Publishing Now and Then

Posted on May 26, 2009 in Uncategorized

The InPrint Online review of Publishing Now and Then, our first event to celebrate the SYP’s 60th birthday, will follow shortly.  In the meantime, you can download a podcast of Suzanne Collier’s talk, read Patrick Janson-Smith’s article in BookBrunch, and there is a copy of Nicholas Jones’ talk below.  Both Suzanne and Nicholas are previous Chairs of the SYP.  Suzanne Collier is the Founder and Business Manager of BookCareers.com, Patrick Janson-Smtih is Publisher of the new HarperCollins Blue Door imprint, and Nicholas Jones is the Founder and MD of Strathmore Publishing.

Here is Nicholas Jones’ talk:

My brief today is to talk about what the SYP was like in my time, and a little about my own career and the part the SYP played in it, and a bit about how publishing has changed, with specific reference to prices. It really concentrates the mind trying to pick the important, the trends, from the minutiae, and also trying to point to things the Society might like to note and respond to.

I decided to a good approach would be to look through the copies of InPrint from my year, but before then I want to give a straightforward background, so you know what experience underlies what I say. Some of the moves I’ve made and choices I’ve taken might seed ideas about possible career paths in the minds of would-be and recent entrants in this audience, so I hope a little autobiography will be useful rather than indulgent.

From an early age – 12 or so – I had been interested in typography and printing, and owned a small letterpress printing press – a technology almost completely irrelevant today, but it gave me a headstart in getting publishing companies to talk to me when I applied for jobs. I’d studied medical science at university, and scientific publishing seemed a good combination of those interests. However, the Thomson Newspaper Group – early entrants into electronic publishing and now part of Thomson Reuters, then owned several book publishing companies and ran a general training scheme. So I worked for Michael Joseph – who are now part of Penguin. After three years there, I moved to Thames Television, the largest company of a then federal ITV, to publish books based on their programmes. Those were the days when a 7-part history of English Gardens could be shown on ITV1 (of course there wasn’t a ITV2 then) and get an audience of 7 million! The accompanying book sold 53,000. After that, I spent 8 years with the Royal Institute of British Architects, producing books for architects, but also responsible for their specialist bookshops; then in 1995 I established Strathmore Publishing to be an editorial and production services company. In 1995, the publishing industry was just coming out of a recession and many firms had over-contracted, so needed assistance as the lists grew again. I could put to use my technical knowledge of print.

Since we are celebrating 60 years of the SYP, I want to say that my involvement with it has proven invaluable in making contacts which have founded great friendships and been a steady source of work and opportunities.

Although Strathmore still produces printed books, we have found a particular niche in recording audiobooks, which having once been a product solely for the visually impaired now find themselves centre stage as, to quote a senior executive at Random House last year, audiobooks are the one bit of digital publishing actually making money.

That prompts a comment: because they are already digital, selling them online doesn’t require the audience to accept a fundamentally different reading experience, which is still the case with e-books. So it is interesting to note that in America, whose experiences often predict our own to a great extent, has seen the sales of audiobooks as physical product (i.e. CDs) fall by 21 per cent, and downloads are 15 per cent of sales by volume, perhaps 10 per cent by value. The SYP might like to consider if and how e-books are going to achieve that – the US figures indicate that last year they were a mere 0.1 per cent by value.

So, as I said, I dug out my old copies of InPrint. In the February 1979 issue I wrote a piece outlining my ideas for the year. I quoted from Ian Norrie’s wonderfully comprehensive history of Publishing and Bookselling, which had been published in 1974, and although that is now mostly of historic interest, it is good to see that Tuesday last week saw in BookBrunch a review of his just-published memoir, The Business of Lunch: A Bookman’s Life and Travels. Ian ran the independent High Hill Bookshop in Hampstead for thirty years – indeed, I briefly worked there, a placement arranged by Michael Joseph, whose training scheme was admirably comprehensive.

Here’s what Ian wrote 35 years ago:

“The Society of Young Publishers was formed in 1949, reflecting the postwar determination of a new generation to make a better job of it than their fathers had.”

