Research Proposals

So, Research Proposals are the devil.

We have to write a 2000w. proposal for our dissertation. Based on this paper, they will assign us a supervisor. The thing is, the proposal assumes you've done some research on the subject already: how are you going to research the topic, what resources do you have/need, what's your schedule, how much money etc. I mean, most of us just decided on a subject at the very last minute.

BTW, mine is "Open Access and Creative Commons: Giving your Work Away for Free" . Working title only :)

So here I am, trying to write a proposal that will be acceptable (it's not graded but if it sucks, they don't let you do a Master's but you can still do a post-grad diploma - that's the course minus the dissertation/major project).

I'm not especially interested in Rights but as the proper Humanities scholar that I am, I'm more interested in the social aspects of this topic as well as how I can think of making it profitable to publishers (because I want a good grade on this project ;D ).

I'm kind of looking forward to writing my dissertation but I'd enjoy it more if I didn't have the mammoth NPD project at the same time, let alone the DMP blog to fiddle and update regularly (as my faithful readers will know, not my strong point) and a looooong essay for Children's. Oh, and work experience, which is getting progressively more boring and routine.

*sigh* I can't wait to finish the course and get a real job.

Oh and, I will try to post something other than me whining. I was thinking maybe a post on the history of Children's lit or something like that, distilled from my class notes. I just have to work up some motivation to do something course related. I need a holiday...

Now it feels more like a Master's course!

Phew! Week 3 and already there's lots of work to be done. The way I see it, I have it pretty easy. All I have to do is read a couple of articles on Children's Publishing that Claire assigned, do a bit of research (more because I'm interested than because I have to) and do some NPD research. This last bit is not very stimulating but I think it's mainly because I'm not too thrilled with the project and the group.

Oh well!

On the other hand, the Magazine module looks tough although the Lecturer is usually so much fun. Boyfriend has to write a 3000 word essay on a cultural subject rather than straight publishing. It's on Men's Magazines (yeah, thooose) which is an interesting topic but involves a lot of research an 3000 words is a LOT!

We also have to hand in our official dissertation proposals next week or the week after that. I've barely even thought about mine. I think having NPD and dissertation work in one semester is exagerating. The NPD project could be a dissertation all on its own! It's that huge and stressful! I mean, it's very interesting from the point of view of getting experience of how it's supposed to work in a real company without risking real money on it but it's a lot of work that is a bit too much like the editorial project for my taste. I don't know, maybe I'm panicking prematurely but I feel it like this weight on my shoulders all the time, even when I'm not really thinking about it. I guess this is how a postgrad is supposed to feel.

Trial by fire and all that.

2 weeks in and already hating group work

Well, NPD is a bit disappointment. I swear, two weeks in and I'm already hating it. It's the editorial group project all over again but with more work and people taking it very seriously from the beginning.

I'm really, really tired of group work. You know it's bad when you know from the beginning that you're going to end up hating everyone in your group in a matter of weeks. Add to that a very bossy and unimaginative Managing Director and you have a recipe for a very unhappy Chantal.

I don't know, maybe it won't be so bad this time around. The trick is to work hard from the start and make your voice heard (a bit of a challenge for me) so you don't get left behind (and see people take credit for your work so you end up losing points grrrrr!). I'm taking on Editorial and Design work. I wanted to be Managing Director but everyone voted for this other girl *le sigh*. Oh well, at least I get Design which I really wanted and avoided Finance which I didn't.

The other modules are okay, I've very happy with Children's Publishing, we had a great discussion on Friday about gender in publishing. We discussed how women had gotten into publishing through Children's imprints which the men didn't consider important enough to put someone more "qualified" in so they gave it to the women and from there...we invaded and conquered :D

We also discussed the argument that the reason boys aren't being properly catered to nowadays is because it's women in charge, chosing and making books they enjoy hence, girls will like better. Boys did use to read a lot more in the past when men were in charge. I just say, "well, duh, there was no TV."

I'm still not sure about Digital Media Publishing. I wish the lecturer would take more time to explain the software and the ideas behind ebooks and such and less time digressing. Also, he stumbles over his words a lot and speaks very fast and I just disconnect and start playing on the internet. The project sound like a lot of fun. We have to pick a Public Domain text (or something on Creative Commons) and make it into an ebook with all the bells and whistles we want (i.e. sounds, video, links whatever). I wanted to do the Malleus Maleficarum but it's a very long text so I don't think I could enhance it as much as I want to because it would be a lot of very repetitive work and with NPD to keep me busy and a dissertation to start working on, I don't think I want to take on more work than I have to.

