Company Town : Publisher Finds a Niche in Entertainment : Books: Santa Monica-based company had little going for it--except the owner’s determination.

In 1991, Quay Hays did the ridiculous. He quit his job and started a book company, although he had no publishing experience, few contacts, little financial backing and 3,000 miles between himself and virtually everyone in the business.

Today, Hays’ Santa Monica-based General Publishing Group has delivered bestsellers such as “Playboy: 40 Years,” which has sold more than 200,000 copies at $45 apiece, and “All My Children: The Complete Family Scrapbook,” which reached No. 7 last February on the New York Times’ bestseller list.

In addition, the company has forged publishing agreements with other top soap operas, as well as entertainment company Rhino Records. It also will publish Nancy Sinatra’s authorized biography of her father, Frank.

Building success on entertainment is normal for the book business. According to the trade journal Publishers Weekly, the most popular book of 1994 was “In the Kitchen With Rosie” by Oprah Winfrey’s chef Rosie Daley. The book sold more than 5 million copies.

Other top sellers included “Don’t Stand Too Close to a Naked Man,” by “Home Improvement” star Tim Allen; “Couplehood,” by Paul Reiser of “Mad About You;” “Gumpisms” and “The Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Cookbook,” from the movie “Forrest Gump;” autobiographies of Dolly Parton and Reba McIntire, and “Beavis and Butthead’s Ensucklopedia.”

“It’s unusual for any new publisher to come into the market and be successful,” said Maureen O’Brien, who writes about entertainment books for Publishers Weekly. “It’s a brutal business . . . a very difficult business, and the margin of error is enormous. So to see a young company like this, especially one based in Los Angeles, without the normal connections to the old guard of publishing, it’s just--it’s amazing.”

The man who made it happen hadn’t planned to be in the book business. Hays--full name William Quay Hays Jr., after a political broker of a century ago--started out in music, coming to Los Angeles from his home state of Florida after college to write movie music for Twentieth Century Fox.

After a Fox management change put Hays out of work, he did music promotion for Nederlander Cos., which owns the Pantages Theatre and operates the Greek Theatre as well as radio station KROQ-FM.

As a sideline, he started the Beverly Hills restaurant Bao Wow with his wife, Sharon, and such partners as Weird Al Yankovic and Melissa Manchester.

He got a whiff of the book business when he founded the design firm Fleming Hays with designer David Fleming.

“For [publisher] Byron Preiss, we would do covers of some of their books,” Hays said. “Various other publishing, like the ‘Southern California Entertainment Guide,’ we designed. I was the editor on that.

“That was my first step to find out that I really wanted to be doing publishing instead of design.”

With his own savings, plus money from his mother and brother and a $25,000 line of credit from First L.A. Bank, Hays set to work, starting in his laundry room. Although he wanted to publish magazines, “the advertising market went into a slump [and] people were letting subscriptions lapse,” Hays said.

So he turned to books. His first project, “Of the People” was a history of the Democratic Party authorized by the Democratic National Committee to commemorate the organization’s 200th anniversary.

Hays had planned to package the book and let an established publisher handle printing, distribution and other aspects of publishing. But the Democrats wanted the book finished in time for their 1992 national convention, only four months away.

“Publishing companies . . . said it was impossible to get done in time,” Hays said. “So I called up the Democratic Party and said, ‘OK, everyone says it’s impossible, so I’ll tell you what, we’ll do it ourselves.’ ”

It wasn’t easy. Hays had to continually check with the Democratic leadership--”We had [press official] Dee Dee Myers’ sky-pager number, so her thigh was vibrating quite a bit.” Also, the Secret Service wouldn’t allow General Publishing Group to deliver the books to the convention, according to Managing Editor Colby Allerton.

“It was raining in New York, and Quay and I literally had to rent a Ryder truck and make our way through midtown Manhattan traffic delivering boxes of this book to the different hotels of the delegates, all across the board in Manhattan, and getting rain-soaked,” Allerton said.

Despite the difficulties, “Of the People” would define the ideal General Publishing Group book: “Low speculative, highly promotable, high quality,” Hays said.

But GPG produced just one other book in 1992, the political volume “Throw the Rascals Out,” and only three in 1993: “The Rock & Roll Cookbook,” “The Official Celebrity Registry,” and “60 Minutes: 25 Years of Television’s Finest Hour.”

At that low production rate, General Publishing Group ran short of money. Hays turned to a friend and adviser, former MUZAK executive Joe Bein, who lent the company about $100,000.

The “60 Minutes” book was featured on the “Donahue” talk show and excerpted in TV Guide. It sold more than 30,000 copies at $29.99 each.

“The revenue from that was pretty much what got us funding [to produce more books],” according to Sharon Hays, who joined the staff as promotion director.

In the less than two years since then, the company has grown from a handful of employees--Quay and Sharon Hays, Allerton, editorial director Murray Fisher, editor Sarah Prich and Bein--to 20. It now publishes nearly 30 books a year.

How has General Publishing Group done it?

“We take an entertainment industry approach,” Hays said. “We make our launches a little more exciting. We make our authors into stars. We use all media to promote the product. We shorten the timeline from commencement to release and promotion. And we try to make our book products as entertaining as possible.”

Entertainment topics account for about half of the company’s line. Even some of its non-entertainment books have a film, music or television connection.

Fisher said General Publishing Group’s first novel, “Frontiers” by Otis Carney, was bought in hopes of turning it into a movie or a TV miniseries. The author of the publisher’s sex guide, “Secrets of World Class Lovers,” is Jaid Barrymore, mother of actress Drew Barrymore. General Publishing Group used that fact to land the book on “A Current Affair,” “Extra,” and “Inside Edition.”

Such a concentration on entertainment is unusual. According to Bob Miller, publisher of Hyperion Books, which produced Tim Allen’s work, entertainment publishing “may be only 5% or 10% of the books published” by most mainstream publishers.

But then, General Publishing Group is unusual in many ways. Only two members of the staff had book experience before joining the firm; only two are over 40. Hays is 37. The company is based in Los Angeles, which Hays sees as an advantage.

“There’s a tremendous talent pool in Los Angeles that’s untapped. . . . We like the idea of New York publishers to insist that the center of the publishing universe is in New York. We encourage that.”