One year, one week and some hours ago… [Shiv]

… I walked in the door of Taylor and Francis to start my first day. Nothing too strenuous, just meeting with a girl in HR to discuss pay and benefits and then meeting the team I’d be working with, getting used to my desk, being given a computer log in and a big folder containing a huge chunk of information on the book production process.

That folder is still sitting just to the left of my computer screen. And I still flick through it looking for a little-used nugget of information from time to time. I’ve had 12 months here at Routledge Books. I’ve worked for the Humanities Production team and the Technical and Professional Production team. I have had direct involvement in the production of 32 finished books and I have 28 books currently in various stages of production (one still sitting on my desk waiting to be processed, another couple are at this very moment being printed, folded and bound at the printers).

From Shakespeare to Concrete Structures, I’ve worked on a huge variety of titles and with quite a few different people. B-format to A4. Authors who questioned every little thing and ones who didn’t. A proofreader who insisted on pointing out that MS word presents ellipsis in the wrong way. Editors who made last minute changes on titles already running late. And printers who really care about their books. Some titles run like a dream, some like a nightmare and most a mixture of both. I feel I’ve seen and learned a lot in the last year.

While studying and job hunting we went to any seminar or talk and read any article or blog we thought would help. I remember hearing repeated that there’s a time limit on your ‘First Role in Publishing’ – the basic idea being that you have one job for the first year or year and a half and then move on. Maybe things are very different in trade publishing. Maybe it’s just being in production instead of editorial rather than being an academic publishing thing. But I feel no inclination to whirl away – I have loads of books left to make and plenty left to learn!

So basically what I’m saying is, 32 books, two house moves, approximately 800 cups of work tea and one year on, I’m very happy that I ended up with a job in book production at one of the UK’s best academic publishers. Who knows what new challenges the year ahead will bring?

On Celebrity, Promotion, Consensus and Kanye (An, albeit long, response to Mr Ewan) [Fishman]

This post contains references to Kanye West, Hurricane #1, Little Boots and Martine McCutcheon. I’m sorry.

Another great celebrity book quote, which Rich Hall took great delight in savaging at the time, was “proud non-reader of books” Kanye West’s proclamation that he doesn’t like books because ‘sometimes… they just be so wordy’. This was during the promotion of Kanye’s 52  page (some are blank) book Thank You And You’re Welcome.

Loath as I am to deflect any flak from the ghost-of-denim-clad-man-past that is Clarkson, as well as a tv presenter and author, he is also technically a journalist, if not one known for book reviews. The Top Gear team wield something ridiculous like five regular newspaper columns between them and many of his books are compilations of his, so the use of his name is a little less clear cut than that of Williams’.

In many ways the problem’s societal rather than the industry’s. You want to tie your relatively unknown product to whatever will draw the most attention, and in this age that’s not publishers or thinkers, but celebrities. The idea of people making a name for themselves through specialised study has been well and truly sidelined – look at the amount of discussion on appearance taking place around the televised debates. Even the intellectual names given most coverage recently – Pullman, Dawkins and Amis to name three – received it largely on the back of controversy. And where the celebrities are matched correctly, as in the Clarkson and Williams examples, it works and works well. It’s interesting to note how far up the scale of books you have to go before journalists names start getting used, rather than just the publication the review appeared in.

The documentary Starsuckers notes the argument that it’s a basic human instinct to pay closer attention to, and put more value in, the actions of those who are most visibly most successful – even if they are now successful due to skewed societal standards. (It also had some cracking stuff about how press releases effectively dictate their own news coverage.) In a society which prizes celebrities, living in such a society gives a constant suggestion that this is how to be successful in life. A good illustration of this would be the recent Home Office report on sexual imagery’s claim that sexuality and image are increasingly becoming a dominant influence on school children’s ambitions for the future.

We might dislike celebrities swanning into involvement with publishing – either through endorsements or publishing their ‘own’ books – but an alternative is high culture books promoting themselves with the names of journalists that even much of the high culture audience don’t bother to be familiar with, while bemoaning celebrities being hugely successful despite not engaging with anything of substance. (Kanye being an interesting exception, spending far more time disserting on design, architecture and fashion than your average hip hop icon.) There’s also an interesting crux in the idea of celebrities’ involvement, which was the elephant being narrowly skirted around throughout a cracking Guardian discussion with AL Kennedy and Martine McCutcheon (http://tinyurl.com/ybu7o8s). In these hip media times, as Alison Kennedy seems painfully aware, the underlying implication of these people being underqualified, too stupid  to be involved with these books, risks painting publishing back into an elitist tower, sending everyone back to tv, internet and Playstations.

The balance falls between publishers being able to attach these widely recognised brand names to their products, using them to boost the attention given to culture, and the presence of these brand names dumbing down the market. The third way would of course be the innovation you’re looking for, where publishers devise promotional techniques in and of themselves which can rival the draw of a celebrity name, or indeed as Canongate near-succeed at doing, making the publisher’s character itself the celebrity.

