Monographer reaches 100: blogging on publishing, the creative economy, and micro-enterprise

So this is the 100th post. An opportunity to look back and review what has transpired since the first post way back on in July 2010. And to look ahead.

I 

First, a few bare facts. The blog has stuck pretty much to its intended areas of focus, namely (1) publishing, (2) the creative economy, and (3) micro-enterprise.

The posts on publishing have, for the most part, comprised (a) theoretical posts, (b) descriptive posts – especially the (continuing) ‘What does a publisher do?’ series, and (c) reviews of books and online resources on publishing. Those on the creative economy have focused on creative heroes and models, creative clusters (especially Greater Cambridge), and design. An those on micro-enterprise have included posts on entrepreneurship and sustainability.

Generally the most popular parts of the blog have been:

• pages forming reference resources –  ’Monographer’s Bookshelf‘ (linking to reviews) and ‘HTG a job‘;
• posts on topics where publishing, librarianship/information science, and technology converge – for example, ‘The case for grey literature‘, ‘Deconstructing journals‘, ‘Patron-driven acquisitions‘, and ‘Searching open access scholarly publishing‘. 

Theoretical posts – for example, those on ‘disintermediation vs unbundling‘ and ‘unbundling and convergence‘ have tended to prove more popular than descriptive ones. 

The blog is probably less ‘frontlist’-driven (i.e. weighted towards recent posts) than many. I occasionally post on topical events – a Bloomsbury acquisition, for example, or the publication of the Portas report – but most posts are less time-specific. It seems that ‘backlist’ posts play a publisher education role.

II 

Whither? I have three aims for the blog – roughly, one short-term, one medium-, and one long-term. The short-term aim is to develop and complete the ‘What does a publisher do?’ series. The posts still to come concern in the main two groups of stakeholders – suppliers and customers – and concern such activities as commissioning, procurement, marketing, sales, and distribution. They will focus more specifically on the book industry than the early posts in the series have done.

The medium-term aim is to focus more explicitly on the development of our own publishing programme, fulfilling the intention (announced in this blog’s initial post) of  ’constructing a story – perhaps a little the way Michael Barnard did in Transparent Imprint, which tells the story of Macmillan’s New Writing imprint’.

And the long-term aim is to convey more forcefully the benefit of placing publishing within the context of the creative economy in general and of exploring parallels with other creative industries, notably design. Somehow I don’t think Monographer’s Blog has really brought that home yet.

III

What, though, would you suggest? What should be the aims of the next 100 posts?

On the buying of books: the role of production values

Recently my reading on the business of sales has led me to consider the flip side – the business of buying. In general I’m finding the literature on ‘buyology’ – the study of how and why we buy – more enlightening than the literature on selling, which so far I’ve found drearily procedural. The buyology stuff seems altogether more powerful: understand buying processes and the design of the sales process falls into place (surely?).

We all buy stuff, so I find it impossible to read up on buying without reflecting on my own behaviour as a client or customer. In my own case, this has served to confirm the importance of production and design.

I find this features most often as a negative. Poor production values put me off buying. Frequently I’ve found myself picking up a book with interest, only to put it down again when I’ve seen how it’s designed. Usually the problem is poor text design – specifically, too small a font. If I open a text and see tiny characters crawling across the page I just think, “Forget it! I just don’t want to bother with this”.

Such experiences have directly influenced the design of our own publications. For example, the designer – Benn Linfield -  of books in our Creative Writing Studies list has provided a spacious design, not only for the body text but also for the parts that almost invariably attract the use of uncomfortably small font, namely the index and imprint page.

Similarly David Williams of The Running Head Ltd has enhanced the accessibility of the titles in our Professional and Higher Education series by providing an admirably accessible design.

As a buyer, I tolerate ‘neutral’ design – that is, undistinguished-but-adequate design. Most of the books I possess fall into this category. Occasionally, however, I find that production values make a positive contribution to the buying decision, even leading me to buy books that I would not otherwise have purchased. Here are four examples:

1. A Thrill of Pleasure (Celtic Cross Press, 2003). Production values will account for most purchases of this book. The main text consists of a selection of verse by William Wordsworth, which is readily and cheaply available in other editions and formats.

What does this edition add to account for its price tag (£50)? The answer is (a) an introduction by Derek Hyatt; (b) a woodcuts by Rosemary Roberts; (c) letterpress printing on Zerkall paper; and (d) a cloth binding.

I bought this book for the craftsmanship it embodies and for its sensual qualities. To my surprise, I find it makes me read the poetry more carefully than I have done with any other edition: the definition of the print, the light cream background, and the spacious margins all contribute.

2. Andrew Allott, The Marches (Collins, 2011). This book exhibits two features that I generally dislike – gloss paper and small font. Yet I find myself forgiving this – in part because there are obvious reasons for these choices (the paper is chosen to display the numerous figures in the form of maps and photographs; the size of font keeps the book to a size that feels comfortable in the hand) and in part for a more interesting reason, namely that the holistic effect of the design (by D & N Publishing) transcends the particular components.

A note in the prelims explains that the aim of the series – the New Naturalist Library - in which this volume appears

is to interest the general reader in the wildlife of Britain by recapturing the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists. The editors believe that the natural pride of the British public in the native flora and fauna, to which must be added concern for their conservation, is best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of expression in presenting the results of modern scientific research.

“Pride…concern…accuracy…clarity”: somehow all this is brought out in the design, though it would require a more learned critic of design than I to explain precisely how. 

One could imagine the content of this book in alternative form as a website. Such a form would have some obvious advantages – not least, hyperlinks for cross-references and notes. Yet useful though such a site would be, it wouldn’t have the same appeal. The value added to this book serves to remind one that content isn’t always king.

So far as the book itself is concerned, I wouldn’t have bought it had it not been for the captivating design: I’m not a naturalist and, much though I enjoy visiting the Marches, I don’t go there often – yet when I happened across this book in Heffers, I wanted a copy.

3. Sukhdev Sandhu, London calling: How black and Asian writers imagined a city (HarperCollins, 2003). This strikes me as a curious piece of publishing. Though it is written in an accessible, rather than academic, style, the book is essentially that rare phenomenon, a monograph published in trade format.

When I came across the hardback in Waterstones, Cambridge, I wasn’t looking for a book on this subject. Indeed, I wasn’t looking to buy a book at all: I had gone into the shop to do some commercial research. Though I’m interested in black and Asian writing, it was primarily the production values that attracted me to this book.

The squat format felt easy in the hand. The generous text design and font size (set in PostScript Linotype Janson by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd) was easy on the eye, making one want to read. That I took the book off the shelf in the first place was down to the – praise be! – uncluttered design of the spine. 

Though the production values are less integral to the product than is the case with either A thrill of pleasure or The Marches, I wouldn’t have bought this book if it had not been so well produced.

4. David Owen, Green metropolis: Why living smaller, closer, and driving less are the keys to sustainability (Riverhead Books, 2009). While nobody who knows A thrill of pleasure or The Marches will be surprised that I found their production values contributed strongly to their appeal, the inclusion in this list of this mass-market paperback will occasion some surprise.

The paper is greyish and cheap. The text design is undistinguished (it can be seen, via Amazon’s ‘search inside’ function, here) – though it is generous. And I really don’t like the cover, though the main title on the spine is clear. 

All of which goes to show that the appeal of production values is not simply an absolute phenomenon: the appeal can in fact be relative – to context and to purpose. This book isn’t central to my reading concerns. I didn’t want to take long over reading it. And I probably won’t keep my copy very long – I’ll end up giving it away. So production values that emphasised transience and disposability, whilst enabling easy reading, seemed just right. 

Paradoxical though it might sound, if the production values had been higher (in some absolute sense), I’m not sure I would have bought the book – even at the same price.

What does a publisher do? Use (or abuse) media

What does a publisher do? is a series of posts designed to answer that question, interpreted not in the sense of ‘What functions do publishers fulfil?’, but rather ‘What operations do publishers (well, this publisher, at any rate) perform?’ This post is the ninth in the series.

The second post (‘What does a publisher do? Manage stakeholders’) in this series set out a framework for subsequent posts – a framework based on the types of  stakeholders a publisher needs to work with. Today’s post focuses on management of interactions with one of the four ‘non-trading’ stakeholders included in the framework, namely the media. Thus:

Suppliers
Owners, investors	Workforce	State
		Community
		MEDIA
		Environment
Clients, customers

In the formative years of stakeholder management theory – say, the 1980s and early ’90s – it was reasonably clear, when it was argued that business should think of the media as a form of stakeholder, what was meant by ‘the media’. For the publishing industry the term referred to, in the main, television, radio, newspapers, and magazines. 

Now, of course, with the advent of ‘new media’ and ‘social media’ and the phenomenon of media convergence, things are much less clear. The channels have both multiplied and become more interactive, with the result that consumers have become producers too. Hence, by the way, my decision not to insert a ‘the’ in the sub-title above, for ‘the media’ sounds like a distinct and identifiable group – a conception that is no longer accurate.  

We founded our business – The Professional and Higher Partnership in 2006. For the first few years we largely ignored Web 2.0. One reason was uncertainty – we found it impossible which channels would last and how each of those that did would be productive.  I’m glad we adopted that position. We could have invested energy in channels that didn’t last. Web 2.0 will, of course, remain in a state of flux – and in due course morph into Web 3.0 – but we feel more confident now about investing energy in some of the winners to date.

