jane morrow bdef report 2012
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Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 1
Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship Report 2011–12
Going Digital: An Australian editor’s observations of
developments in US publishing
Jane Morrow
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 2
Contents
Thanks 3
1. Introduction 5
2. A note on the Fellowship 7
3. Where I started from 8
4. My big questions 9
5. My plan 10
6. Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, New York 10
Illustrated children’s books in digital formats 13
What about enhanced ebooks? 14
What about iBooks Author? 15
7. Penguin placement, New York 16
Differences in editorial departments between the US and Australia 16
Structural and workflow changes in publishing houses in the digital era 17
8. Other New York publisher visits and meetings 20
Workman 21
Touchstone/Fireside (Simon & Schuster) 22
Open Road Integrated Media and publishing royalty 23
The elephant in the room: Amazon 25
Barnes & Noble and the retail situation 26
Mike Shatzkin 27
9. Chronicle Books, San Francisco 29
10. Some thoughts to sum up 31
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 3
Thanks
My deepest thanks to the sponsors of the Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship: the
Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, Allen & Unwin, Random House
Australia, HarperCollins Australia, Penguin Group (Australia), Murdoch Books, the
Institute of Professional Editors, Hardie Grant Books, Harlequin Enterprises
(Australia), Text Publishing Company, Scribe Publications, Finch Publishing, Black
Dog Books, Melbourne University Publishing and the University of Queensland
Press.
Thanks also to the members of the selection committee: Sue Hines, Mandy Brett,
Lucy Byrne, Ali Lavau, Alexandra Nahlous, Tracy O’Shaughnessy, Dee Read and Lisa
Riley.
To Dee Read at the Australian Publishers Association, for being like a dog with a
bone to make sure this extraordinary opportunity continues to exist for Australian
editors, thank you.
Without the incredible encouragement of my former publishing manager at Penguin,
Ingrid Ohlsson, I would not even have approached the starting line. Kaz Cooke
cheered from the sidelines and gave much-‐needed feminist pep talks. Robin Morrow
was my constant sounding board, emotional support and blog proofreader. Alison
Cowan and Ariane Durkin kept me sane, in touch with Australia and told me to keep
writing, which I was very tempted to give up on. Nicola Young saved me from myself
by being an editor’s editor. But my husband, Nathan Buckle, with his we’ll-‐cross-‐
that-‐bridge-‐when-‐we-‐come-‐to-‐it, over-‐the-‐top level of support made the whole
thing, with a young family, not just possible but pleasurable. I am in your debt.
Thank you to those who gave of their time and advice before I left for the US:
Gabrielle Coyne, Laura Harris, Sue Hines, Maree McCaskill, Alexandra Nahlous and
Dan Ruffino.
Finally, thanks to the many talented editors and other publishing types in the US
who agreed to meet me and gave so richly of their knowledge, opinions and support.
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 4
At Penguin: Molly Barton, Leigh Butler, Hank Cochrane, Kathryn Court, Jason Craig,
Colin Dickerman, Meredith Dros, Thomas Dussel, Hal Fessenden, Ann Godoff,
Michael Green, Lauri Hornik, Susan Petersen Kennedy, Patty King, Meg Leder,
Colleen Lindsay, Catharine Lynch, Katherine McCahill, Tim McCall, Barbara Marcus,
John Morgan, Stephen Morrison, Stephen Morrow (no relation), Megan Newman,
Adam Royce, Stephanie Sabol, Dan Sanicola, Ben Schrank, Ben Sevier, Bill Shinker,
Chris Smythe, Melissa Vuernick and Adrian Zackheim.
At Random House: Julie Bennett (Ten Speed), Pamela Cannon, Susan Kamil, Aaron
Wehner (Ten Speed) and Ranjana Wingender.
At Workman: Savannah Ashour, Andrea Fleck-‐Nisbet, Lia Ronnen, Nancy Soriano
and Christina Stoll.
At Chronicle: Johann Alqvist, Guinevere de la Mare, Lorena Jones, Sarah Malarkey,
Melissa Manlove, Victoria Rock and Ginee Seo.
At Simon & Schuster: Lance Fitzgerald, Michelle Howry and Sally Kim.
Elsewhere: Jane Friedman (Open Road), Jill Grinberg and Cheryl Pientka (Jill
Grinberg Literary Management), Dan Halpern (Ecco), Judith Jones (ex Knopf), Nancy
Lambert (Abrams), Karen Murgolo (Grand Central Life & Style), Neal Porter
(Roaring Brook Press), Brett Sandusky (Macmillan New Ventures), Will Schwalbe
(Cookstr), Mike Shatzkin, Jane Starr (literary scout) and Matt Weiland (WW Norton).
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 5
1. Introduction
The particular time in which I visited the US (mid-‐February – end April 2012) was a
time of crisis and anxiety in the publishing industry. I was acutely aware that I was
given access to several publishing houses at just such a politically hot time. It meant
that I had to think very carefully about everything I wrote in my blog (facetiously
titled What Would Beatrice Do?) during the trip.
Not that things have eased off in the weeks since.
By mid February The Library Wars were raging. In March, Random House quietly
began to charge public libraries three times the retail price for ebooks. Five big
publishers pulled back from supplying new ebooks to public libraries. Library
associations were vocal in their dismay.
Two weeks after I interviewed the president of Penguin, the Department of Justice
judgement came out, accusing five of the Big Six publishers (the ‘Big Six’ refers to
Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster
– Random House was the only Big Six publisher to be excluded from the lawsuit) as
well as Apple of collusion over ebook pricing. Penguin was one of the companies to
state that they would fight their case.
When I asked questions about the retail situation, more than once the answer was
words to the effect of: ‘Off the record, I hate Amazon. On the record, they’re our most
valued customer.’
I went to the US on an editorial fellowship. I am an editor and have worked as such
for most of my working life. But the nature of the changes in the industry in recent
months and years made my trip investigative of the publishing industry as a whole,
not just the role of the editor. I wanted to know what skills editors and publishers
needed in order to survive and thrive. In previous years, an editor travelling to the
US on the Beatrice Davis might not have been overly concerned with things like
format pricing, changes in distribution or upheavals in the retail landscape. But right
now the individual issues of ebook pricing, the massive change from print-‐only to
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 6
digital distribution with print-‐on-‐demand, and a retail sector where hundreds of
bookshops across the country have closed in the last two years, threaten the US
publishing industry as a whole – and the Australian industry by extension, in this
increasingly globalised market. It would have been blinkered of me simply to bury
myself in a manuscript and ignore what was going on down the corridor. Or perhaps
it’s more that I didn’t want to. There was a very real sense while I was there that
publishers must continue to adapt, almost on a daily basis, or else shrink and
shrink fast.