Rather than it being a solitary pursuit though (people will sit and watch a DVD alone without thinking twice), I think the core objection to reading is simply that you do it rather than it plays to you. It’s necessarily active rather than potentially passive; it’s just not as easy. If you’re watching tv or listening to music and you lose track of what’s happening, nothing stops and you can try and pick it up later, or not. It takes an exceptional writer to keep you in the flow of reading their book when you haven’t understood what happened in the previous twenty pages. And I think that’s at the crux of your points about high culture and politics – war, expenses etc have disillusioned people from their convictions, and researching and deciding on new ones is far more wearisome to do after a day’s work (and still susceptible to further deception) than watching FlashForward. Just like someone you don’t know being retweeted by someone you’re a fan of on Twitter, the endorsement can be viewed as a safe and easy substitute for actually evaluating the book yourself.

I think in terms of where the markets are now (and here’s how in depth the music/publishing industry comparison can go) both are in the same place that the music industry was in the late ‘90s and, to a lesser extent, the mid-noughties. The aftermath of a huge consensus (in the this case Oasis et al) produces two approaches – in the late 90s, the music industry was signing anything that sounded remotely like Oasis in an effort to milk the momentum as fully as possible (fond memories of Hurricane #1, anyone?) while swathes of smaller acts appeared in the vacuum as the oppressive consensus waned (and if you don’t love Campag Velocet, you should). What’s interesting now is that with the vast range of choices provided by the information age, people have no real need to gather under a consensus. In both publishing and music now, anyone wishing to make the effort to find things of more substance can do so and small labels/publishers, acts/authors and commentators are able to find a sufficient audience of fanatics while the mainstream adopts lowest common denominator tactics. While no musical movement in Britain since The Strokes/Libertines has had the (inter)nationwide dominance of grunge or Britpop (with the debatable exception of Florence/La Roux/er, Little Boots?), publishing has still had the Rowling/Meyer/Larsson phenomena and vampires/angel trends. Perhaps this is an indication, as with the later arrival of digital issues, of how the publishing industry’s timeline lags behind that of the music industry; and so also an indication of how it will develop next.

The fall of the critic, the rise of the name and the price of marketing [Ewan]

 It’s been a while since I last blogged but I think enough events in the real world have hit me squarely in the publishing lobe of my brain to make me want to come here and organise my thoughts to assess the damage.

It started the Sunday before last, my train was just pulling out of Manchester station and I saw a poster for a new novel. Through the powers of successful design my eyes were lead to some 40 point Helvetica, a quote: ‘Completely riveting, as gripping a read as any Tom Clancy’. Below this dedication, which I am tempted to pick apart as a flawed testimony but will leave be for now, there was the title ‘Phoenix Squadron’. There was something more central on the page than the title, the quote the author’s name or the image of the oncoming fighter jet – the author of these praising words – ‘Jeremy Clarkson’.

This event left an itch in my head: this poster represented a trend which is ‘gripping’ my industry (every creative industry), celebrity culture.

I was reminded of it on Tuesday when Eoin Purcell linked to an article in the Irish Publishing News. It reported that Robbie Williams was to provide the endorsement for a new book from Liberties Press, titled ‘Randumb: The Random, Dumb Adventures of an Irish Guy in LA’. His quote? ‘I like book, me’.

This is the point where this camel’s back broke down. It’s not that I disrespect these celebrities being given the space to praise a book. They’re hugely successful people in their own right. Jeremy Clarkson for example, as well as being a multi-millionaire jackaninny, is a best-selling author. People like his books. Robbie Williams is not known for his literary talent, but he’s not pretending either; this is a book about a fish-out-of-water in LA – it’s a good match.

It’s just disheartening, I’ve spent the last couple of years reading the different theories about how marketing needs to change, to foster a different relationship with the consumer/reader/fan, so I’m disappointed when it seems to boil down to ‘can we get Justin Lee Collins to say something nice about this?’

The medium of a poster at a train station is probably perfect for the marketers of a book such as ‘Phoenix Squadron’ to reach their desired audience – the descendant of Blair’s Mondeo Man, Pendolino man: the daily commuter with their Stephen-King-sized brick of, sometimes fact-based, escapism.

I had to cheer myself up by reading about the more exciting marketing strategies currently in play e.g. Dutton’s ‘guess the word’ campaign for Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (http://brsts.com/) or the ‘snap and tell’ interactive posters that communicate with mobile phone users. I understand that I am in the minority. I have had less than a year’s experience of the publishing industry and I have the high faluting ideals of a recent graduate, to boot. I don’t want to see every book stamped with a recommendation from a more popular figure.

I have one exception: I am completely for ‘book groups’ of the celebrity variety. I think the only people that would begrudge Richard and Judy their fortunes for encouraging their viewers to read, would be the wholesalers and shop assistants who had to apply all of those stickers. Such groups encourage the public good of publishing, the act of reading. It’s about planning for tomorrow, making sure that you don’t have to encourage every purchase with a recommendation or offer, because the reader has developed a relationship with your company and with all books. There’s a certain democracy and self-improvement vibe bound up with the big business of these celebrity groups that makes them ‘ok’ in my book. They make reading into a communal activity, breaking down the core objection to reading – the solitary nature of it.