That prompts a little diversion: note the I’m-sure-unconscious sexism in that statement – it was pretty much true in the prewar days than men ran publishing, though now, according to Suzanne Collier’s recent salary sample, it is an industry with more than 80 per cent female staff. When I worked at the then independent Michael Joseph, the Chairman and half the board of directors was female, but I think that was unusual. It seems – and maybe Suzanne will tell us more later – that what gender you happen to be is still an issue which influences your pay and progress in the industry.

The SYP took its responsibilities seriously. You’ll see in that same issue a piece about trying to establish a publishing creche.

Anyway, Ian continued:

“The Society provided a regular platform for the new entrants to the trade from which they could air their grievances and make, in their turn, recommendations for curing its chronic sickness. The subjects of their meetings dealt with the necessity for more and better bookshops, co-operative advertising, the death of fiction, broadening the market for books, and so on.”

Reading that now, I realise that what publishing is fundamentally about – communicating ideas from those who know to those who want to know – hasn’t changed all that much. But the way we create what we sell, how we sell it, and how we make a living from this activity, is fundamentally different. Victoria Nicholl is going to be picking up this aspect, the technological revolution, in the next section tonight.

The first speaker meeting was Publishing and the Law – well, copyright protection has become a hot issue in a way that no one might have foreseen then, but some bon mots remain worth quoting: a partner in Goodman Derrick – a practice which today specialises in media rights clearances for the digital world – remarked:  “publishing contracts tend to be pretty general documents, which is OK if the book succeeds, but disputes arise if either party feels the other hasn’t fulfilled their part of the bargain.” As true as ever.

In introducing that meeting, I quoted from an article by Anthony Burgess – author of A Clockwork Orange – which had just appeared in the Guardian.

“If to publish is to make public, then you can publish – if you’re not too ambitious or greedy, without publishers. Not even in the days of Shakespeare or Dr Johnson was it necessary to have a Faber or a Heinemann.” He goes on to argue that “publisher and author have a sense of distrust and grudging mutual admiration. Both sides want books to sell, but they want them to sell for different reasons: for their intrinsic excellence the one, for their intrinsic saleability the other. Soon the question may be asked: what exactly is a publisher? And the answer could be: not Macmillan or Gollancz, but a boy or girl with access to an electric typewriter and a Xerox machine.”

I think Burgess is rather high-minded – many authors are mostly or even entirely interested in saleability and money – but the principle is probably true, and though the technology has changed, the idea was – as so often with his ideas – remarkably prescient. The US journal of the booktrade Publishers Weekly reported just yesterday that for the first time the number of self-published titles in the US – 285,000 – topped the number of traditionally published titles – 275,000. That change has been facilitated, if not entirely driven, by new technologies.

In April,  the subject was Rights. Nicholas Kennedy from Marshall Cavendish was forthright: “If you’ve haven’t got rights, you have nothing. You editors are making a physical product for the selling of rights. We, who sell things, are the financial lifeblood of the firm.”

I am reminded of a remark I remember from Dick Douglas-Boyd, then Sales Director of Michael Joseph: “The Editorial Department’s job is to find good products for the sales department to sell.” At the time, he said it jokingly (it was at the Christmas party), but now, I suspect that really is the case – no doubt those with recent experience in trade publishing will confirm.

Also in the issue of InPrint reporting that meeting is a first notice of the SYP Handbook – which was gradually to become Giles Clark’s standard work Inside Book Publishing.

In June, we discussed: ‘Is Publishing Just a Job or a Way of Life?’ Speakers included Anthony Cheetham – now where did he go? – and the heads of Hutchinson and Chatto (both now part of Random House). I note from the write up that “Anthony Cheetham found the question irritating. ‘I really do not see a contradiction between the two. There is a very British point of view that somehow the world owes us a living and we don’t have to be professional about it.’ ” Still true, I wonder? Is the desire to work in publishing still keeping down salaries (Suzanne??). He goes on to say that you musn’t want to publish only books that you yourself want to read (though, he says,  “that approach can work well – look at Thames and Hudson”), but that “the whole commercial process can be great fun; getting the right mix in its infinite variety.”