Another project is to have a blog that we'd update regularly. Yes, I have this one but it doesn't count. Also, I could work on my regular posting here, sorry :) My class blog is at: http://imedia.brookes.ac.uk/perez

I'm doing book reviews. We have to have at least 20 posts by the end of the semester and I figured that ought to keep me going. I can definitely write about 20 books. You're welcome to have a look and comment on how bad my reviews are (or the books, whatever)

The new semester has begun!

Meh, classes started again on Monday. At 9 am with Research Methods (for our dissertations/major projects). It was very exciting to see everyone back together again though. I was ridiculously perky. It's that "first day of school" thing, I guess. I wouldn't know because this is the first time I'm experiencing this which, in my opinion, speaks volumes about how much I've been enjoying myself here.

We have 5 student from Paris X university over as ERASMUS exchanges. I started chatting with them. It feels so good to have someone to speak French to! They're quite nice too. Someone had the good idea to invite them to Jazz night yesterday, which I had completely forgot to tell them about. So we had a chat over the music. The Bullingdon (a.k.a. The Bully) has live jazz every tuesday in the backroom. The Bullingdon is right in front of Tesco on Cowley Road. It's something of a regular thing for a lot of the people on the course. It's very good. I meant to go more often but I'm a lazy bum who doesn't want to go walk down the hill to it (and then back up again).

We also had New Product Development on Monday. It's a class that brings together everything we learned last semester. It's a role-play class! We're "Buckley Publishing" and are divided into groups that are different division within the company. I'm in the Education division (meh). We each have to come up with a new product that will fit with our goals (slightly different per division according to our "profile"). It looks like it's going to be labor intensive and the groups are huge! 9 people! It was bad enough with 4-6 last semester! We're all going to end up hating each other!

We also handed in our dissertation registration forms. They're going to assign us to Research methods seminar groups that are relevant to our subjects. In the end, I've decided to go with Open Access and Free audiobooks. I wanted to work on an ecological topic but I couldn't come up with one especially interesting angle to work on (that's what happens when you have too much interest in something I guess) and I was going to touch on digital media anyway so now I'll do it the other way around. Incorporate some ecology into a digital dissertation. I'm quite excited about the subject now and looking forward to starting to work on it.

I have Digital Media class this afternoon where, get this, one of the assignments is to have a blog and update it regularly. I've got the blog part down, I'll need to work on the updating regularly thing though, heh. We'll also be graded on how we customize our blog which I don't know how to do yet but we'll be taught and on the research that goes into the posts. Yes, I can't use this blog for the class (*le sigh*) but at least I have some blogging experience and I'll be able to make this blog better too. I love it when things work out that way. We'll also be covering Photoshop and Dreamweaver, two programs I've used before and some other two things I can't remember and have never used.

Should be fun, all in all.

Another letter from a would-be student

Hey there!

I'm planning to apply for the Publishing course at Brookes in Sept '09. I wanted to know how the course is, how you find the course structure to be, the faculty and the uni? Also, how many people do they take in a class?? Is it really hard to get through to this course?? Do you know much about the other Publishing courses (UCL,Kingston,LCC,Stirling

,Plymouth and City?)

Thanking you,

Hi

I'm glad to help. I'll handle your questions in order :)

1. The course is very intensive. We learn a lot of stuff very quickly and by the end of the first semester we knew enough to work in any department and possibly publish a book on our own. There are 4 mandatory modules, 3 (Editorial Management, Marketing management, Production and Design) are taken in the first semester and the 4th (New Product Development) is in semester 2. Everyone, regarding which of the Publishing M.A. (straight M.A. in Publishing, European, Digital etc) they're doing, has to take these modules. Then in semester 2, you also have to take 2 other modules that you get to chose (Digital Media, Rights Management, Children's Publishing, Magazines and Independent study in which you pretty much get to make up your own module etc.). The classes are half lectures which the Lecturer teaching and the other half is seminars or workshops in which we do some practical exercises usually divided into smaller groups.