When I think about whose name I would rather see stamped on a book, the names that come to mind are those of author and journalists. In case there was any doubt, I don’t think Clarkson – the TV creation – should be put in such a group, you might as well put Big Bird. The idea is that a person becomes a specialist on a topic through lengthy study, you read their work, they are rewarded by making a name of themselves, and you are rewarded by having someone you can trust. It is the essence of a good, honest brand, as well the basis for critical study. It is a hierarchy of respect. I’m sure there were always exceptions to this that proved to be in hindsight a worthy success but I want there to be some reward for a person to find out about high culture.

Maybe it’s the prospect of a hung parliament, but I am starting to get the impression that people don’t know who to trust anymore. Somewhere along the lines of ‘citizen journalism’, the decline of printed newspapers, the re-structuring of Sunday papers, the competition from/demand for the sensational on television has led to a downturn in respect, and thus visibility, for critics.

The perspectives available are so diffuse that many products seem to be critic-immune. As criticism moves from the readily available to the online and scattered it seems that tastes are becoming more conservative. The battle for good publicity has become (if it wasn’t always) a war to be noticed. Comparisons are often made between the business models of publishing and that of the music industry, I think a key similarity has been overlooked in these studies – both of these creative industries rely on an activity that does not need to be regulated or sold – reading and listening. These are not passive activities – regardless of what you might think when you see a commuter with earphones and a book open – they are learning mechanisms that allow for education as well as entertainment and escapism. As well as, I’m sure, lots of other words beginning with ‘e’.

My interest was also sparked this week as I watched the finale of series 3 of Mad Men. The American drama recreates 1960’s Madison Avenue, New York – the centre of the advertising industry at the time. During the last episode, set a month after the assassination of JFK, the hero attempts to win over colleague with the following words: -

Don: “There are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. Then something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves… is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that’s very valuable.”

This gets at the heart of what I want to see, and why I might not have a good case against the Clarkson poster. I am happy to admit that the poster might be right for this book but I want to see, as often as possible, marketing that stretches the medium in order to meet the different ways the opinions are being formed.

Mad Men flatters its viewers by foreshadowing future events but it also lets them see something that is rarely talked about in this postmodern, kitsch era – the role of advertising: to decide how best to communicate with large numbers of people. You can watch characters adjust their strategies as they open their eyes to new markets – the birth of a Media department, the marketing of goods to a specifically African-American audience, the control of information required in promoting products that are dangerous e.g. cigarettes. It’s the genesis of marketing in an increasingly aware and diverse age.

I appreciate that it is easy to feel envious of a scripted television drama but if you scratch off the fiction, by looking at reports of the time, the fact remains that changes were made on a large scale during this period to create the multimedia popular culture that we all know so well. The heroes of Madison Avenue realise that it isn’t enough to tell people what to do and what to want. A repeated phrase as the series progresses becomes ‘I did everything they asked of me’ as they look back on their own nuclear family Gomorrah like the Richard Yates creations that pre-date them.

I’ll try not to turn this into a ‘boo-hoo’ that people working in the industry that sells itself as the gatekeepers to knowledge aren’t always as creative as they could be, I understand the costs that come with every innovation. Maybe I just need to look harder.

On Saturday, I saw something that for me represents the partial replacement of the critic. It was a table laid out on my high street upon which people were offering a petition to ‘Say No to ID’. I’m sure there are better jokers out there than me that have irreverently criticised the existence of a petition that acts as a register of people that oppose their information being stored on a list.  That petition reminded me of the other change that’s taken place since the birth of advertising and marketing – the sharing of private information and preferences.

A publisher can have a far better understanding of what a person wants now, trackers, spybots and surveys have crept into our days just as technological escapism has become almost universal in the developed world. There are so many sources for information that a search engine is now the most influential determiner of taste in the world.

This should tell marketers everywhere something. Google have re-drawn the creative space, and Apple are now opening their own shop with iAds. If marketers want to be in the business of selling then they need to find more spaces where they can set their own prices. The place that is most valuable is the consumer’s memory, it’s not rented by the click and its value will always increase with the long term investment. In order to buy a valuable chunk of this performance space the marketer needs to treat the owner with respect and do more than lay down a flag. They need to offer more than one experience and provide an introduction to more. They need to connect with what the reader’s passions and interests.

Don’t just give me someone else’s word for it that this book is good: let me have a chapter to decide for myself, provide me with links to research the topic, join it into the network of other titles that might interest me so that I can immerse myself in something satisfying. And only tell me about it if I have given you reason to think that I will like it. The smart people out there are already doing this and I hope they are rewarded for it.