I saw plenty of evidence of significant structural changes that have taken place in
several US publishing houses, especially if you compare them to Australian
publishers. It was also very apparent that there was a high state of awareness by
everyone across publishing departments that their world was changing. But I didn’t
see a revolution. Where I personally saw the most innovation was in businesses and
thinkers outside the major publishing houses.
Print is still the overwhelmingly more profitable side of the publishing business and
digital experimentation is very costly. Publishers have had their fingers burnt many
times. But when (and my trip to the US convinced me that it’s not a matter of if but
when) print sales drop significantly across all genres, say in a world where Amazon
utterly dominates retail globally, and tablet devices are in every handbag or
backpack, the question is how publishers will create viable businesses. My fear –
which I must say was not allayed by my experiences in the US – was that publishers
were overwhelmingly concerned with maintaining their viable businesses, despite
much evidence pointing to a future where this won’t be possible, rather than
creating new ways of doing things.
I did have several surprisingly reassuring experiences, however. When I asked a
publishing director at Chronicle Books whether there was a strong sense of
publishing houses fighting for their lives, she responded, ‘The hand-‐wringing has
morphed into acceptance and readjustment.’ And that is certainly what I saw at
Chronicle.
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 7
And when I asked a publisher in a different company whether they found
themselves needing to justify the position of the publisher in the chain between
author and reader, she responded ‘Oh, we dealt with that three years ago.’ That
afternoon she emailed me a document she had used years before on ‘the role of the
publisher in the value chain’. (I note, however, that since my visit, another publisher,
Random House, has released a series of ‘Inside Random House’ videos on YouTube
(http://tinyurl.com/7g7b5jx), which explain step-‐by-‐step the role that the publisher
plays.)
My impression is that we in Australia are a year or two behind the US and could
learn from their experience (and mistakes), perhaps in picking which battles to fight
with the most energy. I hope that my time in the US as a Beatrice Davis Fellow, and
the following report, may be of some help in this process.
2. A note on the Fellowship
I first heard about the Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship (BDEF) back in about
1999 when I was just starting to work in the publishing industry. One sweaty
summery evening, in a bookshop in Sydney’s north, children’s publisher Erica
Wagner (then Irving) enthused about the eye-‐opening trip she had recently returned
from, where she had worked alongside and learnt from some of the publishers she
admired most in the world. My interest was piqued. Whose wouldn’t be? An award
for a mid-‐career editor of a fully funded opportunity of a lifetime: to meet,
investigate and work alongside publishers in the biggest English-‐language market.
Amazing! I think I probably had the BDEF in the back of my mind since that day, and
it is one of the reasons I admired and wanted to be involved in the publishing
industry.
Jump forward to 2012 and publishers are making cuts all over the place, including
many senior editorial roles. I believe that especially at times like these, educational
awards such as the prestigious BDEF and the Residential Editorial Program held at
Varuna, which provides such valuable mentorship for talented editors, are all the
more important. They offer editors the chance to step outside the companies they
work for and learn from others in the industry. They acknowledge the way editors
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 8
contribute to the literary culture of Australia with a nod to the past (thank you,
Beatrice) and enthusiasm for the future.
At a time when Australian publishers, more and more, need to be ‘across’
developments overseas, so that they can act to maintain their markets and value,
I believe overseas fellowships (the BDEF and Unwin Trust Fellowship) are of special
value.
The fellowships also do something rather controversial: they encourage a spirit of
sharing in the Australian publishing industry. I fear that embattled US publishers,
under prosecution for collusion, are tightening their defences and sharing less and
less with each other. From what I can gather from the UK industry, however, there is
a stronger sense among publishers that they are in this together and may as well
learn from each other as much as possible, as evidenced by the digital communities
they support and the attendance of senior executives as speakers at conferences. My
hope for the Australian industry is that we might follow the UK’s lead on this point.
The BDEF in particular also ties in neatly with the Visiting International Publishers
program that the Australia Council for the Arts runs in conjunction with Australian
writers’ festivals. I met several editors and publishers in New York who had been to
Australia on one of these visits and were therefore far more likely to take me under
their wing and share what they do, since they had some affinity with our publishing
scene. Others I met wanted to know how to get into such a program!
Everyone I spoke with in the US about the BDEF was in awe of the program and
without exception wished they had something similar.
3. Where I started from
For 13 years I have worked as an editor of chiefly nonfiction books – both narrative
and illustrated books. While working for small co-‐edition publisher Elwin Street in
London I attended several international book fairs. Stepping into those vast book
fair ‘hangars’ was enough to make an editor from Australia feel very small indeed
(as well as to impress upon me that there needed to be a damned good reason to
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 9
bring any new book into the world). Australian publishers can’t command the print
runs of the US, UK and Germany. And we don’t have all the ereading devices
currently available to readers in the US and UK. In addition to this the Australian
book-‐buying public, with a strong currency in its back pocket and a recognition that
books are especially expensive in Australia, is more and more willing to buy online
from overseas retailers.
Publishers of illustrated books have the additional challenge of trying to make sound
business decisions when the technology isn’t quite there yet to produce digital
products that are genuinely satisfying.
There are many ways in which we in Australian publishing can be left feeling like
toddlers pressing our noses up against the bars in the fence while the big kids are
playing in the schoolyard. I set out for my US trip with the assumption that we in
Australia are a year or two behind the US in terms of many of the changes taking
place in our industry. But also with the belief that perhaps that’s not such a bad
thing. Sometimes it’s handy to have an older sibling who can try new things and
make all the mistakes before it’s your turn.
4. My big questions
I wanted to explore:
• What structural changes are big publishers making in response to the digital
era? How are they adapting and remaking themselves as publishers across
multiple media?
• What is it like being an editor of nonfiction in the US right now? Are their
roles changing significantly and, if so, in what ways?
• In particular, how are publishers of illustrated books innovating? What has
worked and what hasn’t?
• We know that fiction is being read more and more in ebook format and that
formats are somewhat ‘sorted’ for fiction, but what is the likely future for
illustrated books – from illustrated nonfiction for adults through to
children’s?
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 10
In my project application for the Fellowship I assumed illustrated children’s books
could be put in the same category as adult illustrated books – I was to change my
opinion on this later.
5. My plan
My plan was to spend seven weeks in New York and three in San Francisco. The trip
was to begin with the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, followed by a
three-‐week placement at Penguin, another three-‐week placement at Ecco
(HarperCollins) and a final three-‐week placement at Chronicle in San Francisco.
In the grand tradition of previous BDEF trips, not everything ran to plan and I found
adaptability to be crucial.
6. Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, New York
You know an industry is in a state of existential questioning when conferences pop
up all over the place and are attended en masse. I was interested in going to one of
the digital publishing conferences currently running in the US. We’ve got nothing
like them in Australia. When I mentioned this to Kate Eltham (then from the
Queensland Writers Centre), she said I should go to the three-‐day Tools of Change
(TOC) Conference run by O’Reilly, because ‘It tells publishers what they need to
hear, not what they want to hear.’ At any rate, I couldn’t be in New York in January,
when the other major conference, Digital Book World, is held, so that decided it.