The July meeting examined the importance of picture selection. We were honoured to have Harold Evans, then editor of the Sunday Times, before he and Tina Brown went to the States. Imagine a time when photo libraries were hundreds of filing cabinets, and retouching required the skills of an artist with an airbrush. Now, pictures can be selected almost entirely online – another fundamental change in the process of producing books which I suspect most of those in this room will have taken for granted.

September saw a discussion of direct mail. Still relevant, even if the medium is more likely to be e-mail. Interestingly, one of the speakers was Marketing Director of the Folio Society, an organisation flourishing today because it offers books primarily as objects. That reminds me of an article in the Guardian only last week commenting on the current trend of retro books – things like the Dangerous Book for Boys – which depend for their appeal on the look perhaps more than the content.

October discussed whether production standards were declining. The impact of technology again. And ever-increasing paper prices. And falling print runs making it difficult to amortise the origination costs. All in all, plus ça change.

November saw a discussion called ‘Don’t Forget the Author’, which included Thomas Pakenham, author of The Boer War and subsequently the ‘Remarkable Trees’ books, Jane Aiken Hodge, humorist Miles Kington, and publisher Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, then at Hamish Hamilton – which is now Penguin – and both author and agent. That takes us neatly back to Anthony Burgess – though the meeting seems to have been amicable enough. Authors concluded they did need publishers – so that they could concentrate on writing while the publisher got on with the production and dissemination of what the author wrote.

So the principles of publishing are very similar, but the landscape in which we operate has changed completely.

Bestseller lists are now the lifeblood of publicity and marketing, but the Sunday Times list began in 1967 with a sample of only 18 shops – and that was a survey by phone. It was often said that the list was books the shops wanted to sell (or which they had subscribed lots of) rather than what was actually selling. One London evening paper sampled only Foyles and W. H. Smith! It wasn’t until 1976 that an independent organisation was set up to generate bestseller lists based on the  systematic collection of sales info. based on more than a hundred shops. Computers and EPOS, and the entry of Nielsen Bookdata into the market have transformed that – the charts are now based on 8,500 outlets. But has that very accuracy reduced the range of books available by making publishers chase what they perceive as successful genres at the expense of originality?

Were books good value for money then? Are they now? The best price statistics I can find show that with a base of 100 in 1974, prices in general were up to 223.5, and by 2008, up to nearly 850. Book prices are hard to track, but an average novel was about £3.50 in 1979. The average now is about £12 at actual selling price (though £15 or so rrp), showing that books have broadly kept in line with the RPI. But of course there has been a fundamental change: the Net Book Agreement, which existed from 1900 to about 1995 is no longer active. It prevented anyone selling books at less than the price set by the publisher, allowing, in effect, cross-subsidy between popular bestsellers and worthy or experimental material. The agreement went gradually: once a few firms (led by Hodder Headline) ignored it, it became unsustainable, though it was not formally abolished until March 1997. Interestingly, it has been successfully defended in 1962, when the idea that ‘books are different’ because each is individual was accepted by the Restrictive Practices Court. But market forces can be more powerful than courts.

The revolution on the High Street brought about by chain booksellers like Waterstones is remarkable – some of you may remember the arcane system (at Foyles) by which you had to queue up three times, once to get a bill for your books, then to pay at a separate cashier, then collect the books. The only other place where that happened, to my knowledge, was the GUM store in communist Russia.

So bookselling has undergone a revolution since 1979. Supermarkets accounted for no sales in 1979; 4 per cent of total consumer market (tcm) in 2000, 8 per cent by 2008. They entered the book market entirely because of the abolition of the NBA. And then, of course, there is the internet: Amazon was founded in the US in 1995, operated in the UK from 1998, and now has 85 per cent of the UK tcm which is 12 per cent of booksales and rising fast.

I want to end with a comment I heard recently which I feel neatly summarise what publishing ought to be: “The process of reading should be seductive, interesting, worthwhile, tempting.” Who said it? Paul Le Clerk, President of the New York Public Library. It’s absolutely true, I think, of printed books – though it must be added that he said it in response to a question about whether he enjoyed reading e-books. It was, he said, entirely possible to meet those requirements with a Kindle.

These are interesting times – but then they probably always have been, and the SYP will continue to be forum for discussion and for sharing knowledge. It seems to be in very good hands.