I realised mid-writing that the problem I came to this keyboard to address isn’t the industry’s, it is my own. I want marketing to encourage creativity and a literary culture because these are what I want to do and what I want to see. What have we learnt? Don’t put Jeremy Clarkson’s name in front of me on a billboard.

Twitter is Nicaragua (for publishers)

Twitter is Nicaragua.

That’s what I learned at a very interesting seminar hosted by OPuS at Brookes on Wednesday night.

At the event, sponsored by Blake Lapthorn, Sam Missingham (Lounge Marketing)  and Davina Quarterman (Wiley Blackwell) outlined ‘how’ and ‘why’ publishers should get involved with social networking .

In John Pilger’s War on Democracy, a former Chief of Operations summed up the CIA’s involvement within Central American politics , in the last fifty years, ‘if we don’t control it, someone else will’. Sam made the point that publishers and their products are being discussed online, if they don’t get involved in the process of creating a public image, they will lose control of that image. Further to that, there are the economic benefits of communicating with such large numbers (50m on Twitter, 350m on Facebook).

Just to clarify my terms, I know of no publisher that plans to disrupt Twitter’s banana trade.

 Sam provided us with the reasons for. She talked us through the steps she took to enter this brave new world with a 150 year old brand like The Bookseller: enter cautiously, with a personal account; find out how the site works; then start to build followers by providing what people want. Sound easy? Try it.

Using twitter increased traffic to The Bookseller site by 60%, the update feed at @TheBookseller is the third biggest driver of traffic to the site. Davina pointed out that you can do things like this – set up RSS feeds and twitter updates – without logging in to each site: things can be set in motion so that your followers or friends are automatically notified on changes on your site e.g. your news.

In her presentation, Davina gave examples of what Wiley have done online, showcasing their competitions and groups that allow them to communicate with interested parties and develop a community without shouting at people. They use twibes on Twitter to follow important trends and create Facebook pages for their journal titles, like Ecology Letters, to allow readers to discuss the hot topics. Twibes, in particular, seem like a useful way of finding out what a particular group thinks e.g. librarians.

It all seems a very friendly, involved way to do marketing. Questions of time and reward were well met by the presenters as they gave examples of increased exposure and sales. Davina talked of Return On Engagement rather than Return On Investment but that’s a discussion for another day.

Questions were also raised as to how a publisher should behave on social networking sites, with the consensus being: humble, encouraging, This idea of nurturing engagement is a popular positive spin on social networking at the moment; to throw another metaphor into the mix – it turns what could be nannying into parenthood. Not everyone is going to be addicted to following your updates, but the important thing is to encourage those that are, while providing content that the casual browser can relate to.

It reminded me of the Adam and Joe show on 6Music, that offered listeners the chance to contribute songs and then gave the contributors attention by championing the best. They don’t say ‘listen’, they offer the chance to be heard. People tune in to hear the funny songs, and are drawn to contribute because of the attention. Once they’re contributing, the enable (the show) wins by receiving content and feedback.

Wednesday was a night of show and tell, featuring all of the internet-only things that can get ignored when you can’t see your monitor for the slush pile, and OPuS did well to get with the programme by offering free wireless and a hashtag discussion of the show over on twitter at #opustalk.

As a conclusion, the attendees were shown the DK ‘The Future of Publishing’ video that’s been doing the rounds. Comments were made about it being a rip-off of an American Association of Retired Persons video. This is true, but I wouldn’t know if I hadn’t looked it up on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA 

Have a look at the #opustalk page to see what I’ve forgotten, with my short attention span and fickle memory…

F.A.O those who tweet. As it’s #FollowFriday, keep an eye on @samatlounge and @dquarter for future marketing insights, and (unrelated but a favourite) @Gleonhard does a good line in discussing the future of books.

Ewan

@ewants

February 2010 in Publishing News [Shiv]

It’s the end of February, my first month of being a ‘real person’. And I’m a slight nerd about this publishing stuff. I read newsletters and news updates from a couple of sources. (Mostly book2book, The Bookseller and Shelf Awareness but also the Guardian book blog, Richard Curtis’s blog, Publishing Talk, Publisher’s Weekly, The Chronicle, The Huffington Post and a multitude of other sites they link to).

I’m actually much better at keeping up to date now when I don’t really need to than I was back when studying and supposed to be keeping up to date. So I’ve decided to put together some interesting (to me) news from the last month in the publishing world.

[book2book - http://www.booktrade.info] [The Bookseller - http://www.thebookseller.com] [Shelf Awareness - http://www.shelf-awareness.com]

Amazon vs. the world

This was a fun diversion. There have been many good blogs and articles about this over the last month, I’m not going to list or link them all. The gist of the story is:

Macmillan decided to argue with Amazon over the default Kindle e-book price of $9.99. Amazon in response removed all the buy buttons from Macmillan titles, both physical and electronic copies (including Booker prize winner ‘Wolf Hall’). Amazon sort of capitulated but it took them the bones of a week to actually put the buttons back. And people are still discussing ebook pricing, Amazon cyber-bulling and monopolising and a multitude of other silliness. Amazon fail even worse than when they deleted electronic copies of Orwell’s ‘1984’. My favourite outcome is an author site that has sprung up to track Amazon’s button stealing tactics – http://whomovedmybuybutton.com/

iPad or iNotsomuchdownwiththeiPadfad?