Before venturing into Web 2.0 territory, our use of (the) media was confined largely to establishing a traditional (as it were) Web 1.0 website and providing copy – through articles and press releases – to magazines, principally The Bookseller, The Author, and the Times Higher Educational Supplement (as it used to be known). I wrote articles to generate cash (from author fees) and to gain endorsement from the publications in which the articles appeared (if they thought we were worth publishing, surely we must know a thing or two). The articles were primarily about publishing, authorship, and the main context in which we work, namely higher education.

Today we make almost no use of traditional media, other than write the occasional article for Writing in Education. Our migration away from periodicals isn’t for any negative reason (though I do find that, in the digital age, they’ve lost some of their aura). It’s more a question of opportunity cost: there isn’t time to do everything and we prefer to devote the time available to Web 2.0 – principally WordPress and Twitter. 

The attraction of social media is that it provides rapid feedback. One learns quickly – from monitoring statistics, reading comments, tracing retweets, and so on – what readers do (and don’t) understand and they are (or are not) interested in. I also like the Wild West element of social media – the conventions of genre aren’t fully established and there’s an element of making it up as we go along.

We use social media rather in the way that one would network at an event. That is, it’s important to ensure the conversation is just that – a conversation. There needs to be reciprocity. Answer people’s queries; comment on other people’s blog posts; retweet interesting tweets; help people connect with content. What I like about all this is that, to a large extent, the effective thing to do is the courteous thing.

There’s one group that doesn’t ‘get’ social media – corporations. Especially large corporations. When I started using Twitter, I tried following the big name publishers. What a bore! ‘Copies of XXX are flying off the shelves’  (who cares?). ‘Just seen an advance copy of YYY’ (reaches for the ‘unfollow’ button). Chuff! chuff! chuff! chuff! – as DH Lawrence said of Whitman. Sometimes an attempt is made to disguise the relentless bragging as the spilling over of uncontainable excitement: ‘Woohoo! The cover designs for the new edition are in!’

These kinds of corporations are like bores at a party, droning predictably on, taking no interest in the other guests, who they figure merely as an audience. They show no sign of curiosity about the world around them. In a word, they are discourteous.

How can indie booksellers survive in an Amazon-dominated landscape?

Monographer writes: We are pleased to publish another contribution to our occasional series of guest posts. Today’s post is by Katheryn Rivas, who writes on the topics of online university (www.onlineuniversities.com). She welcomes your comments at her email Id: katherynrivas87@gmail.com.

If you are in the bookselling or publishing business, you are no doubt at least marginally sick and tired of the ongoing conversation regarding Amazon, the supposed bête noir of bookstores and book-lovers everywhere. Of course, there’s no denying the fact that the books-and-other-stuff selling behemoth that is Amazon has employed a model designed to discourage consumers from buying from independent bookstores, sometimes in obviously unsavory ways.

Still, Amazon offers what most indie booksellers, a quickly dying breed, simply can’t—an efficient shopping process, digital alternatives to print, and often drastically lower prices. At a time when the average family’s disposable income is dwindling, should not Amazon and others of its kind be lauded for offering the consumer such easy and affordable access to books? In an incendiary critique of independent bookstores, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo makes this point exactly—that independent bookstores, as they operate now, essentially deserve their fate.

But those of us who enjoy browsing books within the walls of a local, independent bookstore know that there is something of the indie store that is worth preserving, something that extends beyond mere nostalgia. But to secure this preservation, there is no doubt that bookstores must change the way they do business. Here are a few possibilities.

Publishing own titles and becoming truly local

One criticism Manjoo mounts against indies is their dubious claims to community. Manjoo explains: 

There is little that’s ‘local’ about most local bookstores. Unlike a farmers’ market, which connects you with the people who are seasonally and sustainably tending crops within driving distance of your house, an independent bookstore’s shelves don’t have much to do with your community. Sure, every local bookstore promotes local authors, but its bread and butter is the same stuff that Amazon sells—mass-manufactured goods whose intellectual property was produced by one of the major publishing houses in Manhattan.

Traditionally, a book’s production-to-consumption chain has involved several parties—authors, publishers, printers, distributors, and booksellers. Now, in an attempt to differentiate themselves from giant retailers and each other, indie bookstores have begun publishing their own titles in what Salon.com calls “…the literary equivalent of the locavore movement. It not only emphasizes local writers, and local subjects, but also asks residents to support a local business with their dollars. 

Expanding children’s sections

Even if the demand for e-books has increased for adults, a recent New York Times article noted that parents still prefer print books for their children. The article notes:

Children’s books are also a bright spot for brick-and-mortar bookstores, since parents often want to flip through an entire book before buying it, something they usually cannot do with e-book browsing. A study commissioned by HarperCollins in 2010 found that books bought for 3- to 7-year-olds were frequently discovered at a local bookstore — 38 percent of the time.

This presents indie bookstores with an opportunity to market to parents who consider browsing with their children an indispensable part of spending time with family and discovering new books.

Emphasizing the experiential value of physical bookstores

If indie booksellers are to survive, they must not try to compete with giant retailers like Amazon. That is to say, they do not have the resources to do what Amazon does, so they must offer an alternative that Amazon and others can’t—and that’s the experience of going to a bookstore. Organizing a vibrant local author reading series, hosting book clubs for children and adults alike, and developing interesting staff recommendations that are uniquely human and not algorithmically solipsistic are all different ways that independent bookstores can capitalize on the bookstore experience.

Stocking used books in addition to new books

As the saying goes, “It’s the economy, stupid.” In many ways, all priorities take a back seat to the number one priority of cost. Independent bookstores cannot support themselves by offering the rock-bottom prices on new books that Amazon does. But they can offer cheaper alternatives—used books—to appeal to the customer who is primarily driven by discounts. Offering books with lower prices will, if anything, bring in more new customers, many of whom may become loyal patrons in the future.

In the final analysis, independent bookstores will and always have had to scrape to get by. No one, after all, enters the bookselling business solely for the sake of profit. But now, the stakes are higher and business-as-usual is drastically changing. Bookstores must either refashion themselves to remain relevant or else face extinction. 

What does a publisher do? Impact on the environment

What does a publisher do? is a series of posts designed to answer that question, interpreted not in the sense of “What functions does a publisher seek to fulfil?” but rather “What operations does a publisher (well, this publisher at any rate) perform?” This is the eighth post in the series.

The second post (‘What does a publisher do? Manage stakeholders‘) in this series set out a framework for subsequent posts – a framework based on the types of  stakeholders a publisher needs to work with. Today’s post focuses on management of interactions with one of the four ‘non-trading’ stakeholders included in the framework, namely the environment. Thus:

Suppliers
Owners, investors	Workforce	State
		Community
		Media
		ENVIRONMENT
Clients, customers

I mean here the environment itself, rather than agencies seeking to protect the environment.

Before we set up our business, I had no experience of working for an organisation with an environmental policy.  I have, therefore, embarked on a learning programme. I’ve done this by reading (books mainly, though also blogs), since that is more cost-effective than relying on training or consultancy. 

The texts I’ve read fall into three categories, namely (a) general (e.g. Edwards & Orr, The sustainability revolution; (b) business and the environment (e.g.  Gareth Kane’s Three secrets of green business and his blog on Terra Infirma); and (c) the publishing industry (e.g. Rethinking paper and ink from Ooligan Press).

I’ve found the quality of books on sustainable business very mixed. Generally the genre exhibits a lack of rigour – scientific, technical, and financial. Reading the better titles, however, has proved productive. 

The main points I’ve learnt are:

1. begin with an assessment: where is one’s business making the biggest impacts?

2. when  doing so, go beyond the obvious: include not only such things as office supplies and business, but also (a) life-cycle impacts (including those of our suppliers, distributors, and consumers) and hence (b) impacts embodied in materials and equipment.

Our assessment of our impact is that it falls in three main areas:

1. print publishing (through materials, production processes, and distribution);

2. business travel (though we don’t ourselves commute);

3. maintaining an office.

When it comes to planning a policy, many sources advocate starting with small steps, on the grounds that (a) small steps cumulatively can make big differences and (b) small steps can lead to larger steps in due course. We’ve rejected such an approach. As David JC MacKay argues in Sustainable Energy:

We are inundated with a flood of crazy innumerate codswallop. The BBC doles out advice on how we can do our bit to save the planet – for example, “switch off your mobile phone charger when it’s not in use”; if anyone objects that mobile phone chargers are not actually our number one form of energy consumption, the mantra “very little helps” is wheeled out. Every little helps? A more realistic mantra is: if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. 

Though we have in fact implemented some small steps – for example, installing software to reduce office ink consumption – we don’t see such steps as part of an environmental plan: they simply help us to reduce running costs.

The plan we have produced has three planks:

1. Reducing the impact of our print publishing by (a) printing in different locations (thus reducing transportation), (b) using responsibly sourced (and, ideally, chlorine-free) paper; and (c) setting a schedule for phasing out print publication altogether.

2. Reducing the number of business meetings by using IT – principally Skype.

3. Reducing impacts resulting from other paper uses – for example by (a) seeking to avoid being sent junk mail and (b) using supplies of recycled paper of various types (for example, tissue paper, toilet roll). 

These initiatives are at various stages of implementation. The one we’ve made most progress on is (3); the one we’ve made no progress on is sourcing chlorine-free paper, which seems easier said than done. 

Sub-Saharan literacy: Book Aid’s contribution

Monographer writes: I’m pleased to say that guest posts are becoming a regular feature on this blog. Today’s post, by Stevie Russell (University of Roehampton) and Martina Armstrong, features Book Aid. Book Aid is a registered charity ( no. 313869). Its Royal Patron is the Duke of Edinburgh and its president is Nigel Newton (Chief Executive, Bloomsbury Publishing).

