to real life than any other form. I was reminded of this ability just yesterday by a review I was emailed for the forthcoming crime masterpiece American Desperado. Co-written by Generation Kill author Evan Wright, it is first-hand account of Jon Robert’s dark life as American’s most prolific cocaine smuggler. Bestselling author David Lipsky said of the book, ‘Evan Wright puts you so deep inside a career in organized crime that midway through you'll begin expecting a knock on your door and a call from your lawyer.  He and Jon Roberts have taken me inside the crime world with such a shocking immediacy that the paragraphs become the readers' memories. Evan Wright doesn't just write books, he lives them; but more important than that, you live them too.’ This is the enduring power of the life less ordinary captured in words.