Yay! It’s shiny! It has a touch screen! It’s like a mini laptop only no keyboard! Except for the magic of typing on the screen! Oh, that screen is gonna get dirty real fast.

Hmm… I haven’t splashed out on an iPhone yet so I’m not sure of the wonderfulness of Apps. Although they sound interesting, I feel no desire to rush out and try them. The iPad does look like a fun gizmo to browse the web on and will probably even be nice to read iBooks on. I shall wait to see if this 10 hours of battery life turns out to be wishful thinking. The name, as pointed out by college humour here: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1928558 is just too easy to poke fun at. I want to play with one. But if I had an internet device that didn’t stand on its own or have handles or wasn’t clunky enough to require a special area in my bag – you can bet I’d drop it, scratch it, leave it at the bottom of my handbag getting covered in gunk, step on it after letting it fall to the floor and a multitude of other disasters which is why you don’t trust klutzes with technology. I’m not shelling out $499 for something I either wouldn’t use or that I would break through over use. But if anyone wants to lend me one to watch a movie on or read an ebook, feel free.

Piracy the good, the bad and the DRM

The internet age old debate is still going strong in the publishing world. An interesting take on piracy as good for books can be found here – http://www.beyondthebookcast.com/wp-images/OLearyDBWTranscript.pdf (though the things mentioned in the interview as positives are probably only relevant for fiction titles *shakes fist at students who pirate academic titles despite understanding where they’re coming from*) And the ‘dark side’ DRMaholic crazed ‘evil publishing’ aspects of the arguments against piracy and for DRM can, of course, be found many places. The Tools of Change conference in New York had plenty to say on the subject – http://www.thebookseller.com/news/113616-copyright-piracy-and-anti-drm-dominate-tools-of-change.html The human cost of piracy is given a voice in this article by an author who has been the victim of piracy called ‘Are Pirate-site Downloaders Better Than Muggers, Pickpockets and Shoplifters? This Victim Doesn’t Think So’ – http://www.ereads.com/2009/04/are-pirate-site-downloaders-better-than.html

Irish Publishing

O’Brien seem to be going from strength to strength and have announced new representation in the UK. Little Island have a great new website and some good kids titles on the way – http://www.littleisland.ie/ Mercier Press on the other hand (who I desperately wanted to hire me this time last year as they are Cork based and have some lovely fiction titles) have fallen foul of Arts Council cuts in funding and have had to cancel or postpone some of their forthcoming titles. I hope they bounce back. And Easons (Irish bookseller) are holding themselves together by not paying out Christmas bonuses, a move endorsed by the unions – http://www.thebookseller.com/news/112855-union-seeks-meeting-with-easons-management.html

Scottish Publishing

Publishing Scotland has been having a mini mud-slinging contest at the results of a recent Literature Working Group recommendation. Accusations of bias have been flung on both sides and the creepy undercurrent is that the Independent Publisher’s Guild is trying to gobble up Publishing Scotland. Scottish authors have started to weigh in – http://news.scotsman.com/politics/Writers-hit-out-at-cuts.6082494.jp Not sure what side I’d come down on as I haven’t read the report or the objections in too much detail but it’s interesting to have a bit of a shake up during turbulent times.

Google Book Settlement

We’ve been talking about this for quite a while. And finally we’re coming to a close (at least to the American side of the saga). Google Books – good for anyone besides Google? Good for everyone? I’ve changed my mind on this a few times so I’ll keep on sitting on the proverbial fence. The ‘free spirited, all information should be available to everyone’ side of me thinks it’d be fantastic to have so much information available online. The ‘I get paid by people who get paid to do lots of work involving writing content that should be monetarily rewarded for’ side of me thinks it’s Google profiting from other people’s hard work. And continuing their bid for ruling the world. Not that their thirst for world dominance is going to stop me buzzing or waiting for wave to get good. Several major British authors, agents and publishers have opted out of the revised Google Book Settlement as revealed by documents presented in the US Google case – http://thepublicindex.org/docs/amended_settlement/Allen_declaration2.pdf Basically, for out of copyright or ‘orphaned’ works – yes it would be great to have them all available in one place. But an online library of Alexandria it can’t be because of in copyright and protected works. While in some cases I see copyright as restrictive, it does exist for a reason and Google can’t ignore that.

