She keeps her best work under cover.

• Author: Covington, Owen
• Position: People - Carolyn Sakowski - Company Profile

When John F. Blair died in 1986, Carolyn Sakowski decided not to let the Winston-Salem publishing house he founded in 1954 die with him. Sakowski had been with the company only nine months, but she and a colleague approached Blair's sister and her three children, who had inherited the business, about keeping it open. John F. Blair, Publisher, had never been very profitable and relied on substantial personal investment from Blair, she says. Lawyers had advised the family to close it and sell the inventory. But Sakowski and her colleague developed a business plan that would require no more infusions of family money.

This year the company turns 50. Before Blair's death, it focused on books about North Carolina. It has since repositioned itself as a publisher of books from and about the Southeast. "It's worked well, it still does, to establish a real rapport with regional booksellers and the region's media," says Sakowski, 56, president since 1992.

Those relationships are due in part to her years as a bookseller. A Morganton native, she moved in the mid-1970s to Wichita, Kan., where her husband was starting graduate school. She had earned a master's in history from Appalachian State University in 1972 after graduating in 1970 from Queens College in Charlotte with a bachelor's in history. She managed a Wichita bookstore for nine years. There she learned the business and how publishers develop and market...