This post is intended as the first of an occasional series of posts featuring the work of not-for-profits and charities in the book industry.

Stevie Russell writes: I am a Chartered librarian who has been working in the academic sector for over 20 years. In 2010 I moved to a part-time position and looked around for some voluntary work I could do in my spare time. I had been a supporter of Book Aid for some years and, as they were near to home and library-related, they were the obvious choice.

So in January 2011 I started as a volunteer in their large Camberwell warehouse, sorting, shelving, stamping, and packing books bound for Africa and Palestine. The books are all new, donated by publishers, and carefully selected to match the requirements of Book Aid’s partners.

I love the work: now that my job is mostly desk-bound it’s good to handle books again – and to know (from the partner organisations’ feedback) that where they are going they will be well used and appreciated.

Martina Armstrong, Book Aid’s Individual Giving Manager, provides more information: Every year Book Aid International packs over 500,000 new books and sends them off to libraries in 12 countries across sub-Saharan African and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  Almost all the books we send are donated to us by UK publishers, for which we are extremely grateful.

In 2011 we provided 516,138 books to over two thousand public and community libraries and resource centres in schools, prisons, hospitals, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), and universities.  From the donkey library service serving schools in rural Zimbabwe to the Dadaab Refugee Camp libraries in north-eastern Kenya, we send books to some of the poorest communities in the world.

There are many ways you can support our work: you could come along to a monthly volunteering evening and help us sort and pack books; if you are, or work for, a publisher and think you could donate some new books, we’d love to hear from you; and finally, you could make a donation towards our work.  Every £2 we receive enables us to send one more book to a library in Africa. 

Please visit www.bookaid.org for more information and contact details.

Reading on the cloud – an opportunity for scholarly publishing?

Scholarly publishers make their publications available in a variety of formats. They include hardback books, softback books, PDFs, ePubs, braille editions, and anthologised, serialised or translated text. Each format has its own advantages and disadvantages. Print books, for example, may be offer a comfortable reading experience and, through enumerating editions and impression, stabilise text and make it easy to cite. But they require manufacturing and a bricks-and-mortar distribution system – and for those reasons may be far from environmentally optimal.

Because each format has specific disadvantages, there’s much to be said for publishing in a range of formats to enable readers to choose what works best for them. Currently the main options for readers of scholarly publications are:

• buy a print edition (new or used)
• borrow  a print edition
• download an e-book (legally from a retailer or illegally from a pirate).

Cloud computing

The development of cloud computing provides a further option. When digital publications are made available ‘on the cloud’, readers may read them without needing to download text.

Advantages to readers include geographical accessibility and so, in effect, portability – readers may access the publications through any Internet connection – and the avoidance of the downsides of downloading (notably clunkiness, digital rights management (DRM), and security fears).

One example of a cloud-publishing service is 24symbols, which when launched was figured in the press as ‘Spotify for books’. 24symbols’ model offers readers a choice between subscriptions, namely Freemium (you can  access books free of charge, but you encounter advertisements) and Premium (which is paid for, is free of advertising, and offers an option to download the publications).

As publishers we have begun to use 24symbols and have begun to use the service for both our Professional and Higher Education and our Creative Writing Studies series – for example, we’ve made Stephanie Vanderslice’s Rethinking Creative Writing available in this way.

There is also some interest in the industry in making audiobooks available on the cloud (for example, through Audiobooks.com – a service I’ve no firsthand experience of ). This is likely to be of more limited appeal to scholarly publishers: limited markets make it difficult to carry production costs and features such as tables, figures, and notes don’t translate.

Cloud computing for scholarly presses and institutions?

As well as offering its subscription services direct to readers, 24symbols also offers a platform for organisations to offer their publications to readers direct: that is –  to borrow the wording of their (not so slick) marketing literature  -  they offer

a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) to publishers, academic institutions, product and service enterprises, and other types of companies interested in offering a branded cloud reading service to their customers and/or employees.

It may prove to be the offer of SaaS that is of most significance for scholarly publishing. This kind of service (I presume we’ll see further such offerings from other providers) offers university presses and learned society publishers an option for reaching  readers direct (thus cutting out the industry supply chain) without undue capital cost.

Moreover, provision of Freemium and/or Premium options enables presses to make choices between open access (i.e. producer-pays) and traditional (reader-pays) publishing. 

The SaaS model also provides a way of supplementing – perhaps even supplanting – university repositories. Though the development of repositories has proved a welcome addition to the publishing landscape, they have some weaknesses. They often lack visibility and recognition – and the very term ‘repository’ is unfamiliar to many potential users.

SaaS cloud-publishing would seem, therefore, to offer providers of scholarly publications with an exciting option. An idea that excites me even more is that repositories from a number of institutions may band together to provide a combined offer to readers – though that would require an openness to ‘co-opetition‘ not regularly encountered in the world of universities and research centres.

What does a publisher do? Interact with communities

What does a publisher do is a series of posts designed to answer that question, interpreted not in the sense of “What functions does a publisher seek to fulfil?” but rather “What operations does a publisher (well, this publisher at any rate) perform?” This is the seventh post in the series.

The second post (‘What does a publisher do? Manage stakeholders’) in this series set out a framework for subsequent posts – a framework based on the types of  stakeholders a publisher needs to work with. Today’s post focuses on management of interactions with one of the four ‘non-trading’ stakeholders included in the framework, namely the community. Thus:

Suppliers
Owners, investors	Workforce	State
		COMMUNITY
		Media
		Environment
Clients, customers

 ’Community’ is of course a term in need of some definition. In most stakeholder management texts with which I am familiar ‘community’ means, first and foremost, the local district(s) in which the business is based.

Our main aim regarding the local community is simply to avoid causing nuisance. Many commentators on stakeholder management would regard this rather passive stance as unimaginative and unambitious. I am, however, happy with it. We make minimal demands on the local community and, indeed, make a contribution through purchasing from local suppliers and services. In particular, we use two small rural post offices: we hope our patronage will help save them from the axe that has fallen on so many others.

We do on occasion adopt an activist stance. An example is membership of the Mid Anglia Rail Passengers Association (MARPA), a much-needed group seeking to protect and improve regional rail services. 

Overall, however, our approach to the local community may be described as low temperature. The main reason for this is that for a company like ours, which is not selling to a local market, it makes little sense to equate ‘community’ with ‘local community’. Digital technology tends to obliterate distance. For example, we happen to employ the services of a local editor, but we also use an editor who lives in the north of England: our e-mails to them take the same amount of time to arrive in their in-boxes. In what sense, then, is one editor more local than the other?

The commoditization of books: Monographer visits a remainders fair

Today to London the visit a trade fair for remainders dealers, organised by CIANA. There are two such fairs a year, one in September and one in January, and I’d never been to either before. I went in part in search of some specific information, but also out of curiosity: the trade in remainders represents a part of the industry supply chain I knew little about.

In truth, I found it vaguely depressing – though really only for sentimental reasons. All trade in books through the supply chain represents  a commoditization of books, but here the process is least discriminating – at the furthest remove from the experience of readers or the ambitions of authors. One art book (there are a lot of art books) becomes virtually identical to another – and not very different from any other illustrated book. I was struck by just how many titles were available. Evidently the days of truly inventory-free publishing, heralded supposedly by print-on-demand, are some way off.

There are those who see the very existence of remainders – which in effect requires publishers to sell below unit cost – as, along with returns, evidence of great irrationality in the industry. The problem with that argument is that nobody ever prints excessive numbers of a book: it’s just that, when one orders print, one doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight. When I hear commentators lament the irrationality that they claim to detect, I always ask them what method they have for ensuring perfect foresight (a method that would, I am sure, be much in demand): none has ever provided such a method. 

Next year I wonder whether I should offer to bring a party of authors with me. In my experience, authors hate  seeing their books in remainders shops, interpreting such a fate in terms of failure and rejection. Many times I’ve explained that being remaindered need not imply any such judgment: remaindering is a sign that the publisher sold less than it forecast – that is all. Yet even when authors accept the logic of that argument, the emotional dissatisfaction persists. 

If they could see the remainders trade in action, they might feel differently: there’s an awful lot of it and the very process of commoditization removes any suggestion of stigma.

What does a publisher do? Manage brands

What does a publisher do? is a series of posts designed to answer that question, interpreted not in the sense of ‘What functions do publishers fulfil?’, but rather ‘What operations do publishers (well, this publisher, at any rate) perform?’ This post is the sixth in the series.

In ‘What does a publisher do? Manage security’, I said that our management of our own interest in our business (as owners) resolved into three activities: (a) security management; (b) strategy management; and (c) brand management. The current post focuses on the third of these.

Mention the phrase ‘brand management’ and one almost automatically begins to think of visual design, especially logos. Yet the business of creating a brand look is neither the most important aspect of brand management nor the starting point.

For a brand is surely a set of stakeholder expectations. If, in dealing with a company, its stakeholders find those expectations are not fulfilled, the visual look of the brand will rapidly become valueless. If iPhones didn’t work very well, the apple icon would lose its magic.

I

When we started to create a brand for our business, The Professional and Higher Partnership, we first wrote down the qualities that we hoped our stakeholders would say (or think) about us after dealing  with us. They included the following:

- professional

- traditional

- conservative-but-not-stuffy

- above all, trustworthy 

- with a touch of class.