Most Exciting Time to be a Reader

I read a wonderful article by Jason Pinter in the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-pinter/is-this-the-most-exciting_b_463200.html) called ‘Is This The Most Exciting Time Ever For Book Lovers?’ and I have to say that I agree. There’s so much going on all over the world in terms of books and ebooks and ereaders and new literature and more awareness of the cultural, social and historical importance of books and reading and information sharing. It’s a great time to be alive and to be keeping half an eye on future developments. Screw the taboo – I’ll shout it loud and proud – I LOVE BOOKS J And having been trapped in an airport for 3 hours at one stage this month, even the most crass, “chart” fiction focused small bookstore can be a joy to browse in. Also, just to kill an hour the other evening I ended up on the floor of a Waterstones reading Ogden Nash’s poetry while grinning to myself. I find I’m mostly cured of the ‘need’ to purchase a book every time I enter a bookstore. But in 3 out of the 4 I’ve been in this month I’ve spent money and I never feel it’s money badly spent. I discovered a new word I fell in love with too – ‘fossicking’ (it basically means rummaging or seeking). In the Guardian Book Blog where the author talks about the joy of browsing in real bookstores – http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/feb/22/browsing-books-robert-graves

Espresso Book Machine

I want an espresso book machine (http://news.shelf-awareness.com/mv/a1/837322.html#3810088) – ideally a large one for here in the office to run off marketing and sample copies of books. And a smaller, cheaper, quieter version at home for when I have my own library. I want one that will let me feed in cool material to use as a cover. And one that comes with an InDesign like programme to make my own personalised covers for much loved books. Ah, I can but dream. While you’re at it – where’s my personal instant teleportation device?

LBF Build-up

I had fun at the London Book Fair last year. It had some really interesting seminars, it was fun to chat to people and get free copies of some new titles and drink cheap bubbly at large trade publisher’s stalls. But this year, I can’t justify going. I’ve looked at the events on offer and while I would be interested in going to some of them personally, none of them seem relevant to me professionally. Maybe some other time. However, if any of you circle members are heading down London way for it, I think meeting up in a nice pub near Earl’s Court for food and chat would be a good plan and that trip I can justify. So roll on April.

Self Publishing and Social Media – ooh, aah…

I’m a little surprised at how many news stories and blogs seem to be covering ‘self publishing’ and using ‘social media’ as shiny new concepts. Maybe as an internet generation child it just seems like old news to me. I’m used to the facts and figures of facebook users being trotted out as ‘staggering’ while totting up the amount of hours I spend and finding that I’m within the average range. (Although yes, the fact that if FB were a country it would be the third largest in the world is pretty cool). Self publishing is becoming more refined in its methods, better at managing costs and marketing itself as a legitimate publishing option. Authors are tweeting, taking advantage of Amazon’s direct deals and managing fan communities online. But surely this has been going on for long enough now that we don’t need it highlighted every other day? The internet is awesome, if you aren’t keeping up with the trends already then wading into the social media stratosphere now may not be the best option. Hire a young person to figure out some internet stuff for you and learn more before you believe the hype. The same goes for people thinking they can make a huge profit self publishing or that they’ll never be accepted by a mainstream publishing house – research is key. But most of the stuff I’m reading about this stuff seems to be more ‘olds’ than ‘news’.

Misc/Personal

J.K. Rowling is yet again being accused of plagiarism over a 32 page book called ‘Willy the Wizard’ that came out in 1987 that she insists she has never read. It has a wizarding contest where people overcome obstacles. And there’s some sort of scene in a bathroom where the hero gets a clue. But I sincerely doubt that’s where Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came from. I hope the courts will agree.

Terry Pratchett has given the Richard Dimbleby lecture this year (the first novelist to do so). He talks about assisted suicide, Alzheimers etc very poignantly. Because of his PSA (the form of Alzheimers he has) – Tony Robinson reads it for him. The lecture can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUE3pBIuAGk&feature=related

I’ve noticed since consciously entering the blogosphere that many people are hanging around here that I didn’t know about. I guess since facebook gives me those titbits of information so consistently I never looked for more depth in people’s online personas. I’ve been proved wrong yet again. Turns out a few of you are dipping your toes in the water while others have been swimming around for years.

Also – this wonderful little blog from a sci-fi/fantasty author is setting out to deal with misconceptions about publishing – http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/common-misconceptions-about-pu.html My favourite sentence from this first instalment: They’re colossal multinationals, and during the 1980s they went on a buying spree, acquiring smaller (often family-owned or private) publishing companies in a giant game of publishing pokemon.

A big cheer for Fishman for his insights into his world

P.S.

If skimming through a sampling of publishing news like this gets your juices flowing, I recommend The Book Depository’s blog on Monday – The Bookseller Redux is usually informative and entertaining. http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/blog (Also, since Amazon has been revealed as the epitomy of evil, these guys make a wonderful alternative. They have 11,000 free ebooks, good competitons, free worldwide delivery and cheap but not ridiculously cheap prices. And no, I don’t work for them)

P.P.S.

I’m shuffling sideways in work from the Humanities Production team to the Technical and Professional Production team. I’m excited because I’ll have new formats to deal with and possibly more colour books but on the other hand I’m nervous about leaving the section I was getting comfortable with and my friendly team. But ce sera sera.