If it was sensory overload outside the building for TOC, held at the Marriott, Times
Square, it was brain overload at the sessions inside. They should have called Day 1
Geek Day. This was the day for workshops on epub3 and HTML5, optimising your
website for discovery – the technical nitty-‐gritty that is now an important part of the
world of publishers. I discovered there are people who obsess about terrible page
breaks and image links in ebooks more than I do and it was invaluable for me as a
non techie to gain a rudimentary grasp of the current issues in ebook production
from these seminars. I used this new knowledge straightaway in weeks to follow, as
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 11
I helped do the quality control on ebook files at Chronicle, or when discussing file-‐
format issues with publishers, sales and production people at Penguin. In many
ways I think this basic technical knowledge will be to editors in this new digital era
what an understanding of print processes has been to editors in previous years.
In that first week, at TOC, I got my head around the various devices currently
available in the US market and went into shops to play with them so I was familiar
with how they worked. The main differences between the US and Australian
markets at the time of my trip were that the Kindle Fire was not yet available in
Australia and the Barnes & Noble’s Nook devices were also unavailable.
The session at TOC that did get me furiously scribbling notes was Peter Meyers’
presentation called ‘Breaking the Page: how to design next-‐generation content for a
canvas that can do much more than print’. His premise was that immersive
literature has found its perfect form – the long-‐form book – and we shouldn’t mess
with it. But when it comes to illustrated books, simply enhancing print files into
ebooks for the iPad is like using a Ferrari to get to the grocery store. What is
required instead is a ‘total reimagining of the content available in the expansive
canvas of the tablet device’.
Meyers pointed to stand-‐out book apps and digital books that worked – such as The
Elements by Touch Press, The History of Jazz by 955 Dreams, and London Unfurled by
Pan Macmillan UK – and those that didn’t, giving reasons for his assessments. He
also gave the following as some principles and pitfalls in publishing illustrated
nonfiction for the iPad:
• Don’t try to replicate print. It happens so often and it’s understandable why it
does, but it just doesn’t satisfy.
• Meditate on the materials. Consider the particular properties of the devices
you’re composing for and the gestures involved: swiping, tapping, pinching
etc.
• Consider the kind of content you have. Websites have had the benefits of 15
years’ user experience in making them friendlier in design. We’re just at the
beginning when it comes to digital illustrated books.
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 12
• Exercise restraint. The challenge can be what to leave out. The first wave of
experimentation was all about adding things, which can mess with the
immersive reading experience. Don’t eject the reader from the experience of
reading, through distracting hyperlinks.
• Consider carefully the reading path. Remember tablets have smaller viewing
areas than double-‐page spreads.
• Integrate multimedia, don’t just add it. Reader disorientation happens more
easily onscreen.
Several of the points made by Peter Meyers were echoed by Junko Yokota, Professor
of Reading and Language, and Director of the Center for Teaching Through
Children’s Books, National Louis University, Chicago, Illinois, whose session on
children’s book formats I attended on Day 2 of the conference. She criticised apps
for children (and even some that rated highly in Kirkus Reviews – the most
respected US online magazine for book discovery) that detract from children’s
ability to comprehend story. She walked us through the schema-‐setting illustrations
of the cover, endpapers, half title and title pages of a print picture book, explaining
how a child interacts with these, compared with the disappointing stripped-‐down
equivalent in ebook form. The message was to select carefully material that would
do better in digital formats, to consider tablet devices as beyond-‐the-‐page
limitations of print books, and not simply to recast and reproduce. A big concern of
hers was to limit interactive features unless they helped with a child’s
comprehension.
Some of the exciting possibilities that exist in the digitisation of books for children,
as Professor Yukota sees it, include:
• the potential, at the click of a button, for children to experience a book in a
different language
• the ability for the child to be read to by the author, no matter what their
geographic location
• the artistic potential for books that want to break with conventional page
formatting.
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 13
While Meyers’ and Yokota’s sessions were stimulating, and got me thinking of all
kinds of possibilities for wonderful illustrated digital works, at the top of my mind
were several crucial problems that remain for book publishers as they approach
illustrated book content for tablet devices, among them:
• Digital products such as these are extremely expensive to produce and there
is no guarantee of return on investment.
• Truly experimental digital illustrated books that have been a success are few
and far between. No one is talking about starting a digital-‐only or digital-‐first
illustrated list, the way they are with other genres.
• These kinds of digital ‘books’ are totally new for publishers. Are publishers
best placed to create these sorts of digital books in the first place?
Illustrated children’s books in digital formats
While I was in New York I spent some time at Barnes & Noble stores playing with
Nook devices in their kiosks. Fixed-‐layout illustrated children’s books were featured
prominently by the retailer and were clearly a selling point. I wonder if the devices
are selling to families with young children. I didn’t see them much on public
transport but I certainly saw countless Kindles.
Michael Tamblyn, from Kobo, mentioned at the TOC conference that he expected
devices to be available in the not-‐too-‐distant future that catered specifically to
children of particular ages. Perhaps we will soon see a Kobo and/or Kindle for Kids.
If and when that happens, there will surely be a surge in downloads of the sorts of
illustrated children’s content that so far has been only a tiny proportion of the
market – just 1 per cent of sales according to the digital sales manager for children’s
books at one major publisher I spoke to in February.
I believe, for this reason, that children’s books in digital form will go a different
direction to illustrated books for adults. In my application for the BDEF, I had
assumed that the two might have related production processes and therefore
related futures, but as I said earlier, I have changed my mind about this.
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 14
What about enhanced ebooks?
Enhanced Editions co-‐founder Peter Collingridge was quoted in a Wall Street Journal
article entitled ‘Blowing Up the Book’, published on 20 January 2012
(http://tinyurl.com/878fegg), saying: ‘Consumers weren’t waking up in the morning
going, “I really need to have Nick Cave reading his book along with a soundtrack.”
We were solving a problem that didn’t exist.’
This quote rang in my ears during my weeks of inhouse placements, as I visited
publishers who told me about their latest enhanced ebook projects. Enhancements
often took the form of embedded video or audio in a biography title – at the time of
my trip a total headache to get to work across the different file formats necessary for
different devices, but hopefully soon much easier to manage with devices supporting
the new epub3 industry-‐standard file format.
Publishers and editors I spoke with described a surge in excitement about producing
enhanced ebooks a couple of years ago, but added that since then interest has
waned. Success stories for these ebooks have been few and far between – the
Jacqueline Kennedy: In Her Own Words enhanced ebook published by Hyperion an
oft-‐cited exception to the rule. While one might think that video content for a history
or biography would be of great interest to ebook readers, most people I spoke with
said there is not yet enough evidence that readers are willing to pay a few dollars
extra for enhanced content that might have taken a book editor many, many hours
to select and curate.