The sense of trustworthiness was important because we wanted to build a business on repeat custom and loyal stakeholders, rather than having constantly on the prowl.

I did wonder whether ‘traditional’ was redundant, given that we also had ‘conservative’ there, but I realised this was not the case: we wanted to give a sense that, though we were a start-up, it was as if we had been around a long time. Maybe this reflected my sense of self: in starting a creative enterprise, I had a feeling that I was at last doing what I was meant to do, what the rest of my career had been a preparation for – founding the business felt simultaneously like breaking new ground and coming home.

Were I doing this afresh in 2012 I would replace ‘traditional’ with ‘ancient and modern’ – the ‘ancient’ to reflect our roots in codex publishing and the ‘modern’ to reflect our digital publishing and openness to Web 2.0. I sense a similar balance businesses such as Digital Bindery, which I see presents itself as using ‘twenty-first century tools’ in the service of ‘artisan’ e-book conversion,  Scriptura, and (I hope the MD, David Williams, doesn’t mind me saying) The Running Head.

II

Our list of desired qualities formed the core of the brief we gave our designer, Lou Dugdale. It was supplemented by a list of qualities that we wished to avoid being associated with. The negative list read:

- corporate

- trendy

- slick

- low cost.

Overall we had in mind we characterised the desired impression as ‘something like an established firm of lawyers or surveyors in a  market town, only not so boring’. 

So here is the logo Lou produced:

And here, for comparative purposes, are links to well-established lawyers and surveyors in our region, namely Rustons & Lloyd and Cheffins respectively. 

III

Our thinking about brand was crystallised or confirmed by two subsequent conversations. One occurred, very briefly, in Ely, as I was walking through the cathedral close (after a visit to the excellent Topping & Company Booksellers). A woman I did not know stopped me and said ‘You must be a gentleman farmer or an auctioneer’ (‘Actually I’m not either that I’d rather like to be both’).

One was with a bright young woman who specialised in corporate brand management, whom I met during a seminar in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. I found it interesting to tap into her expertise on such matters as what makes an ideal brand name. She then asked me the name of my business. In response to my reply (‘The Professional and Higher Partnership’), she did a good of job of remaining polite whilst leaving me in no doubt that our name came close to the opposite of ideal. 

She seemed perplexed that I welcomed the judgment. Later, reflecting on the conversation while exploring the town’s marvellous abbey, I felt buoyed with confidence., knowing we’d got one thing right.

Creative regions: access to research

One of the consistent concerns of this blog has been to indicate ways in which thinking on (a) publishing and (b) the creative economy generally may fruitfully be brought into dialogue. Another focus has been the relationship – in publishing especially – between creativity and place. It is, therefore, good to know of some accessible research on the creative industries, with special emphasis on their spatial aspects. 

Creative Regions in Europe is a research network supported by the Regional Studies Association. The network’s website provides numerous links to research in various, mostly grey literature, formats. They include seminar outcomes, reports, a green paper, and a book (Creative business – 10 lessons to help you build a business your way).

Perhaps of most interest here is the series of working papers by Roberta Comunian and others. A number of them study the phenomenon of ‘bohemian graduates’ (graduates in creative disciplines, including publishing and writing) – their careers and economic performance and the implications of and for higher education courses.

What does a publisher do? Manage strategically

What does a publisher do? is a series of posts designed to answer that question, interpreted not in the sense of ‘What functions do publishers fulfil?’, but rather ‘What operations do publishers (well, this publisher, at any rate) perform?’ This post is the fifth in the series.

In ‘What does a publisher do? Manage security’, I said that our management of our own interest in our business (as owners) resolved into three activities: (a) security management; (b) strategy management; and (c) brand management. The current post focuses on the second of these.

On our periodic review days, my fellow director and I review our current strategy to date and outline the strategy for the coming period. To do so, we use one very straightforward tool*. We plot a graph with share of revenue on one axis and profit margin on the other. From this we can derive a quadrant model:

	Small share of revenue	High share of revenue
High profit margin
Low profit margin

On this we can plot our revenue streams. Before doing so, however, we need to make one modification. Some of our revenue streams are services – editorial services and training on publishing – for which the cost of sale, in financial terms, is very low.

The problem here is that above model would fail to differentiate sufficiently: all such services would show up as ‘high margin’. To overcome this problem we treat time as an alternative measure of cost – our thinking being that services that soak up a lot of our time have a high opportunity cost.

For our strategic planning we merely apply the conventional wisdom  for this model. The low-margin, low revenue streams, we seek to eliminate. The high-margin streams that currently provide a small share of our revenue, we seek to boost through a  sales drive. Low-margin streams that provide a high share of revenue, we seek to make more profitable by raising the price. High-margin, high revenue projects – well, we look for more of the same. Thus:

	Small share of revenue	High share of revenue
High profit margin	Sales campaign	Focus
Low profit margin	Eliminate	Increase prices

The conventional wisdom here constitutes a kind or organised common sense. We find it helps to confirm what the right thing to do is. It can take a bit of courage to eliminate a revenue stream, but the above model makes it clear that it make sense.

As a result we curtailed the literary agency services (low-margin, low revenue) we once offered. We are raising the price of our editorial services (low-margin, high revenue). In the process we will no doubt lose some clients – but focusing on higher margin streams will make us more profitable.

* We didn’t invent this tool, but I regret I’m unable to credit its author because I have been unable to trace its source. Needless to say, any leads would be welcome.

What does a publisher do? Manage security

What does a publisher do? is a series of posts designed to answer that question, interpreted not in the sense of ‘What functions do publishers fulfil?’, but rather ‘What operations do publishers (well, this publisher, at any rate) perform?’ The series may thus be thought of as the empiricist counterpart to the series of post listed on the Towards a theory of publishing page. This post is the fourth in the series.

The second post (‘What does a publisher do? Manage stakeholders‘) in this series set out a framework for subsequent posts – a framework based on the types of stakeholders a publisher needs to work with. Today’s post focuses on the management of the owners’, or investors’, interests:

Suppliers
OWNERS, INVESTORS	Workforce	The state
		The community
		The media
		The environment
Clients, customers

In my own company, there are two owners – myself and my fellow director, Karen Haynes. Thus this post focuses on what we do – other, that is, than seek to manage other stakeholders effectively – to protect and develop our own interest. Because I’m writing a descriptive account, rather than a textbook, the emphasis falls here on what – for better or worse – we do in practice, rather than on what ideally we should be doing. 

Managing our interest resolves into three operations – (a) security management, (b) strategy management, and (c) brand management. ‘Security management’ here refers to (i) continuity management and (ii) risk management.

None of these – with the possible exception of brand management – constitutes the kind of thing people choose to go into publishing to do. Typically it is the creative activities – working with authors, briefing designers, opening up new markets – that attract  people into the industry. Yet stakeholder management, security management, and brand management support those creative activities. Thus they may be thought of as pillars of the creative enterprise.  

As publishers, our approach to security management consists of, first, seeking to identify potential threats to the continuity of our business and then taking steps to avoid or mitigate them. The first stage requires us to look outwards, at the business environment, and inwards, at our own processes.

To look outwards, we periodically scan the horizon using a taxonomy of changes in our business environment which we call EPISTLE:

Economic

Political

Intellectual

Social

Techn(olog)ical

Legal

Environmental.

This form of scanning forms a staple activity of an annual review day. At our most recent review day, for example, we identified a risk arising from the fact that our region – Greater Cambridge – is relatively buoyant and prosperous. That may sound paradoxical: the point is that the local buzz might lead us to be over-optimistic, forgetting that the wider market is much weaker.

The operations we perform to mitigate or avoid threats include the following:

1. In our selection of suppliers to work with, we ensure that there is plenty of duplication. It is tempting, once one has decided which supplier is best in class, to send all one’s work in that direction. For example, if a cover designer proves outstanding, it is natural to think, “We’ll ask the designer to do all our covers”. However, such a policy increases the level of operational risk: if the designer were then, for example, to fall ill, that could delay the entire publishing programme. We therefore like to work with more than one of each type of supplier – more than one copy-editor, more than one e-book converter, and so on.

2. When taking out insurance:

a) We use a broker who we feel will understand our business, so that they can seek appropriate policies. Our broker, La Playa, has a particular strength in creative and IP businesses.

b) We treat the annual renewal of our insurance policies not as routine moments, but as an opportunity both to re-read the policies and reconsider the level of cover. 

3. In financial management, we prioritise cash flow – even above profitability. We therefore produce frequent and regular cash flow forecast to ensure that we can cover future liabilities, not least the need to pay VAT and Corporation Tax promptly. More precisely, we produce a range of forecasts – since forecasts consisting of a single, precise, figure for each time period are almost bound to prove inaccurate – and, in any case, what really matters is not the most likely scenario, but the worst-case scenario.

In a micro-enterprise often the most crucial element of continuity management is the health of key personnel. We therefore have insurance policies to cover loss of earnings should a director become incapacitated. Such an eventuality is, however, a poor second. Better by far not, if at all possible, to fall sick in the first place.

The implication is that health and fitness is not simply a matter of self-management – of promoting one’s well-being and quality of life: it is also a form of continuity management for the business. Hence the lunchtime walk and the evening swim.

 

.

The creative economy: remarks on the place of publishing

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) recently published a statistical report entitled Creative Industries Economic Estimates – December 2011. It provides estimates for various measures of the UK’s creative economy: they include gross value-added, exports, employment, and number of enterprises. 

