GORGIAS PRESS is profiled by Linda Carlson for the Publisher's Marketing Association:

Ancient Languages, Modern Strategies for Success: The Gorgias Growth Story

A few excerpts:

“Gorgias wasn’t born of a business plan, but out of our passion for exotic languages and the determination to disseminate them to the general public,” says Christine Altinis-Kiraz. She and husband George Kiraz took advantage of the high-tech implosion to follow a dream—building a business that publishes books on Arabic, Islamic, Jewish, and Syriac studies, archaeology, the Near East, the Middle East, classics, history, and religion.

They called it Gorgias, Christine explains, because they wanted a name from classics (Gorgias was a Sophist philosopher and rhetorician credited with transplanting rhetoric to Greece), and they liked the fact that this one sounded a little like George’s name.

[...]

Like many other PMA members who want to build a catalog quickly, George did reprints. He selected a dozen titles from the collection of antique books he had started as a teenager and secured reprint rights. “Even in the book antiquarian market, it took me years to find these titles myself—but they were still very important both to scholars and to general readers interested in Syriac and the ancient Near East,” he explains.

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Two technologies made Gorgias viable at the outset: email and print-on-demand. Email made marketing almost cost-free. Even with list-rental payments, the cost was thousands of dollars less with email than it would have been with graphic design, printing, labeling, and postage.

The big advantage, however, was print-on-demand. As Christine points out, “POD enabled us to build a backlist quickly, without high production and inventory costs, and to publish titles that would have been rejected by our competitors because of their highly specialized nature.” But, she cautions, POD is not cost-effective for every book. “It makes sense if the publisher has a limited budget, if the readership is a small niche market, and if the books can be priced higher than trade books.”

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Luck—in the person of Mel Gibson—also played an important role in Gorgias’s early success. The 2004 release in Aramaic of Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, created awareness of Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, and generated an unexpected number of sales for the publisher.

(Via the Hugoye list, which is also a Kiraz production.)