A week after I attended TOC, I sat in the office of a publisher of young adult books
who discussed with me his latest experimental project, which involved a print
graphic novel with accompanying app. Several weeks after that I asked him how the
book and app were selling. Not well was the answer. ‘My sense is that anything
hybridised, anything weird, just is not immediately embraced by the consumer in
the way that we hope,’ he said.
I wonder if this situation will change as digital-‐native young people become tablet-‐
buying adults, or if we are best steering clear altogether of enhancing narrative
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 15
books. For now, I think most publishers are opting for the more conservative ‘wait
and see’ approach.
What about iBooks Author?
A couple of weeks before I arrived in the US, Apple released its iBooks Author tool,
targeted first and foremost at the textbooks market, to allow publishers and authors
to produce illustrated ebooks that are more satisfactory for viewing on the iPad than
the simple pdf-‐style reproductions made available to date in their fixed-‐layout
format. It is clear that Apple also intends the tool to be used by general trade
publishers of illustrated content.
iBooks Author enables ebook creators to produce attractive, though limited in
format, digital books that make the most of the iPad screen size without the
limitations of breaking the screen into ‘double-‐page spreads’ the way fixed-‐layout
does. Animation and slideshows of imagery can be created without the expensive
development work usually required from out-‐of-‐house vendors. Beautiful ebooks
can be created directly by editors and designers.
The big downside, however, is that files cannot easily be converted from InDesign to
iBooks Author. They first need to go back into Word or into proprietary Apple
applications such as Keynote. And of course we’re talking about creating a particular
file format (a production headache) that can be sold by only one retailer at a low
price point (a sales headache).
iBooks Author hasn’t yet taken off in Australia – perhaps we will see that happen
later in 2012. It certainly demands a close look and experimentation by creators
of illustrated books. I asked digital managers at three US publishers whether they
intended to create illustrated ebooks for the iBookstore with this new tool. None
of them said a definite yes. All said they’d take a look and consider it but were
generally hesitant about adding a whole separate workflow to their already-‐under-‐
stress production departments. I guess there will be some initial experiments, and
the sales figures from those will determine how readily the tool is exploited by trade
publishers for illustrated books.
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 16
7. Penguin placement, New York
Months before my arrival in New York the wonderful HR Director at Penguin US,
Melissa Vuernick, asked me to email through a wishlist of people I wanted to meet
with at Penguin. I did – and I didn’t edit it down. She was so helpful, setting me up
with my own office space and meetings arranged, I wanted to hug her.
I couldn’t quite believe my luck with my three-‐week access-‐all-‐areas pass at
Penguin. While I wasn’t attached to any particular editorial department, I was free
to arrange meetings with whomever I liked, and I was made to feel welcome.
The Penguin Adults and Young Readers divisions occupy side-‐by-‐side fairly ugly
buildings in downtown Manhattan, near West Village. As opposed to some of the
other major publishers, such as Simon & Schuster, Random House and
HarperCollins, which occupy prime-‐real-‐estate Midtown offices, Penguin has a less
corporate feel. Inside the building, editors work in rabbit-‐warren offices where the
layout affords no landmarks (I found I was perpetually lost!).
From my understanding, Penguin, and the other big publishing houses, operate as
fairly loose groupings of individual imprints. People work in tight teams on their
particular imprint, with dedicated publicity and marketing staff. But the downside is
that an editor of nonfiction at The Penguin Press might never have met an editor of
nonfiction at Dutton (a Penguin-‐owned imprint), though they may be interested in
several of the same authors and find themselves bidding on the same books. More
than once I found myself providing a kind of professional matchmaking service,
saying, ‘You really should meet X down the hall. You work on similar kinds of books.’
It was all rather strange for an Australian, coming from a much smaller industry.
Differences in editorial departments between the US and Australia
Following is a brief summary of how publishing departments are structured in the
US. Anyone who has had some experience of publishing in the US, or read reports by
previous BD fellows, will be aware of how different things are from the Australian
situation.
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 17
An editor at a US publishing house acquires new works (something usually
restricted to the role of commissioning editor or publisher in Australia). They make
offers to authors and agents and usually do structural or developmental work on a
manuscript, in liaison with the author, but the copyediting is done either out of
house by a freelancer or inhouse by a production editor. Editors-‐in-‐chief or vice-‐
presidents (what we would call the publisher) also do structural edits. They are
simply more senior editors who oversee the imprint’s list, but they do many of the
same tasks editors do, keeping their close ties with particular authors.
Assistant roles to editors-‐in-‐chief are genuine pathway jobs. A pathway might be to
go from assistant, to assistant editor, editor, senior editor, editorial director, then
editor-‐in-‐chief. At editorial meetings assistants and junior editors have a genuine
voice at the table and are often involved in acquiring books.
This spreading-‐of-‐the-‐load means that not one single acquiring person is required
to have all the contacts and find all the authors. Ideas come from everyone at the
editorial table, and usually a range of ages and interests are represented there.
I found the whole acquisitions process in each of the publishing houses I visited in
the US far more collaborative than those I have seen in Australia.
One of my best experiences at Penguin was attending editorial meetings for The
Penguin Press. Ann Godoff (ex Random House) heads up the imprint that publishes
fiction and nonfiction by such authors as Michael Pollan, Zadie Smith and Joshua
Foer. Editors have their own specialist areas of interest, but freely discuss at the
meeting manuscripts they are considering and auctions that are taking place.
I admired the intellectual rigour of the discussions as well as the sense of
commitment to upholding the value of the list. It seemed to me to be deliberately
structured as a safe place away from critique by other departments (sales, publicity)
for the development and honing of ideas and for giving advice about how particular
works should be edited.
Structural and workflow changes in publishing houses in the digital era
For at least five years most publishers in the US have had in place some kind of text-‐
only (or ‘mono’) ebook conversion team. In the early years, and certainly after the
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 18
Kindle was released to an eager market in 2007, publishers operated something of
a triage system to determine which books should be rushed through the conversion
process. And it pretty quickly became policy to produce ebooks at the end of the
traditional print process for all mono frontlist titles. The conversion teams used to
be out of house – far-‐flung coders that editors had little to do with. Now for the
larger publishers, these roles are inhouse, with their own divisions, quite separate
from the print production department. I found it interesting that the person who
heads this team at Penguin in the Adult division reports to an associate publisher,
so it’s all looped back into the creative process. At the other houses I heard that
these conversion teams report to a dedicated digital director.