What does the report show about the publishing industry? The definition of publishing used in the report is broad: it includes books, journals, magazines, newspapers, and ‘digital content publishing’. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to separate out figures for each component.

From the figures for the publishing industry thus defined, three findings stand out to me. 

1. The recession has, not surprisingly, damaged the publishing industry. The data for gross value-added (GVA), covering the years 2008-9, indicate that GVA declined. Between 2009-11 the number of enterprises fell, from 10,820 to 9,700.

2. However, the statistics indicate that the publishing industry is relatively resilient. The above fall in GVA amounted to less than 1% – and, as a proportion of the creative economy in total, publishing’s contribution increased (albeit marginally). Moreover, between 2009-10 (the years for which data are provided) employment in publishing remained stable – in fact, that figure too slightly increased (from 241,881 to 243,809). 

3. As an exporter, the publishing industry outshines some of its more glamorous media counterparts. In 2009, the industry accounted for an estimated 3.1% of exports, compared to 2.6% for television and radio and 1.9% for film, video, and photography.

The statistics also raised some questions in my mind. The data for employment are broken down into various categories. They reveal that the overall increase in employment mentioned above results from some contrasting shifts. While the number for ’Creative Employees in the Creative Industries’ fell quite sharply (from 60,893 to 54,596), the numbers for ‘Support Employees in the Creative Industries’ and ‘Employees doing creative jobs in other industries’ increased (from 96,215 to 100,682 and from 51,102 to 54,161 respectively).

It’s difficult to know what to make of this. The changes are relatively small and there must be some margin of error – and one wonders how stable those categories are, given that the headings aren’t exactly idiomatic. Perhaps, then, there has been no change in the underlying reality. I do find myself wondering, however, whether that rise in ’Employees doing creative jobs in other industries’ perhaps reflects the way that new technology has made it easier for organisations beyond the publishing industry to publish.

 As for the changing ratio between Creative Employees in the Creative Industries and Support Employees in the Creative Industries (from 1:1.58 to 1:1.84), I would welcome suggestions for an explanation …

Paper trails: from trees to trash – the true cost of paper

Paper trails: from trees to trash – the true cost of paper by Mandy Haggith was published by Random House in 2008. I have only recently discovered the book, in its ePub edition. The sub-title makes clear what the book is about, provided one recognises that ‘cost’ refers to environmental and social, as well as economic, cost.

From the first chapter (‘Addicted to pulp’) Haggith makes readers aware of our huge consumption of paper throughout our lives, from the ‘medical chart in a maternity ward’ to the ‘death certificate and coroner’s report’. The bulk of the book is devoted to educating the reader about the paper industry’s impacts through various stages of paper’s life-cycle – from planting and felling trees, through pulping and processing, to landfill at the end. 

The text blends three types of writing – (a) travelogue, based on Haggith’s visits to various sites – principally forests, plantations, and mills – around the world, from Vancouver Island to Indonesia (the book would have made a great television documentary series); (b) analysis; and (c) evocation – of the beauty of the ecosystems in question.

Before reading this book, I hadn’t given much thought to my use of paper, beyond seeking to use certified paper (principally Forest Stewardship Council-certified) and buying a certain amount of recycled paper for office use. This book has persuaded me that such an approach is lazy. In particular, it drew attention to problems even with the  Forest Stewardship Council’s certification scheme  (even though she favours it) : the scheme allows some logging of old-growth forests – and all schemes are at risk of being undermined by corruption and practices outside the law.

A strength of the book is that it explains some of the ecological processes involved. It seeks to demonstrate that monoculture reduces biodiversity and the planting of exotic species can have dramatic effects on the water table as well as driving out native species.

Paper Trails is about the paper industry in general, rather than about publishing in particular. As such, it may be thought of as a companion piece for  Rethinking Paper & Ink: The Sustainable Publishing Revolution (Ooligan Press; reviewed  4 June), which deals with the impact of the publishing industry in general (not only its use of paper). In places, however, Paper Trails does focus on publishing – especially in the chapter on Canada (‘Harry Potter and the Pulpmills of Doom’). The chapter closes with an account of Raincoast Books’ decision to print Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix on recycled paper.

Few books on sustainability have made as strong an impression on me as Paper Trails – in fact, I don’t think any have. The book left me with a strong presumption that I should change my consumption patters – in particular, by switching to chlorine-free and recycled paper and, above all, reducing my paper consumption. 

So far as our publishing business goes, my thoughts, having read this book, run as follows: (i) that originally we set out to publish only in e-book form; (ii) that we relaxed our policy (from ‘e-book only’ to ‘e-book mainly and print-on-demand where necessary) because parts of our target market – Creative Writing Studies – is relatively unenthusiastic about e-books; (iii) that I now wonder whether we should revisit that decision and set a date beyond which publications become e-only; but (iv) before taking that kind of step I want to triangulate Haggith’s argument against other research findings (and here I should register a criticism of the book, namely that the bibliography is rather light on scientific references).

What does a publisher do? Stakeholder management revisited

What does a publisher do? is a series of posts designed to answer that question, interpreted not in the sense of ‘What functions do publishers fulfil?’, but rather ‘What operations do publishers (well, this publisher, at any rate) perform?’ This post is the third in the series.

In ‘What does a publisher do? Manage stakeholders‘ (13 Dec), I wrote that as publishers we seek to (a) identify our stakeholders and (b) manage our relationships with them effectively. In the rest of that post, I explored (a); here I wish to develop (b). 

To formulate our stakeholder management strategy we use a straightforward tool, namely a graph. On one axis we plot the degree of influence the stakeholder has on our business; on the other, we plot the importance of the stakeholder to our business. From this we can derive a quadrant model:

	Low influence on business	High influence on business
High importance to business
Low importance to business

An example of a stakeholder we place top-left is Nielsen Book Services. They matter hugely to us: without their Bookdata service, retailers and library suppliers would find it difficult to source our publications. And, in the UK, there is no ready substitute. Yet Nielsen have little influence over us; the kind of data Nielsen require – ISBNs, formats, prices etc. – is the kind that we would generate anyway. And the PubWeb service for uploading data is open 24/7.

An example of a ‘bottom-left’ stakeholder is the London Book Fair (LBF). Each year I wonder whether to attend; each year I do; and in each year I come away having found it useful. But not that useful: these days we can both communicate with other businesses and gain information using online services. And LBF has little influence on us, besides requiring us each spring to block off a few days in our diary.

In the bottom-right, we have the tax authorities – in the UK, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). HMRC matters little to us: in fact, we prefer not to think about them at all! But they have huge influence: they determine the way we keep records, the time at which we make payments. In fact, they influence our weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual cycles – each of which has time set aside to ensure we fulfil their requirements to the letter.

Finally, top-right, come those stakeholders who are important to us and who exert an influence on us. For example, library suppliers and aggregators. We rely on them to make our publications readily available to libraries. And, though they compete with each other, one cannot simply substitute one for another, since each occupies its own position in the market (some libraries prefer to source through MyiLibrary, for example, while others prefer Dawsonera). Moreover, they have influence on us: each has its own technical requirements regarding file formats and we need to ensure our workflow fulfils those requirements.

According to the conventional wisdom of stakeholder management, one needs to treat stakeholders differently according to which quadrant they occupy. Top-left stakeholders are said to require special initiatives; bottom-left stakeholders are seen as low priority and so merit little attention; bottom-right stakeholders are seen as a source of risk and so should be carefully managed and monitored; while those in the top-right require the best working relationships. So:

	Low influence on business	High influence on business
High importance to business	special initiatives	maintain good relationships
Low importance to business	low priority	source of risk:monitor and manage carefully

For the most part, we go along with the conventional wisdom. We do indeed give LBF (bottom-left) little priority. We don’t follow them on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever: we just turn up. In contrast, we do follow Nielsen (top-left) on Twitter and we do read their e-newsletters, just to ensure we’re up to date with their services: and we do make use of their customer care services, phoning our account manager to discuss points that are not self-evident (registering varied arrangements for distribution, for example).

Sometimes, though, the scope for implementing the conventional wisdom is limited. For example, I’m not very clear what a micro-enterprise can do to maintain a good relationship with a library supplier or aggregator beyond making sure we meet their requirements.

The future of bookselling revisited: the Portas review

High streets – towns’ central retail areas – are under great pressure – from the growth of out-of-town shopping malls, supermarkets, and hypermarkets, the development of online and mobile shopping, and the recession.

As a result, the UK government commissioned a report from Mary Portas on the future of high streets. The Portas Review: An independent review into the future of our high streets,  published earlier this week, may be downloaded from the author’s website, www.maryportas.com.

Booksellers of the bricks-and-mortar kind have two reasons to be interested in the outcomes. First, they are particularly prone to the forces identified above: in the UK at least they are more likely to be found in the high street than in a mall and the buyers of books were early adopters of digital commerce. Second, they have a vested interest in the survival of high street retailers of all kinds: a high street that is successful in general creates footfall, and hence potential custom, for all its members.

It is not surprisingly then that the Booksellers Association (BA) should have made a submission to the review and should comment on it on publication. What is surprising is the BA’s uncritical welcome of the report.

The BA’s press release (13 Dec), downloadable from its website, begins:

In her independent review into the future of our high streets, Mary Portas says she has a vision: “I don’t want to live in a Britain that doesn’t care about community” and furthermore, “I want to put the heart back into the centre of our high streets, re-imagined as destinations for socialising, culture, health, wellbeing, creativity and learning.”