The Book Resurrector (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love being a P.O.D. Administrator!) [Fishman]

As some of you will know, before xmas I was an Editorial and Marketing Intern (with a bit of Production work thrown in) with a publisher, based in a fine 18^th century Edinburgh building, who had very lovely staff and a rapacious appetite for cake. Well, after that ended I was kept on to carry out my own little project.

I was surprised when interning that rather than digitisation being a fast approaching challenge, it was already pretty central to operations here. Reporting to the Production head, my job has been to take over the responsibility for clearing the backlog of books and journals to be loaded onto our print on demand service and website respectively. I’m like the Google book project viewed through a giant pair of back-to-front binoculars. Except I already have permission. Because they’re our books. I also get to be on hand to help out the desk editors with their mountains of typescripts.

How profitable print on demand is was an even bigger surprise. Titles which had long languished out of print but never managed to build enough dues to justify a reprint can now generate a respectable profit through single copy print runs, available in perpetuity thanks to the PDF format (the cockroach of the digital world) and produced in copies sturdy enough to rival traditional printings.

In some cases having these books set up has been easy, with the electronic files of more recent titles having been retained, to be sent to the printer without requiring any amendments. Others require sourcing the book, finding a copy of the cover or having the cover amended or updated. And as Shamey mentioned, there is the thrill of books arriving when each job’s almost done (seriously, me with the box of ALL our covers – like a kid in a learned funhouse). While this does entail my having to skim over many a proof page like Johnny 5 on mogadon, to ensure that nothing has gone amiss in the scan (the actual scanning is a fairly straightforward photographic process; when printers are required to start altering things is when the dominos can start to fall), there are plenty of points of interest to keep me distracted.

I think we were all agreed, at least when the course began, that trade fiction was the most popular of the publishing fields people wanted to work in. Books allow us to hear more unusual voices, weirder viewpoints, and fiction is where it can get weirdest. Having been here almost eight months, I’m beginning to think the weirdness of academic publishing could blow fiction out of the water. Freed in many cases from the possibility of a runaway broad success (textbooks being a form of exception), academic publishing can often produce incredibly niche books provided it can find a niche academic market big enough to make the production profitable. High points of the weird have included articles on a specific set of three 18^th century decorative cloth birds; a book review of ‘Rhubarb: The Wondrous Drug’; and a sixteen-page article on the history of Stirling’s Raploch estate (whose negative connotations date back to the early 19^th century, with Burns subsequently using the word ‘raploch’ to mean coarse and unrefined!); but above and beyond all of these is a recent scholarly monograph we published which examines the relationship between avant-garde modernist aesthetics and modern military technology. As an indication of how great this book is, it has an entire section headed ‘Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics’! It’s also quite obsessed with snipers.

Even what I expected to be the major downside of the position – being deskless and having to hotdesk all over the building – has turned out to be surprisingly beneficial. While during the internship I had the opportunity to work with, or at least meet, staff from every department, people’s willingness to accommodate a hotdesker has effectively allowed me to sit in on each department as it goes about a normal day’s work – from currency conversions in finance and Comic Sans typescripts (no, really) with the commissioning editors, to the bizarre demands (and names!) of journals contributors and listening to Henry Rollins’ excellent radio show in the chief exec’s office.

And once the backlog has finally cleared, the journals all scanned, and I have probably followed classmates south of the border, there will still be plenty more developments to come for POD. Our Production head has been traversing the country with an eye to changing our POD supplier, which has been giving me a nice eye on how their arrangements vary, and various new and improved formats are vying for the cockroach’s position.

So, that is my world in publishing. Who’s next?

D

Academic Production [Shiv]

Welcome to a day in the life of Production Editor 1b.

As of Monday 1st of February I will be full-time permanent staff (rather than maternity cover as I have been since July). It’s the first time I’ve ever signed a permanent contract but I genuinely enjoy my job and I’m looking forward to it.

So – What is it I do?

As a production editor – I’m in charge of a manuscript from when it gets handed over from our editorial department through to being a finished book. I basically project manage a word document into a printed product. We get the title, some preliminary details and information, and the actual text files (and image ones if needed). Some books get sent out to be project managed externally. This is easier for me, slightly quicker and a little bit more expensive. The rest of the titles are produced in-house and that’s where I have to roll up my sleeves. We run the initial documents through a special program that does all sorts of behind the scenes stuff to make copyediting and typesetting easier. We get it copyedited. We run a different part of the special program to make the document into a shiny tagged up xml file for our typesetters. We send it out to the author and a proofreader (and sometimes an indexer). We do up a costing and get editorial to sign off. We liase with design and get the cover to proof. We collate the author and proofreader queries and get them corrected by the typesetter. And then we (if everything goes to plan) send off the press ready files for the paperback and hardback cover, the text file itself and tell them how many to print on what paper etc.

After a while, a bunch of wonderful new books arrive on my desk (that I have to send to various people rather than take home). The little tingle of pride and joy I get from that hasn’t faded in 6 months.