For most publishers this ebook conversion stage – whether it’s a text-‐only or
illustrated book turned into fixed-‐layout or reflowable layout – is still pretty much
just an extra step at the end of a linear production process. Ebook files go back to
editors for quality control, but it seems an endless job for editors to check ebook
files on all possible devices and by that stage they’ve really mentally moved on to
other projects anyway. Honestly, I doubt many publishers or editorial directors ever
look at the ebook files – and certainly not in the way they scrutinise pages before
print. That’s such a problem when, for some imprints, ebooks make up more than
50 per cent of sales.
But what if files were prepared for ebooks first, as one digital director is
considering? Only after the digital version of the book was final and signed off,
would the print pages be prepared. It would mean a big shift in workflow, but this
director is hoping it might save money down the line and embed digital thinking at
the heart of how editors and designers work. And of course make them care – a lot –
about the quality of the digital product.
At Crown (Random House), they are considering a concurrent workflow for
illustrated print and ebooks. The workflow of the future might look something like:
• pool the assets for the title (text, images for print, extra images for digital,
video etc)
• editor and print designer develop look-‐and-‐feel for all editions of the work
• editor and print designer work on print
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 19
• editor and digital designer/developer work on digital products from the
same asset pool and look-‐and-‐feel, referring from print to digital products
and back again frequently to ensure they don’t diverge too significantly.
But what about more complex digital projects?
Everyone seems to be doing it a bit differently. Katherine McCahill, Senior Manager
of Digital Product Development at Penguin, told me that a lot of New York publishers
have a strong digital group whose remit encompasses websites and digital
publishing. Until recently these departments had an executive who took over a lot
of control of individual projects. Now the trend is to push projects much more into
publishers’ hands.
One solution has been quickly to bring in a team of multimedia developers – to ‘buy’
digital talent to work as a digital-‐product factory. In 2011 Random House bought a
digital marketing and development company, Smashing Ideas, based in Seattle. Now
the issue is integrating what editors in New York do with the techs in Seattle, when
both groups have vastly different creative backgrounds. In many cases the kind of
personality attracted to book publishing is the exact opposite of the start-‐up tech
mentality. Mucking around with XML is not what editors signed up for when they
started in publishing 20 years ago. Diplomacy issues can be rife.
At Crown, they are implementing a digital steering committee, where interested
people across departments can bounce around ideas for digital projects, report in
and learn from each other. The aim is to empower people, to ‘calm editors down’
so that they can be content-‐led and not feel that they must be working on digital
projects.
At Penguin the concern is that hiring a team of people with multimedia expertise
might be a quick way to get digital products to market but would allow editors to
keep digital projects at arm’s length – digital would simply become someone else’s
job. So the structure now is to provide a kind of digital development and consultancy
service to editors and publishers, who themselves drive the projects. A small team
with a variety of publishing and multimedia backgrounds works across imprints
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 20
to act as a sounding board, to advise, handhold where necessary, and provide a kind
of translation service and ‘buffer’ between editorial and outside vendors such as app
developers. They regularly meet to discuss and decide on new enhanced ebook or
app (read high-‐cost) digital projects, and editors are welcome to pitch ideas. I
admired this structure, but it did seem that these few people were overburdened
with work and perhaps not afforded the space, time and funding that might foster
the most innovative digital projects.
One of the only commonalities among the people I met who work specifically on
digital projects is that, five years ago, they couldn’t have imagined what they are
doing now. They worked as editors, marketing execs, an art director and now they
have jobs that sound like something from The Jetsons. The other commonality I
noticed: without exception these people are all utterly overworked. They fight an
uphill battle each day. I wondered how long they might remain in the publishing
industry.
8. Other New York publisher visits and meetings
After my Penguin placement, I had arranged to spend three weeks with Dan Halpern
and his team on the Ecco imprint at HarperCollins. For years I have admired Dan’s
list, which features literary fiction and nonfiction as well as several food books such
as those by Anthony Bourdain. But when my emails went unanswered a couple of
weeks before I was to start at Ecco I knew something was wrong. Dan phoned me at
the last minute to say that the placement couldn’t go ahead, that HarperCollins
wouldn’t allow non-‐employees to spend such a lot of time in their offices. He
suggested it was a policy from on high, at NewsCorp level. Out of his hands.
As a BD Fellow travelling to the US I found that coming from one of the Big Six
publishers, albeit from as far afield as Sydney, was more of a negative than a
positive. Of course, on the one hand it opened doors in a big way for me at Penguin
in New York. And since everyone in the US knows Penguin, they had a level of
respect for me and what I do. However, I believe it also made people from the other
major publishers more wary of me, and less likely to share. When I introduced
myself and told them a little about the Fellowship, several people said something
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 21
along the lines of, ‘So, you’re spying for Penguin, are you?’ When I explained that
for my time overseas technically I was not employed by Penguin, but was there on
behalf of the APA and the Australia Council, the response was, ‘Yes, but you’re going
back to your job and Penguin, right?’
I found that the success of my meetings with people who expressed such concerns
relied utterly on my ability to make warm personal relationships with them and
show them that I had connected with several people from different companies they
knew and respected.
So with a three-‐week hole in my program, I set about making the most of this less
structured time. In fact, I relished the opportunity to pursue leads. Penguin allowed
me use of the office for an extra week, Dan Halpern gave generously from his
Rolodex, and I followed up a ton of recommendations, a couple of which ended in
mini-‐placements.
Workman
While I was based at Penguin I had lunch with Digital Publishing Director at
Workman, Andrea Fleck-‐Nisbet. We found we had endless things to talk about and
I was pleased to have the extra time in my schedule to ask Andrea if she would have
me for a couple of days in the Workman offices. She generously agreed.
The Workman offices are a block away from Penguin. Light and bright, they feel like
the books they make – well designed, functional and hard-‐working. The family-‐
owned medium-‐sized company has the prestigious Artisan cookbook imprint, as
well as a fiction imprint and several craft/hobby specialty imprints. Their big-‐brand
publications are What to Expect When You’re Expecting, 1000 Places to See Before
You Die and the Brain Quest series for children.
As a publisher of primarily illustrated books, Workman is very busily investigating
ways it can adapt to the digital marketplace. Andrea leads a small team made up of
ebook production people, a digital editor and a couple of staff dedicated to websites.
While this smaller company might not have the financial clout of one of the Big Six,
I was deeply impressed by how quick-‐thinking and creative they were. Workman is
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 22
much more open to exploring partnerships with outside companies in order to
exploit digital opportunities for their cookbooks and other nonfiction titles than any
other company I came across while in the US. They work with a sense of urgency and
an understanding that they need to encourage editors and designers to think more
digitally – to consider a workflow that allows for multiple formats coming from the
same content. The two days I spent at Workman inspired me to consider ways I
could adapt illustrated book projects for the digital environment.