Sydney Davies, head of trade & industry at the Booksellers Association, said:

“This is exactly what a bookshop brings to the community. This supports the position the Booksellers Association has long held about the vital importance of booksellers on the High Street for the UK”.

Yes, Mr Davies – but the question is not whether Ms Portas’s sentiments echo your own: the question is whether her recommendations will do anything substantial to help your members.

I can’t see that they will. The report provides 28 recommendations. For example:

• “Put in place a ‘Town Team’: a visionary, strategic and strong operational management team for high streets”
• “Establish a new ‘National Market Day’ where budding shopkeepers can try their hand at operating a low-cost retail business”
• “Put betting shops into a separate ‘Use Class’ of their own”
• “Retailers should report on their support of local high streets in their annual report”
• “Introduce a public register of high street landlords”.

According to Ms Portas’s comments at the launch of her report, these recommendations only make sense when read together, as a whole. I find that view unconvincing: yes, there is some articulation between recommendations – but in truth the list is a pretty disparate one.

The report is beset by vagueness. If we’re going to have Town Teams, it’s great to hear that they should be “visionary, strategic and strong” – but what exactly would they do?

It would be difficult to argue against Portas’s recommendation to “Make it easier for people to become market traders by removing unnecessary regulations so that anyone can trade on the high street unless there is a valid reason why not” – one would hardly want unnecessary, invalid policies. But what exactly are we talking about? One’s eyes move from the summary of the recommendations to the body text of the report in order to find the answer to such questions, only to find this: 

We need to encourage and enable markets to be new social hubs full of entrepreneurial talent and innovation. Government could signal its clear and
strong support for markets by simply switching their default position. Instead of needing to jump through certain hoops of licenses and regulations, why can’t we proceed on the assumption that anyone can trade on the high street, unless there is a valid reason why not?

“Certain hoops”: such as? 

The report’s vagueness is most evident in the recommendations’ verbs: various people are enjoined to “consider”, “focus on”, and “explore” things. I’m sure they should do so. It’s just a shame that the report should provide them with so little guidance in their considerations, focus-ings, and explorations.

In short, the report fails to live up to the standards that it sets for others. For example, Portas encourages policy-makers to be clear (“crystal-clear” even) about things, but listen to her own analysis: 

There’s a minefield of issues – tax and business rates, rents and contracts, planning, parking restrictions, delivery curfews and use classes, to name but a few.

Some geezer at the bar of my local pub could have told me as much.

The high street needs rigorous economic analysis. We should ask: To what extent are the current problems the result of the free play of the market and to what extent the result of poor government (regulation, taxation, etc.)? To the extent that the market cannot be relied upon to deliver – because, for example, of the externalities involved – how likely is it that new policy-making will make things better rather than worse? In particular, to the extent that policy-makers provides incentives to high street retailers, what kinds of opportunity cost are incurred?

These are difficult yet unavoidable questions. If The Portas Review had grappled with them, there is a chance that it might itself have proved “visionary, strategic and strong”.

But the report doesn’t do rigour. What it does instead is enjoinder putative Town Teams to produce “game-changing stuff … not just the usual suspects round a table planning the Christmas decorations”. Portas’s faith in such teams is remarkable: 

Armed with a shared vision of the future and shaped by the people who will use their high street, the Town Team could have the power to decide the appropriate mix of shops and services for their area. Anything which doesn’t meet the agreed plan simply wouldn’t be able to go ahead.

There will of course be no vested interests, no risk of corruption, and no question that these seers can fail to double-guess the future. None whatsoever.

On the one hand, then, we have very powerful economic forces, drawing consumers towards shopping out-of-town or online: on the other hand we have  lashings of motherhood-and-apple-pie words – no end of “vision”, “teams” and, above all, that old stalwart “community”.

The word “community” certainly gained a double tick from the BA, whose press release tells us with heart-warming smile that “In our submission to the Review, we emphasised that bookshops, in addition to promoting literacy and culture, also build community character”.

Well done, Mr Davies. Now tell us what you think this review is going to do for your members. I think the answer is, very little. If you’re a high street bookseller, the grim news seems to be: you’re on your own, it’s down to you.

What does a publisher do? Manage stakeholders

In my initial post in this series “What does a publisher do?” I said that the series would seek to specify, in concrete terms, what a publisher actually does. All of the subsequent posts in this series will indeed concern themselves directly with the nitty-gritty. The current post, however, works on a somewhat more abstract level, the reason being that its purpose is to provide a framework for all subsequent posts in the series. It is, as it were, a meta-post.

Over the last couple of decades or so the conception of stakeholder management has become increasingly popular. In essence, stakeholder management consists of,  first, identifying your stakeholders and then seeking to ensure you have the stakeholders you want and that you are managing (your relationship with) them effectively. This includes, but is not limited to, a consideration of contractual and financial arrangements.

To do all this, it helps to have a taxonomy of stakeholders in place. Many such taxonomies have been proposed – see Friedman & Miles, Stakeholders: Theory and Practice (OUP, 2006) for an excellent review. None is ideal for all circumstances. For pragmatic reasons, I find it useful to use a very straightforward approach.

I visualise our taxonomy in the form of a sandwich. The top layer comprises our suppliers. They range from publishing-specific suppliers – for example, authors and freelancers – to  general suppliers (for example, business that supply utility-type services such as water, electricity, mail, and transport). 

Thus we have: 

Suppliers

 The bottom layer comprises our clients and customers. They include ‘B2B’ clients – other businesses, such as wholesalers and library suppliers – and customers (typically, readers buying our publications). So: 

Suppliers

Clients, customers

 In between, we have three sets of stakeholders:

1. the owners/investors;
2. the workforce;
3. what I broadly (and reasonably accurately) think of as our ‘non-trading’ partners. They include: (a) the state – local, national, and supra-national governments; (b) communities – principally the local community and professional communities of practice; (c) the media (in which I include not only professional journalists and broadcasters but also various Web 2.0-ers – for example, prominent bloggers); and (d) the environment which, though non-human and inarticulate is a stakeholder by virtue of the fact that we influence it and it influences us.

Overall, therefore, our taxonomy looks like this: 

Suppliers
Owners, investors	Workforce	The state
		The community
		The media
		The environment
Clients, customers

In fact, however, we don’t have a workforce (other than ourselves). Though we’d like to employ people, the state would penalise us for doing so – principally by imposing a payroll tax known in the UK as ‘national insurance’. We therefore rely on outsourcing work to suppliers. I maintain the category of ‘workforce’ in our schema, however, in the hope that we will one day find ourselves working in a less punitive regime.

In the rest of the series, as we specify the operations that we perform as publishers, we will employ this taxonomy, considering the work that managing each set of stakeholders entails.

What does a publisher do?

Many years ago I met the British politician Sir Rhodes Boyson at a drinks reception at the Institute for Economic Affairs.

“What do you do?” he asked me.

“I’m a commissioning editor,” I replied.

“Yes, but what do you do?” he asked.

It was only when I drilled down to the level of the activities that filled my week  - presenting projects at publishing meetings, sending out contracts, and so on – that he was satisfied.

I thought his question was a good one. It made me realise that there were all kinds of jobs about which I know very little in terms of what the people doing them do. My friends who worked as technology consultant, investment manager, systems analyst etc. – I might understand the functions of their jobs (roughly), but I could not tell you what they spent their time doing.

The purpose of the series of posts I’m introducing here, then, is to answer that question – though in relation to the job of publisher, rather than commissioning editor.

There is currently a good deal of discussion online about what publishers do in a more abstract way – what their function is, how they might add value. The current series isn’t designed to deal with such concerns: its aim is more altogether more concrete. I work hard as a publisher: I hope that subsequent posts will manage to convey what, in the process, I actually do.

Entrepreneurship in publishing

Recently I ran a class on entrepreneurship in publishing for the Publishing Studies department at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. I was assisted by Efstathia Pitsa from Cambridge Judge Business School. Effie’s introduction helped to establish a broad conception of entrepreneurship.

In particular, she pointed out that although the word ‘entrepreneurship’ typically calls to mind individuals – Richard Branson, Bill Gates – most successful examples of entrepreneurship involve teams rather than just individuals. Effie also argued that a defining feature of entrepreneurship was the creation of value, where ‘value’ may be defined in a number of ways – not only financially.

This conception informed my own typology of entrepreneurship, which comprised:

• classic entrepreneurship (the Branson type);
• micro-entrepreneurship (the development of small-scale businesses);
• social entrepreneurship (the application of entrepreneurial behaviour to a social problem);
• intrapreneurship (entrepreneurial behaviour within a corporation, by an employee).

As examples I used mostly companies with which my own business, The Professional and Higher Partnership, is involved. They included:

• 24symbols (at present, micro-entrepreneurship – perhaps to become classic entrepreneurship);
• Worldreader (social entrepreneurship);
• paperight (social entrepreneurship, at least in part).

As my main example I used Wynkyn de Worde, the printer of the late 14th and early 15th centuries. My account of Wynkyn as entrepreneur, which draws heavily on the essay in the Dictionary of National Biography, ran as follows:

Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/5) was probably born in Worth, Germany. He joined Wiiliam Caxton in Cologne (1471-2) and later moved with Caxton to Westminster (1475 or 1476). He probably worked in Caxton’s printing shop until Caxton died in 1492.

Wynkyn took over Caxton’s business and in 1500/01 moved it to Fleet Street in the City of London. The move brought a change in publishing strategy, away from courtly material and towards religious, educational, and popular books.