Obviously, I do some other stuff too but my main job is helping to make books. I’m on the humanities team so my subject areas are religion, philosophy, history, drama, literary studies, media, culture etc. I’ll have anything from 10 to 30 titles on the go at any one time (though I haven’t had to juggle over 24 yet), all at various stages of the production process. Sometimes I get disctracted for a while and end up reading parts of my books instead of checking the corrections, which is a nice little indulgence when I’m not too busy.

The team I work with are helpful and friendly. I don’t feel as if I completely grasp all the aspects of my job yet but I guess we never really stop learning. The company as a whole, despite being quite large and taking up two buildings in an industrial estate, is good at welcoming new people. There’s an abundance of sports and social clubs if you’re that way inclined. And they’ve employed 3 Stirling graduates from our year of the course alone so they obviously have good taste in people.

I hope you found that at least vaguely interesting. I’d love to hear what other people get up to in their publishing jobs.

The Beginning – Part 2 [Shiv]

Dear Publishing Circle,

Many things have changed since we started studying publishing. Some of us have moved to new and exciting parts of the country. Some of us are still seeking employment in our chosen field. Some of us have landed on our feet. And some of us are happy just to have landed.

So I propose a new era for The Publishing Circle – (and I know, we have far less free time now than when we were students) - let’s share what we’re up to these days. Give us all a glimpse into your daily tasks at work or home, your successes and failures. And let’s keep sharing ideas and comments on things happening in our professions and in the world around us.

Publishing has always thrived on good communication skills so we’re following in the finest industry traditions.

Kind regards and best wishes for the future,

Circle member

Study, Job-hunting, Rain and Caffeine [Shiv]

So…

In approximately 24 hours the M.Litt in Publishing Studies class of ’09 will be walking out of our exam. It’s a strange thought. When sitting the final exams of my undergraduate degree I remember thinking; you’ll never have to do this again. I guess the lesson is never say never.

I’m about halfway through Inside Book Publishing and haven’t even looked at my lecture notes (some of which are still haphazardly strewn on the floor of my room from when I ‘cleared’ the desk last week). I’m on my third cup of tea this morning and have run out of milk. But it’s raining far too heavily for me to leave the house to get some. There’s something poetic about the slight bitterness of black tea and my slight bitterness about the process of job hunting.

As I’m sure most of the class are, I’m writing cover letters and emails to beat the band. With few responses. I was lucky enough to get an interview with Intellect, journal publisher in Bristol. A 12 hour round trip and even though they seemed to like me, I didn’t get the job. Now I’m facing a similar situation trying to get to Oxford for an interview with Taylor and Francis. I’m honoured to get an interview (that sounds a bit sycophantic I know but they’re huge and probably have tonnes of uber-qualified candidates) but I’m apprehensive about making that trip, going through pre-interview and mid-interview nerves, either feeling devastated or getting my hopes up only to have them quashed again. And getting back up to Scotland will be a nightmare the day before our end of year party and results.

I really ought to stop whinging and get back to work. I guess the mild bitterness about job-hunting is bleeding through and becoming exam apathy. Then again, I’m just out of practice at procrastinating.

I’m looking forward to being finished on this course, though I’m going to miss my classmates. Entering the real world and getting a proper publishing job is going to be exciting and scary and wonderful. Just going to have to face the rain as well as the studying.

whither my attention span? [Laina]

I’ve been thinking. A lot.  And that’s all well and good on a rainy day when I can afford to procrastinate just a little bit, but when there’s Twitter and RSS feeds and email and Facebook and blogging, where do you draw the line? There’s too much to know!

This morning, I read this post which I think I came by via @timoreilly on Twitter. It’s all about how much cultural stuff there is now, and how we can never get through it all and perhaps don’t consume things with the same excitement and relish that we used to when we were younger. I have a stack of books that remain untouched and swathes of songs I’ve never listened to on my laptop – is it just greed or obsession with novelty that I’ve got so much stuff and, seemingly, so little time to enjoy it? I can blame uni, for now, for my lack of fiction reading. Laughably, the need to concentrate on using the right words for assignments keeps me from listening to music as much as I used to. But how much am I really concentrating anyway? I have nine tabs open in Firefox, four columns in TweetDeck and 859 miscellaneous unread things in my RSS reader. There’s just more stuff being produced than any of us could possibly consume and enjoy. John Boyne’s monthly reading stack positively baffles me.

Maybe most of us come with this built in urge to hop about from one thing to another, or at least those of us who spend a certain amount of time online reading other people’s words and putting our own out. Does it mean we’re just better multi-taskers? It’s not like it affects our work ethic; when there are things to do, they get done, and for the most part the flitting about is to a purpose. Ok, failblog isn’t the pinnacle of my education in publishing, but it’s a break from the few dozen newsfeeds I follow every day, and that’s alright too.

This post is reassuring. It says I’m doing it right, right? Selling your soul to the internet is the way forward.