Touchstone/Fireside (Simon & Schuster)
During my first couple of weeks in New York I made a friend of an acquaintance I
had worked with years ago when in London. Back then, Michelle Howry had been
Senior Editor at Perigee (Penguin). Now at Touchstone, a Simon & Schuster imprint,
Michelle acquires commercial nonfiction in areas such as health, self-‐help, biography
and popular science. I asked her if I could spend some time at S&S with her. Her
boss, Sally Kim, who had been part of the Visiting International Publishers (VIP)
program at the 2007 Sydney Writers’ Festival, was happy to have me attached to
her editorial team.
It was a wonderful experience to be a fly on the wall at S&S editorial and
acquisitions meetings. Decisions about acquisitions, and setting print runs and retail
prices, take place around an immense boardroom table at which sit about 25 people
– key account managers for chain and discount stores, publicity and marketing as
well as editorial. Editors presenting their own new titles need to be fearless and able
to justify each suggestion they make about format, cover design and so on.
Touchstone is interested chiefly in ‘big books’ – books that will make it onto ‘The
List’ (the New York Times bestseller list) or at least those that can command big print
runs. At the editorial meeting, again and again, when a decision was made to pass on
a manuscript, the reason was often ‘it feels a bit small for us’.
Editors at imprints such as Touchstone – and this must be true of so many
publishers in the US – nowadays require an unusual mix of extroversion and
introversion. The ability to persuade and sell to colleagues is mandatory, but so too
are those qualities that are more often found in bookish introverts: the ability to sit
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 23
quietly with a manuscript or proposal, to analyse what works about it and what
doesn’t.
I also thought it interesting that publishers such as S&S are outsourcing some of the
editorial work they used to do inhouse. While they do the structural editing inhouse,
all of the copyediting and proofreading work is sent out to freelancers. Additionally,
many authors of the sorts of books Michelle acquires are hiring freelance
ghostwriters or editors before the manuscript is submitted, in order to turn in more
polished works. As Touchstone acquires books from many nonfiction authors who
might not be natural writers, it’s incumbent on those authors to bring on co-‐writers
to help produce a publishable book. Several former inhouse editors have made the
transition to freelance co-‐writer or ‘book doctor’ working with authors directly.
As Australian publishers seek to publish fewer but ‘bigger’ books, I think it likely this
trend will emerge in Australia too.
Open Road Integrated Media and publishing royalty
While at Penguin, I met publishing royal Barbara Marcus. Barbara used to run
Scholastic and was the publisher of Harry Potter – so, you know, she can do
whatever the hell she wants now. Barbara currently works a couple of days a week
at Penguin, advising on their Young Readers lists, but she also consults a couple of
days for Open Road Integrated Media, just down the road from the Penguin offices.
Barbara asked me if I’d like a tour of Open Road and of course I agreed. I had read
about Open Road: that former CEO of HarperCollins worldwide (and my old über-‐
über-‐ über-‐ über-‐boss from years ago) Jane Friedman, with private-‐equity backing,
was now shaking up the publishing industry from the other side of the fence. I had
also read that HarperCollins had brought a lawsuit against Open Road in relation to
electronic rights for one of its authors. Did I mention these were hot political times?
When Barbara showed me around the Open Road offices, we must have caught Jane
Friedman at a good time – she invited us in for a long chat around her table, and
introduced me to Luke Parker Bowles (yes, royalty in a different kind of way), who
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 24
oversees the creation of the extraordinary author video footage Open Road shoots
for the promotion of its books.
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher providing a slick marketing
platform first and foremost for ebooks of backlist titles. It offers authors, and
authors’ estates, whose titles they feel are not being promoted sufficiently by their
publisher, the opportunity to have their books made available once again (as
ebooks) and to be promoted continually through the year. Marketing staff at Open
Road connect with hundreds of influential book bloggers, providing author video
content for their sites, which include at the end a ‘buy the book’ button, taking
viewers to a retail site of their choice.
Of course author contracts didn’t include electronic rights for books until publishers
had an inkling that they would be useful one day. Jane Friedman told me she knew
most contracts before 1995 didn’t have a clause about electronic rights, ‘Because I
put it in the HarperCollins ones myself.’ Now that ebooks are a growing piece of the
pie, the contracts departments at every major publishing house are busily trying to
clear e-‐rights on old contracts. Many authors and authors’ estates are signing over
these rights, but many are not, unsure that their publisher is in a strong position to
exploit the electronic rights, or unconvinced that being offered the industry-‐
standard 25 per cent of not much as a royalty is really worth it.
That’s where Open Road is getting in and invading the space of traditional
publishers. Open Road offers authors an alternative platform for the digital editions
of their books, with a 50/50 revenue split.
Jane Friedman spoke passionately about the satisfaction she gets from breathing
new marketing life into old titles that deserve to be read by a wider audience by
authors such as Iris Murdoch, Pat Conroy and James Gleick. She seems entirely
unperturbed about upsetting the establishment in the process. In fact, I got the
feeling she rather enjoys stirring the pot. And she is definitely doing that now Open
Road is acquiring frontlist (‘e-‐originals’). In the Open Road office I met two editors
specialising in genre fiction who had come over from other publishing houses and
been there only a matter of days. And while I was still in the US, several more
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 25
announcements were made about editorial appointments to Open Road. A couple
of weeks after my Open Road visit, Friedman also announced that it would offer a
selection of titles as print-‐on-‐demand via Ingram.
I asked a few publishers what they thought of Open Road and was surprised to hear
some didn’t really care. One publisher told me she didn’t dislike Jane Friedman
personally but hated what she was doing. This publisher’s company was working
through an enormous backlog of contracts to negotiate ebook rights. Some authors
or authors’ estates were agreeing, others were holding out, wanting 50 per cent,
‘and we’re just not going there’. She said it was terribly disheartening when authors
her publishing house had been publishing aggressively for decades considered
taking their ebook rights elsewhere. However, she said that ebook sales for backlist
and midlist have been small, so she wasn’t sure how Open Road was making
revenue. I wondered whether that publisher pushed backlist ebooks as much as
Open Road does.
The elephant in the room: Amazon
‘What do you think of Amazon?’ I asked several editors, publishers and salespeople.
‘I hate them’ was the response that came surprisingly quickly. I couldn’t believe how
vehement some people were. Of course no one would speak on the record, since the
publishers are now in a bind where they need Amazon as a customer, and yet by
many accounts Amazon is a law unto itself, using negotiation strategies such as
threatening to remove ‘buy’ buttons from a suppliers’ book listings if they do not
agree to their terms.
I tried but I couldn’t get a meeting with anyone at Amazon, whether in its sales,
technical or publishing divisions. At virtually every meeting I had they seemed to be
the elephant in the room, however. I found it creepy how often, when talking with an
editor at any given publishing house, they would tell me a colleague of theirs had
recently left to go to Amazon for a better-‐paying job.