Distinctive and innovative aspects of Wynkyn’s publishing included:

• regular use of woodcuts
• collaboration with grammarians
• publishing English poets, including Lydgate and contemporary poets such as Skelton

Wynkyn established a trading network including businessmen in Bristol, Oxford, and York.

In his essay on Wynkyn in the Dictionary of National Biography, N.F. Blake concludes: “Wynkyn’s various qualities need emphasizing: after Caxton’s death he had sufficient vision to embark on a new publishing policy; to imitate his former master might have led to financial ruin. He was personable enough to get on with patrons from many classes and to run a heterogeneous household. No evidence of his involvement in litigation has been found. He was willing to give his helpers the credit they deserved, and he did not ignore their contribution as Caxton did. He probably knew several languages, and there is no reason to underestimate his learning and acumen. Previous assessments fail to give him due credit for his achievements”.

As we considered the example of Wynkyn, I was struck – and amused – by how little had really changed. From the vantage point of the early 21st century, the late medieval publishing scene remains utterly recognisable. Geography matters. Design (those woodcuts) can provide a competitive advantage (witness Apple): so can stakeholder management (establishing a supply chain built on long-term relationships; readily giving credit where it is due). Diversity (that heterogenous household) is to be embraced. And change is afoot: to continue merely to do what you’ve always done would, even for an industry leader, lead to disaster.

Though we’ve come so very far – Gutenberg’s press has been replaced by digital printing and by ePub and Kindle – it seems nothing much has changed. If you’re a wannabe publishing entrepreneur looking for a mentor, Wynkyn’s your man.

The case for grey literature

Grey (or gray) literature has been growing in importance for decades and will continue to do so. It has certainly grown in volume as governments, think tanks, charities, and other  non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have expanded their publishing programmes.

It’s also progressed qualitatively, thanks to developments in information science, supported by services such as GreyNet and OpenSigle. Grey literature undoubtedly presents challenges to librarians and archivists. The print products often don’t lend themselves to shelving – they may lack a proper spine (using, for example, stapling or ring binding instead) and they come in a variety of shapes and sizes (loose-leaf, leaflets, pamphlets, booklets, etc.).

Both in print and digital form, grey literature is difficult to define or categorise. The University of British Columbia library provides a helpful characterisation and GreyNet provides a list of document types. Though neither of these are entirely satisfactory – there is a tension between categorising literature by genre and defining it by provenance; the place of self-publishing is unclear; and the list is arguably incomplete (what about slides or teaching resources?) – it is perhaps in the nature of the grey literature that no such attempts will ever prove entirely adequate.

Yet, for all the difficulties, information science has, as I say, made progress – with the result that grey literature has become somewhat more readily retrievable. This extends the ‘shelf-life’ of grey literature – whereas grey literature used to disappear rather quickly, into piles on desks and then into filing cabinets or waste-paper bins,  it now hangs around much longer, especially online. (Logically this should lead to increasing citation rates, though I don’t know of any statistics to support that.)

Why do I say that the importance of grey literature will continue to grow? In part, because it harmonises with developments in publishing, notably the growth of open access (especially within repositories).

In part too because governments have become more interested in the impact that the research they sponsor makes beyond the research community itself (notably, in the UK, in the Research Excellence Framework – see its Assessment Framework and Guidance for Submissions). Publishers of grey literature are often strong at getting publications ‘out there’ and into the hands of influencers, such as policy-makers and the media.

And also because researchers are under pressure to publish and grey literature is well placed to play a central role in what we might call the ecology of research communication. What I mean by that is that (a) grey literature is itself a form of publication – reasonably established and respected within research communities – and (b) grey publications often form stepping-stones towards other more polished or developed forms of publishing: a report or white paper, say, may in due course metamorphose into a book or act as a quarry for research papers. Thus a researcher can use grey literature projects as a stage on, as it were, an authorial conveyor belt.

As an editor, I love exploring grey literature. I see it as a seed-bed of creative projects. Whenever I give training courses for researchers – on how to write for publication and how to get published – I seek to convey enthusiasm for grey lit. But it’s hard work. One obstacle is that the term itself is not known very broadly – it’s much used in some disciplines (archaeology, for example, or health sciences), but hardly at all in others (especially arts and humanities): indeed it’s not at all unusual to find researchers who have written grey literature without knowing it.

Another obstacle is that the term ‘grey literature’ isn’t inspiring – it’s difficult to sell anything grey (except suits). Perhaps there should be a competition to come up with a sexier phrase. Meanwhile, if you have a suggestion, do please share it …

PS The best suggestion to date (26 Nov) is ‘silver literature’, which I like.

Printed books and patron-driven acquisition

My previous post (16 Nov) – a review of Swords (ed.), Patron-driven acquisitions – examined the phenomenon of patron-driven acquisition (PDA). I noted there two conceptions of PDA – one narrow and one broad:

• the broad: any system in which library’s decisions over which books to buy are driven principally by demand from patrons, rather than collection librarians’ judgement;
• the narrow: a system whereby a supplier (typically an aggregator such as EBL, ebrary, NetLibrary, or MyiLibrary) makes a collection of e-books available to a library free of charge. Purchases (or leases) of titles using the library budget are then triggered by patrons’ selection and use.

Impressive though Swords’ book is, it sometimes slides unannounced from the broader conception to the narrower. The result is that in places it exaggerates the advantages of PDA.

To be more precise:

1. if one moves from (a) a traditional model whereby collection librarians select acquisitions, primarily of printed books to (b) a model whereby acquisitions are primarily in e-book form and are determined by users, one moves simultaneously along two dimensions, namely:

• from librarian to user;
• from print to e-book.

2. If, however, one fails to distinguish the two dimensions, there is a danger that one will claim that the advantages of the latter model are derived from PDA, whereas in fact some may be simply down to the advantages of e-books over print.

3. And, furthermore, one risks overlooking the possibilities of patron-driven acquisition of printed books.

For example, in their chapter on building libraries in Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, and Azerbaijan, Rex Steiner and Ron Berry conclude with a list of the ‘effects of PDA’. Oddly they don’t mention what I think is the obvious advantage, namely that users get the books they want (and libraries avoid buying books that nobody wants). Many of the effects they do identify derive not from a movement from librarian-driven to user-driven acquisition but, rather, from a movement from printed books to e-books. Examples include the reduction in the need for new shelving and the elimination of a lengthy shipping process and of the difficulties of customs clearance. Such effects would apply, regardless of whether the acquisition of e-books was librarian-driven or user-driven. Similarly, the difficulties encountered in the print supply chain would apply, regardless of how the acquisition of print books was driven.

However, Patron-driven acquisitions doesn’t entirely ignore the possibility of print-PDA. In particular, Michael Levine-Clark, in his chapter on the University of Denver library, considers this question. He notes:

A crucial aspect of this plan is the idea that users should be able to duplicate print and electronic books as needed. The library conducted surveys of the university community … One clear conclusion of the 2010 survey is that users prefer ebooks for some functions and print books for others; because people may read the same book for different purposes, different users may want the same title in different formats. A demand-driven acquisition model allows the library, whenever possible, to provide access for both formats of the same title, but only to purchase either format when actually needed.

How very adaptable – and how very sane. Yet not all librarians will sympathise with this view – in part because the acquisition of printed books entails problems (not least the total cost of acquisition, processing, and storing) and in part because, well, in librarianship, print is not very sexy. It is probably no accident that, though the book does discuss print and paper, neither term appears in the book’s index.

I fear that users who prefer print are sometimes regarded in the library world as benighted souls who simply don’t ‘get’ e-books – the unwritten implication being that with time they will either come to see the error of their ways or become extinct! Yet benighted souls still deserve a service – and some, far from being benighted, simply have special needs. Thus practices such as the Denver surveys – resulting in a better informed, more nuanced, provision – seem wholly admirable.

Levine-Clark also considers, briefly, the role of On Demand Book’s Espresso Book Machine. Though this machine’s technology is undoubtedly clever and appealing, I’ve always been sceptical of its commercial potential – except in libraries, where it ought surely to have some application. 

Levine-Clark notes that the Espresso service ‘does not yet have sufficient frontlist content’ to be ‘viable’. There is here a chicken-and-egg situation similar to that faced by e-books prior to the development of the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle: there is limited supply because there is limited demand – and there is limited demand because supply is limited. Perhaps there’s an opportunity here for a concerted effort to push such services over the threshold of viability.

Patron-driven acquisitions

‘Patron-driven acquisition’ (PDA) is, according to the Editor’s Note in Patron-driven acquisitions: history and best practices (De Gruyter Saur, 2011), synonymous with several phrases, namely ‘demand-driven acquisitions’, ‘patron-selection programs’, ‘user-driven collection’, ‘research-driven acquisition model’, ‘patron-initiated purchase’. In its most general sense, PDA refers to any system in which library’s decisions over which books to buy are driven principally by demand from patrons, rather than collection librarians’ judgement. The phrase is, however, often used in a narrower sense to refer to a system whereby a supplier (typically an aggregator such as EBL, ebrary, NetLibrary, or MyiLibrary) makes a collection of e-books available to a library free of charge. Purchases (or leases) of titles using the library budget are then triggered by patrons’ selection and use.

For libraries, PDA offers a number of advantages. In particular:

• it hugely increases the range of titles available to users
• titles have to be purchased only as they are required by users: this prevents wastage of library budgets on the acquisition of books that nobody reads (an extensive problem).

As the volume’s editor, David A. Swords, writes: “As I write this introduction, the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy has ‘turned on’ an ebook collection of 170,000 volumes for its students and faculty … If those books had to be purchased before they could be used, if they had to be shipped to the city of Baku on the Caspian Sea in the Caucasus, if they had to be processed and shelved, the library could afford only a fraction of them”.

