On Writing a Publishing Textbook

Posted on April 6, 2011 in Uncategorized

Introduction

Sometime after signing a contract to write a book (in my case, writing for a third time) a moment arrives when one wonders if it was wise to have done this. It is far harder work than one had ever imagined, and it is solitary work. This time, I have a co-author – Richard Balkwill – but, in my case anyway, the ‘second thoughts’ tend to linger. However, it is not my purpose here to reveal the burden of authorship but to respond to the editor of this journal’s request that I reflect on writing a textbook on publishing. That said, perhaps such an article about authorship might be useful. For a publisher, finding out what it is like to be an author is quite a revelation. So driven mad are we by delivery dates that if an author does turn up with the contracted work, we are too relieved to ask ‘How was it for you?’

So how was it? Thankfully, of course, one’s publisher fully understands the subject. This is most definitely an advantage, since if one wants challenges about the quality of the content before the book hits the streets, it can be found at your publisher’s offices, on tap from the people doing publishing every day. Beyond that, there are bigger questions that keep going through one’s mind. The easiest of these questions to answer is, can a textbook really ‘nail’ publishing in the way that we characterise textbooks? I think not. There is an inherent, constant movement in the act of publishing that requires publishers to bring flexibility and judgement to bear on everything they do. A ‘tick the box’ mentality in a publishing textbook would be pointless because it will never represent the demands involved in what goes on in publishing houses. Neither can any textbook possibly compete with the richness found in the memoires of exceptional publishers such as Diana Athill. Nevertheless, at the very least, within a textbook it is possible to present models of the good, the bad and the ugly for the reader to digest.

Can publishing be taught?

This is the first mighty question, and if you believe that it can, then you can probably be found in the ‘skills’ camp. In the past in publishing, there was something of an aversion to the idea of ‘skills’ as though they were the sole province of mechanics, and I shared that aversion. I am not the only person to have been asked if I would like to go on a ‘presentation skills workshop’, or something similar, and to have felt quite offended at the idea that my presentations could have been bettered. Was I the only one who felt that presentations were a kind of seat-of-the-pants experience that would reveal the naturally talented? If the mood was right and the audience attentive, well, you were just marvellous. It was left to Chance (gingered up by a spot of Nerves), especially for those who always wowed their audiences because they had the gift of the gab. But what did we remember: what they had to say or just the way in which they said it?

Undeniably, there are gifted individuals who never seem to need help from anyone, but there are not many of those in life, even in publishing houses. Most people who work in publishing are well above average in intelligence, education and competence, but when they begin work, they know nothing about publishing. They will gradually learn through experience, but that progress takes a long time and if they are unfortunate enough to be working with indifferent management, they will learn imperfectly. One of the bitterest experiences I can draw on from teaching publishing students is hearing occasional stories, after they have entered publishing, about their managers. I once told the co-editor of Book Brunch a true story about one of my former students, which then appeared in the digital newsletter and which I will repeat here for those who may have missed it. She was told by her boss to find out about ‘that liable stuff’. This from the editorial director of a well-known publishing imprint!

My main reason for believing that publishing can be taught is that I know from experience that it is possible to turn a good-enough publishing professional into a very good one, provided one is prepared to spend time and effort on them. You can teach by sitting next to them and explaining, or sending them on courses where they will be trained by industry experts, or you can write a book which they can read and return to. This is detailed work – hence the effort – but if you are truly interested in seeing people learn and apply what they have learned, and gain the benefits from that, then it should be more of a pleasure than a chore. I think it is necessity.

History is on my side, unless we are about to revert to earlier attitudes. Skills have become respectable, although there are still some who find this sort of thing either irrelevant or boring. But how many iconoclasts can publishing afford? I grew up in a publishing world with more of them per square boardroom than we shall ever see again. They were huge fun – a small regiment of amusing, cultured, thoroughly well connected and sharply-incisive men of judgement, leading an army of people desperately trying in some way or other to approximate them. Why they were so good was mysterious. If only we could learn to perform as well as they did, we sighed. So transfixed were we by these performances that we could not quite work out that what we were watching was the culmination of many years experience and mounting skill, resulting in complete confidence and decisiveness. But for every one of those who could stand up and take the room with them at a sales conference, there were twenty others who bored the sales force into sheer bafflement as they waited for editors or marketers to give them some relevant information that would help them sell the book.