A cursory look at deals on Publishers Lunch shows Amazon is very actively
acquiring titles and authors and for big bucks. It appears Larry Kirshbaum’s
publishing division at Amazon wants to get big fast, as the rest of Amazon has done.
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 26
On 18 June 2012 The Nation published an extensive feature by Steve Wasserman
entitled ‘The Amazon Effect’ (http://tinyurl.com/86n6qub). I highly recommend
reading it.
Barnes & Noble and the retail situation
I was in New York seven years ago and spent hours at many of the big Barnes &
Nobles and Borders stores. During my BDEF trip I returned to the Union Square
B&N. It was confronting to see so much of the floor space occupied by non-‐book
items – stationery, toys and games, and a Nook kiosk. Hank Cochrane, who has sold
to B&N for Penguin for more than a decade, told me floor space devoted to books
had shrunk by one-‐third over recent years. This makes it a bun fight for publishers
to get their books visible to buyers.
Rumours are rife that B&N stores will shrink in size and sell print-‐on-‐demand books.
One publisher I spoke with expected B&N to spin off and sell the Nook. He claimed
that the future of bookselling will be in the community bookshop where books,
book-‐buyers and authors interact in real time and space. ‘It’s not what we would
have thought. Amazon has forced the chains into a sort of weird irrelevance.’
This rang true for me when I visited the bookshops. There are many wonderful
independent bookshops in New York, but I must say I found Barnes & Noble
uninspiring. Years before, when I had last visited New York, I noticed publishers
loved to hate B&N, claiming it had become too powerful and complaining that it had
decided to compete with them as a publisher as well. Now the situation is so very
different. According to an article published on 28 January 2012 in the New York
Times and entitled ‘The Bookstore’s Last Stand’ (http://tinyurl.com/8ypdkpg),
publishers are keen to do anything they can to keep B&N in business. Without B&N,
how will customers not fortunate enough to live near a surviving independent
bookshop discover a publisher’s books? The obvious answer: on Amazon.
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 27
Mike Shatzkin
In my last week in New York I was fortunate to get a meeting with industry observer
and consultant Mike Shatzkin (he of The Shatzkin Files – http://www.idealog.com).
He was very generous with his time, but I must say I left feeling rather depressed.
I asked him in which direction illustrated books – both for adults and for kids –
would go. In his opinion, illustrated books for children will go a very different way to
those for adults. In the US, parents are starting to hand down to their children their
old iPads and Kindles. As this device hand-‐me-‐down process continues, and as
devices come onto the market that are better suited to children’s needs, it follows
that children will become more and more used to reading onscreen as well as on
paper. Enhanced ebooks that children consume on these devices will be some
combination of what a book is today, what a game is today and what animation is
today, according to Shatzkin. He posed the question, in which of these three groups
would you rather be: the publishers, needing to hire the gamers and animators; the
animators, hiring the gamers and book publishers; or the gamers, hiring the
animators and book publishers?
‘I think the last thing you’d want to be is the book publisher and hiring in the gamers
and the animators. You would want to be in command of the mode. I think gaming is
the key,’ he said. He argues that there is so much that gaming experts know about
how children of particular ages interact with devices – knowledge gained through
costly research and development – that book publishers are at too much of a
disadvantage to catch up.
While I think Mike Shatzkin’s view on this is extreme and tends towards the black-‐
and-‐white (well, mostly the black), our discussion certainly gave me pause for
thought.
I had become convinced that my original thesis – that illustrated children’s books
might be lumped in the same basket as illustrated books for adults in terms of their
futures in a digital world – was indeed wrong. There seems to be so much scope for
growth in digital books for children at the moment in the US (and I was to see plenty
of evidence for that at Chronicle Books just a week later), and especially once the
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 28
new industry-‐standard epub3 is widely supported by various devices. I now think it
likely that in the short-‐term future in the US, ebooks for kids that include audio,
video and/or animation will be very widely available and consumed.
At the same time, the children’s editors and publishers I met with spoke of record
sales in print picture books. At Dial Books for Young Readers (Penguin), they are
ramping up the picture book side of their list, and Neal Porter at Neal Porter
Books/Roaring Brook Press (Macmillan), who has published numerous Caldecott
Medal-‐winners, attests to print picture books continuing to be extremely strong in
the US market. He has no intention of scaling back production of print picture books.
And in what direction will the illustrated nonfiction book go?
I would argue that many illustrated nonfiction titles require their print format, that
they are special because of their design and very bookish, tactile qualities. But if
what Shatzkin suggests comes to pass, there is a question over what value the
‘inspirational’ nonfiction book will have once the practical ‘how to’ is available
cheaply online. Because illustrated books produced by most publishers rely so much
on being discovered in a shrinking number of bookshops, they are at risk of
becoming collectors’ items.
We’ve already seen this with thousands of free – and excellent – recipes available
online. Cookbook sales, for now, continue to be strong, though they are certainly not
growing like they used to. But there are question marks hanging over them. Will
consumers still want the physical book if and when they can get the recipes much
more cheaply on their device?
So far there has been a handful of really successful illustrated book apps. But
Shatzkin, and several editors I met in my travels, believe they represent a small
number of one-‐offs – nothing that builds to a picture we can learn much from for
developing, for example, a digital-‐focused illustrated publishing program. Shatzkin
goes further: ‘There is [as] yet no evidence – none, zero – that illustrated books work
digitally.’
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 29
While I think many in the publishing industry intuitively believe that illustrated
nonfiction will find its place in the ebook market once devices are sophisticated
enough, conversations such as the one I had with Mike Shatzkin were very sobering.
9. Chronicle Books, San Francisco
Leaving New York feels like leaving the centre of the world – nothing very important
could happen elsewhere, could it? But I was excited to be moving to my three-‐week
placement at Chronicle Books, in a city I’d never visited before, San Francisco.
Chronicle Books might not be one of the big players in the US publishing scene, but
deep down I think everyone wants to be them just a little bit. I lost count of the
number of New York editors who said they would love to know what Chronicle is
like. Chronicle has the coolest office, the coolest editorial and design talent, the most
imaginative sales channels and those books that you pick up and say, ‘I knew it was
going to be a Chronicle book.’ Authors and illustrators are very keen to be published
under the Chronicle imprint.
The physical environment of the office says a lot about the company philosophy. The
Chronicle office is a thoughtfully designed, creative, environmentally friendly space.
There’s yoga at lunchtimes; a formats library for designers and editors to refer to; a
whole floor of meeting rooms of different sizes; and even a readings evening when,
over beer and pizza in the library, staff read excerpts of what they’ve been writing
lately (the first chapters of a YA novel, a blogpost from a year of travel . . .). Creative
Director Michael Carabetta has overseen Chronicle’s aesthetic in every way, I was
informed.