The Lecturers are all great and very helpful. There are a couple whose teaching style is a little lacking but they make up by being happy to answer questions and see you in private if you need more help. It's fairly informal and we call them all by their first names, so you see, it's really very friendly. Everyone's here to learn so it's not a problem that we're so informal. Some of the lecturers are born comedians so their lectures are hilarious as well as informative.

The uni has a computer room just for publishing in the Tonge building with all the software used in the publishing business. We mainly learn to use Adobe InDesign which is the most widely used now. There's also Quark but if we want to learn how to use it, we're on our own.


2. The mandatory modules are for everyone and there's no limit to the number that can be. This means that everyone taking any of the Publishing M.As. will be there. At this time, that's about 75 of us. Of course, some people don't show up to classes and prefer to learn on their own using the lecture slides and the part-time students don't take all the mandatory modules at the same time so they're only there for one or two modules every semester. It sounds like a lot of people in one room but it isn't that much really and the lecturers are very good at reaching even the people at the back (I know because that's where I usually sit :D). For the elective modules, we're in smaller groups. There's no limit to how many people can be in one class but they're usual self-limiting in that there's many modules and people have different interests and goals so the main group breaks up into smaller ones. Children's publishing and Rights Management are the ones with more people.

3. I didn't find the classes to be too hard but they do demand a certain amount of work and, in my opinion, it's important to go to every class. It's not really possible to start your assignments at the last minute, for one thing, because a lot of it is group work. You don't get to chose your group so you never know who is more or less reliable. There's some maths involved in Marketing and Production which some people have a hard time with but I was terrible in maths in school but found it fairly easy if boring. Another possible difficulty is whether you can learn software easily or not, then there's the design aspect where some people are just naturally better at it than others. But I've seen everyone's Design projects and was very impressed by them.

4. I know that the City and Kingston programmes are good. City especially has a good reputation. I looked it up a bit because I applied there too. I think the difference is in how theoretical vs. practical the programmes are. Otherwise they teach more or less the same things. City is in London so that's one thing to keep in mind as well.

Have a look through my blog at http://publishingu.blogspot.com

I talk mainly about what I'm learning and doing and things like that. I'm not a very regular poster but there might be something that could interest you.

I'll be happy to answer any other questions you have.

End of the semester crash

As of Friday, I'm on holidays. I hadn't realized how exhausted I was until I finally crashed yesterday and spent most of the day asleep. I'm still tired right now even though I went to bed early and woke up later than my usual.

Looking back at the semester, I realize just how far the lecturers have gotten us. I started the semester thinking one year was not enough to be any good at this. Now though, I realize I know more about certain aspects of publishing than my supervisors at work and I understand pretty much everything else that's going on, why they do certain things etc. I also have a decent knowledge of marketing (although I really do not enjoy doing that kind of work and will not go into that if I can help it) and I notice the clever things other people do to get you to buy their stuff. In fact, it's kind of taken over my brain. I'm always spotting things I tell myself "I gotta remember that for when I'm working". It's evil. I also know about production, how to order a book, what paper and what kind of press should be used etc., stuff most people in publishing don't know or care about because they have other people to do it for them.
And finally, I know how to make a book look good.

One of our project this semester was to design a non-fiction fashion book. I was skeptical at first. We'd never studied design before, let alone book design, were just learning the basics of Adobe InDesign and didn't exactly know what was expected of us. We had a look at all the projects on friday and it was AMAZING! Everyone's work was professional and the look fit the purpose of the book. You had all sorts of styles from the traditional, discreet catalogue to gorgeous, striking and elaborate. Some people had a very classy, discreet look and other very modern, eye-explosion stuff.
We're going to get a CD with all the projects to have a look at. I am really impressed with how far we have come in less than 4 months.

I'm slowly realizing that I know enough to completely create a book from scratch all by myself. Not a lot of people, in publishing even, can do that. This is really a very well rounded program and although I often complained about having to take marketing when I don't want to go into that, I can see why Brookes students get hired so easily. We have a good knowledge of what everyone else does and how hard/labor intensive it can be and makes us better at collaborating.

I'm really looking forward to next semester, starting in 02/09. I'm taking the mandatory "New Product Development" and two electives, Children's Publishing and Digital Media Publishing. It should be really interesting.

The Long Tail

In Marketing class we also talked about "Long Tail" Marketing. You can read the original article by clicking here.