The justification for teaching or training, and therefore writing a publishing textbook, is that whilst the industry – any industry – needs stars, the majority of people need more prosaic, but essential, skills to help them do their jobs competently. To be competent, one needs to practise doing the right thing. I do not see why publishing should be different from any other profession in that respect.

Confidence of course is the key. The confidence of the complete fraudster and that of the honourable worker both result from a proper understanding of what one does, why one does it, and when, and how one does it.

The skills of knowing how to pick your way through a synopsis; to keep an author informed and encouraged; to ensure your colleagues get information that is essential or helpful, and when; how to negotiate with suppliers, all these help to create a good publisher, and these skills, I maintain, can be taught. It involves a kind of step-by-step learning. None of this is magic. I think that what lies beneath the resistance towards ‘skills’ and the idea that publishing can be taught, is partly an impatience with the word itself: ‘skills’ (as happened with ‘challenging’) has been hijacked by the Education world and given a good hammering until it emerged, limping. Publishing skills are undoubtedly rather sophisticated and not easily acquired, but they are still skills.

Masters Degrees in Publishing

We have to mention the part played by these courses in the general development of the idea that publishing could be taught. Paul Richardson played a revolutionary role, as it was he who introduced publishing degrees at Oxford Brookes University. At the time (over 20 years ago), many publishers were incredulous at the notion that publishing was being turned into an academic subject. Of course, they were mistaken. What are known as ‘vocational degrees’ exist in many subjects. The precedent set at Oxford Brookes is followed now by other publishing degree courses and I would roughly describe them as practical introductions to the main publishing functions (which are developed in some depth) with a critical edge. The way of doing this is to present and analyse practice but also to challenge the efficacy of this practice. Right from the start, these courses aim to avoid producing compliant entrants to the publishing field. The attraction of the masters degrees is that they prepare a postgraduate for a career in publishing, providing him or her with a knowledge base – plus opportunities to get practical experience – that would take several years to acquire from a standing start at the beginning of a career in publishing.

The most important change brought about through these courses is that their graduates are gradually raising the knowledge base and competence at entry level. Furthermore, these are the very young people who will fill what are perceived as the current skills gap in the application of digital technology. They are perfectly at ease with it but they join publishing with everything they have already learned about publishing.

The presumption of authorship?

Becoming an author is not just a question of finding the capacity and energy to do the job but also about making judgements about what should go into a book. My first book, about book commissioning, provided plenty of experience of all three, which I was able to draw on for this second book. One of the things I also learned from that first book was that the reception from around the world, as a result of the translated editions, was remarkably similar. This allowed myself and Richard Balkwill (who also has a lot of international training experience) not to get too hung up about writing from the point of view of the Anglo-American model of publishing, since it seems to be in demand.

I discovered from my book for commissioning editors that one should not be worried about pitching the level too much at beginner level. This sounds rather depressing, but the feedback I have had has made it abundantly clear that many inexperienced publishers have been given such poor training on the job, or none at all, that they appreciate being taken right back to the point where they can re-think what goes into their jobs and what is required of them professionally. For students, of course, with no experience, one does not need to be so concerned about level. I also learned that for both sets of readers, what they want to know is what to do if something goes wrong and also to be able to recognise warning signs of imminent trouble.

For these reasons, Richard and I decided to go firmly down the practical road. We were not going to attempt to write a comprehensive guide to publishing. In any case, there is a very good comprehensive book (Inside Book Publishing) by Giles Clark and Angus Phillips already in print. We were going to write an introduction to publishing practice. This would not be a neutral guide; the authors’ opinions on practice would be evident. Furthermore, by eschewing the neutral approach, we hoped to come through as publishers who had done this kind of work for many years. The reader can tell when the writer puts some distance between the subject and himself or herself that the lack of intimacy usually indicates a lack of practice. Finally, the neutral approach, characterised by mechanical description, was something neither of us was interested in writing as we felt its purpose was too limited.