At Chronicle it was such a joy to sit alongside a couple of editorial teams, to attend
meetings and generally get to know how the place worked. Having worked on
illustrated books for many years, it was my Mecca.
The thing about Chronicle that jumped out at me early on was that it thrives despite
the closure of Borders and some other bookshops because it has so many links with
special markets (thanks in part, I presume, to its gift lists) as well as robust business
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 30
development. Clothing and homewares chains are key accounts. And they put on a
couple of thousand new accounts every year!
I heard that it was company tradition that, on the release of their Fall titles, editors
and designers were allocated a couple of phone numbers of individual accounts and
encouraged to phone them up for a chat. According to one publishing director, the
practice resulted in publishing staff having a deeper appreciation of their sales
colleagues (how hard it is to sell) and individual accounts were thrilled to have a
personal connection with someone involved in the creation of one or two Christmas
titles.
The editorial and acquisitions meetings I attended at Chronicle could not have been
more different from those I witnessed in New York. At Chronicle, the focus is less on
big print runs and more on whether the title is a fit with their list and how it would
do in special sales channels. New acquisitions are discussed at very collaborative
publishing group meetings attended by team members from editorial, design,
marketing, managing editorial and production. But not sales! Apparently Chronicle
discovered some years ago that sales predictions discussed at acquisitions stage
were far from an exact science, often extremely conservative, and the acquisition
process was more effective when discussions concentrated on the content of the
books and how readers would respond to them, rather than obsessing about how
the gatekeepers (e.g. buyers for chains and discount stores) would respond.
With its very strong identity, Chronicle is able to publish some titles that bigger
publishers couldn’t find a home for, but the flipside is that they cannot compete with
New York on big advances.
I had wondered if I would encounter, in this illustrated publisher, a business fighting
for survival because of the recent closure of many bookshops, and perhaps urgently
testing new business models. What I found was a company that had enjoyed a
couple of its best years ever, and was forward-‐thinking without being panicked.
It was a joy to meet Lorena Jones, former publisher at Ten Speed Press, who is
currently Publishing Director at Chronicle, overseeing the Food and Wine as well as
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 31
Lifestyle lists and running the digital publishing program. She did three years ago a
lot of the thinking that I’m only beginning to do now about how illustrated books
might find their way in the digital future. Lorena was ridiculously busy but we
managed to squeeze in a couple of discussions face-‐to-‐face as well as on email –
much of which has been so helpful to me in writing this report (hat-‐tip to Lorena).
10. Some thoughts to sum up
We need to get beyond the argument about digital taking away from print sales.
Consumers are going to take the content of what is currently in books in whatever
format they want – we just don’t yet know what all those formats will be. We can try
to keep hold of the physical market but ultimately, if consumers want digital, we
have to provide that and adjust our business models accordingly. I must say I was
more inspired by the vision of the smaller publishers I visited than the larger ones
when it came to this point.
Sales of ebooks, enhanced ebooks and other digital versions of illustrated titles for
both adults and children are in their infancy. They’re far more complicated to get
right technically, and there are countless formats of print books not yet worth
converting to ebooks because of the quality that would be lost in the conversion. It’s
expensive to invest in researching new formats for illustrated content, but
necessary. Just think of all the trial and error that went into determining the best
print formats. We need to do the same with digital formats.
I am frustrated when I hear of senior managers in some (typically larger) companies
in the US and Australia making pronouncements that certain digital formats have
been proved to be a waste of time and money (‘apps are going nowhere’ or ‘we
won’t do another enhanced ebook’). The investment is quickly removed from
whatever the digital experiment was. What is it that traditional print publishers do
other than assess risk each time a new project is acquired? Every publishing season
there are very many print projects that lose big bucks for the very same publishers,
who don’t threaten to junk the format.
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 32
If digital teams are not given the time, space and other necessary resources to
experiment within the publishing house structure, this innovation will take place
outside of traditional publishers, who then won’t own the knowledge.
But this experimentation and testing of the market is happening, sometimes in big-‐
name publishing houses, sometimes in home offices. The question is when the
devices and file formats have sorted themselves out, perhaps in five or so years’
time, when illustrated publishers know what readers want and what will work for
them, who will be ready to supply the wonderful digital illustrated books for readers
of all ages?
The chief concerns at the moment for illustrated publishers are getting a format-‐
agnostic workflow in place, i.e. one that can cope with producing titles in multiple
formats (print, ebook, enhanced ebook, web); making sure those workflows produce
books of as high a quality as the rest of the list; getting staff skilled-‐up; and all
without taking their eye off the production of print books where these are
continuing to succeed. The role of the editor in this process (and the author, and the
designer, and the production controller . . .) has expanded and will expand even
more to make this happen.
I believe the real growth opportunity for illustrated digital publishing is in children’s
picture books, but that this doesn’t necessarily mean a decline in print books for
children, as long as bookshop doors – particularly those of independent bookshops –
remain open.
Cookbooks might have any number of format solutions that will work for different
users, but we are some years away from knowing what these will be because there is
still so much fragmentation in devices and software. My suspicion is that straight
digital representations of printed cookbooks might never work. Many readers will
want a print edition if only as a collector’s item; many more, I suspect, will want
recipes served to them digitally. Some will want both.
Gift/lifestyle/art books might remain strongly forever print-‐only and perhaps move
to become even more high-‐end, high-‐priced with short print runs. Chronicle is
Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 33
seeing evidence from some book-‐buyers against all things digital when it comes to
these sorts of titles – that readers want the printed book as a precious object.
The opinions of individual editors about the state of the publishing industry right
now seem to run on personality lines. Those who are used to or willing to try
innovating in formats, business models and ways of working tend not to be
frightened of the disruption, but rather see it as a challenge. Those for whom a
change in the successful-‐thank-‐you-‐very-‐much way of doing things produces anxiety
tend to see the disruption as purely a threat.
I hope that there might continue to be room in the industry for both personality
types in editorial across this spectrum. In nonfiction and illustrated books
particularly there will be so much more editing and content development to do that
those who don’t want to be involved in producing all the different formats can be
enlisted to do the deep editorial work and feed this to those who are perhaps
happier to work across platforms, devices and formats.
It seems likely also that there will be more and more work for freelance editors and
‘book doctors’. One executive editor I spoke with said she didn’t fear for the role of
the editor. It wasn’t a question of whether there would be work for editors; it was a
question of who we’d be working for. She suggested many editors might find
themselves working directly for a number of authors rather than for a particular
publishing house.
However the digital shakedown of formats for nonfiction and illustrated books
occurs, it was underlined to me again and again that the editor both now and in the
future is of utmost value. Developers, coders and designers all offer indispensible
expertise for a modern publishing house, but they don’t do what an editor does.
Editors are skilled and experienced at analysing text for meaning and value, and at
helping authors present their very best. This role will continue to be vital.
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