Basically, the author of the article is saying that there is more money to be made from online sales of non-hits than there is to be made from hits. His thinking is that although they are priced lower, there are so many of them you can't help but make a profit. Of course, this requires you to have plenty of bandwith and memory but that's fairly nonexpensive in comparisson to the kind of money there is to be made.

Hits make a lot of money at first but only about 20% of everything produced will be a hit. The rest will die pretty quickly and soon be out of print or otherwise unavailable. Stores like Amazon though, make pretty much everything there is available and with POD (print on demand) there is no reason for anything to ever be "out of print" again. Tools like the product recommendation program pull customers towards similar products and they become aware of less mainstream interests.

We didn't discuss this much in class although I wish we had. I'm not entirely clear with the article so I don't agree or disagree with it at this point. It seems to make sense, for music anyway. As for books, I'm not convinced at all and I don't think anyone else was either. It would be a good way to fill certain niches as the internet doesn't require people to be within a certain distance of a brick and mortar store but I think most people still prefer to buy their books from a physical store and have it immediately. They'll also tend to make more impulse buys in an actual store than online.

I think most everyone agrees going to an actual bookstore is nicer (but then go and buy online like I just did - hey! textbooks are expensive!)

There's something attractive to the idea of "everything is always available", from the buyer PoV anyway. But where does that leave quality? If you can afford to offer everything in the "off-chance it will find a buyer", then there's very little need for people such as editors and agents who separated the wheat from the chaff. I don't think it would be much good for authors either. When you're associated with crap, people assume you're crap too whether it's true or not.

So... thoughts? Comments? Explanations on how LT marketing really works?

4 Ps

The second class was Marketing Management. Well, not entirely true. We had an Excel workshop in the morning. The workshop was ok, not the most fun software to play with but a good refresher for those of us who haven't used it in years.

The most important thing we learned in the intro marketing class were the 4 "P"s. Product, Price, Place, Promotion.

What is marketing?

"Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying custormer requirements profitably." - (Chartered Institute of Marketing).

You have to find a need that you can fill adequately.

During the production driven era, you had to make do with what there was (e.g. only black cars were produced so you got a black car). During the marketing era though, things are driven by the customer's needs and wants. The focus is on the buyer and products have to fit the customer's lifestyle and provide a need and benefits. It's the beginning of diferentiation. Customer Relation Marketing is driven by loyalty and customer reltions. Meaning, try to hold on to your customers for as long as possible. Keep them coming back. An example we were given in Amazon. The "people who bought this also bought" feature can be a powerful marketing tool, when it works. Amazon recommendations don't always suit the customer.

Timing is very important in marketing. When a book hits the stores can determine whether it lives or dies. Obviously Christmas is very important but apparently, a lot of publishers have become a little rigid in that are and forget there are occasions for book selling throughout the year. If you miss the right moment, you're pretty much screwed. I better work on my scheduling skills.

Week 1 summary

*downs a cup of hot Blackberry & Nettle tea*

Well, that was the end of week one and I feel remarkable more evil. Well, not a lot more evil but some. I've been to the pub more times than I can count, got incredibly drunk once and did a lot of stupid things (I wish I could say I'll never drink again but it would be a lie). Basically, I'm really enjoying myself. Pub quizzes are fun, my team almost won but were definited in the last two rounds. We still got a lot of free beer and a fiver. Pretty lame but better than nothing. Another course team got the 45.

Here's one thing that is incredibly annoying. Money goes really, really fast. I spend as little as possible but somehow, the money just zooms by. Also, I can't seem to get a job. Some of my course mates managed to get a job within the week, I haven't even been called back for an interview. What jobs there are are pretty lame with low pay and either too many hours or not enough. It would still be enough to eat on but the hours are mostly all wrong for my schedule.

We've had a couple or really lovely sunny days. Yes, just after google announced it was officially autumn *grin*. UK weather is being rebellious. Still, the trees are starting to redden a bit but they are mostly green. I have a pretty nice view from my room window. Did I mention I have a private bathroom? Well, it bears repeating, except, of course, I have to keep it clean myself. Nothing is ever easy, is it?

Anyway, in more interesting news, all my classes were very interesting. It still looks very challenging but incredibly exciting as well. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to be doing this. I figure I'll write one post per class, detailing what we learned and so on.

The classes are: Editorial Management, Marketing, Design and Production (split into two). In between, we have some extra lectures occasionally and IT workshops.