 

A further advantage – though not one this book explores – is that PDA seems somehow in tune with the zeitgeist of crowdsourcing/openness/Web 2.0/wisdom-of-crowds.

 

The book does, however, acknowledge that PDA has some disadvantages. As Rick Lugg writes in his chapter, ‘Collecting for the moment’, users tend to “have a limited frame of reference … focus on past and current experiences … tend to offer incremental, rather than bold, suggestions … [and] are less familiar with the potential of future possibilities”.

 

In the Acknowledgments, Swords applauds his contributors. He is justified in doing so. Really the only disappointing chapter is that by Swords himself, on publishing. He states frankly that the ‘chapter has been a bear’ and lists the number of false starts involved (for example, Swords’ preference was to commission a publisher to write the chapter, but he had no takers). In the event, Swords builds the chapter around a telephone interview with Mike Shatzkin (though Shatzkin ‘had never heard of PDA’). Whilst one applauds Swords’ enterprise in plugging the gap, it might have been better to have quietly shelved the chapter.

 

It would be churlish, though, to dwell further on the one weak link in the book. Overall, Patron-driven acquisitions is very strong: it provides a rounded, informative, treatment of the subject. Particularly impressive chapters include:

• ‘The story of patron-driven acquisition’ by Kari Paulson, tracing, in an engaging narrative, the genesis and evolution of PDA;
• ‘Patron-driven business models: history, today’s landscape, and opportunities’ by Sue Polanka and Emilie Delquie, providing a concise and crunchy survey;
• ‘Elements of a demand-driven model’ by Swords himself, providing an outline of (a) the acquisitions thinking behind PDA, (b) the workflow involved, and (c) a budgeting model.

 The book has been typeset, smartly, by Rainer Ostermann and handsomely produced by De Gruyter. It is an impressive piece of professional publishing. I’m grateful to Mark Huskisson for having alerted me to it.

A publisher visits Arcadia

The development of e-books has – as I argued in previous post (‘Enhanced p-books?‘, 20 April) – created a context for publishing ‘enhanced p-books’. I outlined the argument as follows:

1. E-books provide serious competition for p-books, especially paperbacks …

2. So if we want people to continue to buy p-books, we are going to need to give them some reasons for doing so.

3. And there are ways of doing so. We can enhance those qualities that have always attracted bibliophiles. We can give them beautifully designed jackets and much-better-than-perfect bindings. We can use paper that appeals to more than one sense.

I mentioned there what may be called the extreme wing of this tendency, namely the Fine Press Book Association (FPBA). The association’s members not only fail to adopt the latest digital technology: they consciously seek to use and preserve traditional technologies, materials, and methods. This weekend the FPBA held its biennial fair in Oxford. It offered a convenient opportunity to take stock, not of the latest developments, but rather of the lack of them.

I found the fair an extraordinarily exciting event. In my review (16 April) of this year’s London Book Fair (LBF), I argued that the twin conceptions of that event, as both fair and festival, sat uneasily together. The reverse is true of the FPBA’s fair: the event is both a fair – with publishers eager to re-acquaint themselves with the patrons on which they depend – and a festival. It celebrates the survival of a number of crafts as living traditions: they include, besides publishing and printing, typography, calligraphy, woodcutting and engraving, binding, tanning, and the manufacturing of fine papers. The event is, in short, a wonderful, multifaceted, celebration of creativity in traditional forms.

Perhaps I can give something of the flavour of the occasion  by identifying some of my favourite exhibits and exhibitors. First come The Celtic Cross Press and Tern Press. The former describes itself thus in the fair’s catalogue:

We began printing books by letterpress in 1984 and we use a 1950 Vandercook machine. Typesetting is usually done by hand with Rosemary [Roberts]* doing all the design and art work – wood engravings, linocuts and line drawings printed in colour. We use a variety of fine papers, and books are usually bound in full cloth-covered boards, or sewn into card covers.

The catalogue copy for Tern Press runs a follows: 

Founded in 1972. Literature set, printed, illustrated and bound by Nicholas & Mary Parry. Handwritten texts with watercolour. Lithographs printed from the stone. Use of Tiern type, 200 titles in which all aspects of production attempt to enhance and reflect the subject.

I bracket these somewhat contrasting presses together because both provide suitable starting points for an incipient collector. Their books are readily appreciable and their prices do not break the bank (the Wordsworth selection that I purchased from Celtic Cross cost £50; Tern’s Piers Plowman selection , which I have my eye, on is priced at £90).

Then, from New York, there is Russell Maret. Even my untrained eyes could see that his Specimens of Diverse Characters is a tour de force. His blog describes the two editions (standard and deluxe) as : 

bound using a modified Bradel binding that opens beautifully flat at every spread. The standard edition has a red leather spine with paper covered boards printed from my foundry Lisbon Ornaments. It is housed in a cloth covered clamshell box with an inset red leather label stamped in silver foil. The deluxe edition uses the same structure but the boards are covered in gray leather with a specimen of Iohann Titling stamped in silver foil on the front cover. In addition to the book, the deluxe comes with a portfolio of progressive state proofs of three complex prints and a selection of five unbound prints from the book. The book and portfolio are housed in a clamshell box with a leather spine and foredges. At the back of the box is an inset window behind which is a setting of Harry Carter’s passage Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand in a special issue of Iohann Titling foundry type cast on a 30pt body.

Two books appealed to me more than any others. The first was The Gregynog Journals, in which artist Jonas Jones’s evocative writing is illustrated with his own watercolours. The book is published by Scene & Word as part of a set that contains a second book (The Lakes of North Wales) three prints, and a CD. It is almost achingly beautiful. If I’d been awarding prizes, that would have received my silver medal.

And the gold medal would have gone, unquestionably, to the appropriately named Extraordinary Editions for its edition of the King’s Survey of the Channel Islands – 1680, described in the catalogue thus:

Perhaps the most beautiful book about islands ever made and certainly fit for a king being nearly royal folio in size and containing 40 large fold-out maps and watercolours … It is bound in leather with hand-made marbled cover papers. 

It achieves the difficult feat of being both expensive and good value at £1,500.

As I hope even this brief selection indicates, there is a wonderful diversity to the event. As one moves from one stall to the next, one never knows what to expect. This is a tribute to the another creative craft, additional to those I itemised above – namely creative micro-entrepreneurship (probably not a term that the presses’ owners would typically use) .

Though one doesn’t normally talk of entrepreneurship as a ‘craft’, somehow it seems appropriate here. It is an unusual kind – one that eschews the kind of clustering characteristic of creative industry in favour of splendid provincial isolation or even remoteness. In the UK, fine presses house themselves – often in old converted buildings or outhouses – in all kinds of out-of-the-way places, many of them with fine Saxon or Celtic names**.

Overall, one can think of the FPBA fair as a sort of antidote to contemporary industrial fairs: it is small, backward-looking, creative, and fun. I guess if publishers make it to heaven, this is the kind of thing they find.

*co-owner of the press

** For example: Lastingham (Yorkshire), Quenington (Little Downham (Cambs), East Cramlington (Northumberland), Hinton Charterhouse (Avon), Linstead Magna (Suffolk), and Llanhamlach (Brecon), Llandogo (Monmouth), and Tregynon (Powys). Exhibitors also came from America, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, and Korea. 

Peer review and manuscript management in scientific journals

Peer review and manuscript management in scientific journals: guidelines for good practice by Irene Hames is published by Blackwell in association with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). It is, quite simply, immensely helpful book: it is comprehensive, thorough, and practical.

The book begins with introductory issues – what should peer review do? what does peer review assume? – and an outline of the basic process of peer review. It then leads the reader through the main topics and issues pertaining to peer review. These include the obligations and responsibilities of the people involved in the review process and also the issue of misconduct.

Chapter 4 – ‘The full review process’ – provides, in a few dozen pages, a succinct overview.

Chapter 7 – ‘Reviewers – a precious resource’ – is a gem: it covers, in a mere seven pages, the following:

• thanks and feedback to reviewers;
• reviewer training;
• ways to recompense reviewers;
• how to develop and maintain reviewer loyalty;
• recognition of peer review as an accredited professional activity.

Appendix I – ‘The golden rules and the peer-review good practice checklist’ – is extremely practical. Appendix II – ‘Examples of checklists, forms, guidance for reviewers and editorial letters’ – is a treasure trove for journal editors.

Why, when I compiled the Monographer’s Bookshelf (my list of best books on publishing), did I not include this book? Well, to be honest, I quite simply forgot! I first read the book in 2009, when preparing university courses on peer review – I found this book the single most helpful resource. I should have included it on the ‘Bookshelf’.

When, after having compiled that list, I wrote an overview (‘Publishing on publishing‘), I commented: 

Publishing on publishing is jaded. Some of the books on the list – notably Bookmaking, Book Commissioning and Acquisition, Creative Economy, and From Pitch to Publication – are showing their age. We need books to replace them by authors who have started their careers in more contemporary settings. The same is true of many books that didn’t make the list.

Peer review and manuscript management was published in 2007. Much of the book remains as useful now and it was then – I don’t think one could call it jaded. But the landscape of journal publishing is changing fast and no doubt if the author was writing the book afresh today it would look a little different. The topics dealt with in Appendix IV – ‘Alternative models of peer review’ – now require a fuller, more integrated, treatment. I hope that, before too long, there will be a new edition.