Having agreed on the approach, which then set the tone, we therefore decided on confining the writing to the main functional areas of publishing. This has meant omitting a lot of information that would complete the whole picture but we wanted to draw the line around the key functions and concentrate on them. We asked ourselves: who wants to get into publishing and what do they need to know; for those already in, what areas do they work in and what kind of ‘kit’ do they need; what would come under the heading, ‘nice to know, but not critical at the beginning of someone’s career’? And how does that all connect up within something called Publishing? So our concentration was unapologetically on that level of practicality. I was reminded of comments made to me by a Chinese publisher that too many publishing courses, and indeed too many publishers, in that country concentrate on broad issues such as markets, doing market research or demographics, instead of working on the practicalities of being good publishers.

How do you avoid being out of date?

In some ways, we could not have chosen a worse time to write a textbook in publishing practice. ‘All change!’ seems to be the perpetual cry, followed by ‘…We think’. It is almost impossible to teach any kind of practice without established models. But were we really writing at the beginning of a new publishing age? I think this is arguable. Most publishers have been immersed in digital technology for years – in production and design, rights and distribution, increasingly in marketing, and overwhelmingly in journals publishing. Digital technology therefore has its place throughout this textbook. Current uncertainties are really about where people will do their reading – on digital platforms or in books – and how to make money out of both. In any case, I remain convinced that the publishing function will remain the publishing function even though many outward appearances may change. The challenge to choose good content and sell it; to know its many markets and how to get to them; to produce the content in a form and with design values that enhance readership is unlikely to change fundamentally. Simply put, publishers are going to have to be even more skilled because digital technology has a flexibility that is both unnerving in its possibilities and exciting to those utterly on top of their game. That is yet another argument in favour of teaching and training.

What can you not teach?

What we cannot teach in this or any textbook is wisdom. Wisdom comes through learning from yours and others’ mistakes. We can point out how mistakes can be made but the rest is up to the reader. Wisdom does not come out of the blue any more than judgement does. Both represent the culmination of experiences from which one has learned, giving one the confidence to make sound decisions.

Neither can we teach how to handle risk. All we could do is point out what would be best way of handling and realising a project and that the further you deviate from that, the greater the risk. Perhaps, by way of offering some light relief, I could present my own approach to discussing risk. Like a number of other publishers, I am very fond of horseracing, and have been for about 30 years. The similarities between horseracing and publishing have been pretty obvious to me for most of that time and I have often referred to this in my lectures, I am bound to say to the students’ surprise, initially. Imagine, the horse is the content; the jockey is the author, who is going to make the best of the content; the trainer is the publisher who is going to prepare the content for public presentation, and the going (the state of the ground, which varies with the weather) is the market. This little scenario is probably imperfect but it does encapsulate the idea of training, skill, knowledge, expertise and luck, and how they all combine. It also makes a stirring change from an example involving Wayne Rooney, a broken metatarsal bone, an early exit for England from a World Cup, and a five million pound royalty advance!

Conclusion

I am very conscious of having written extensively in this article about whether publishing can be taught, but I felt it was important to go back to first principles before approaching the matter of writing a textbook. I am rather surprised to come across senior publishers who still do not believe that it can be taught and are not very interested in training either – something to leave to HR to sort out. Ours is an industry that has enjoyed the cult of the gifted amateur for much of its history. It has been fun but it has not always served us well and if we are about to experience some kind of revolution in publishing, amateurism is just about the last thing we need. And if it is revolution time, why did we write a book? I suppose Richard and I could have come up with some sort of cutting-edge distance-learning programme and been beamed down the line onto computer screens, with gismos enhancing our nodding-head presentations. We could have fantasised about earnest young publishers getting our Apps on their mobile phones as they stood swaying in packed underground trains on their way to work. But we stuck with the book because we think that for this market and for these readers, they still overwhelmingly learn, reflect and absorb in depth through the written word, from whatever platform it is delivered. A textbook is just one contribution to teaching and learning how to do one’s job effectively. And the written word is still their business.

Gill Davies is the author of Book Commissioning and Acquisition (2nd edition), published by Routledge. The Professionals’ Guide to Book Publishing, co-authored with Richard Balkwill, will be publishing by Kogan Page in February 2011.

This article was commissioned by and first appeared in Logos, an international journal for publishing and related professions.

Kogan Page are offering SYP members a 35% discount on The Professionals’ Guide to Publishing: A Practical Introduction to Working in the Publishing Industry by Gill Davies and Richard Balkwill. Take advantage of this discount here.