Visit to Oxford University Press

On Friday we had a "visit" to Oxford University Press (OUP) for the children's module. I put visit in quotation marks because, well, they took us to a meeting room and gave us a marketing lecture. I was disappointed, I really wanted to see some of the building.

Still, the lecture was rather interesting although it only covered publicity and marketing. The marketing assistant did our M.A. last year too which gives me hope.

One of the things they insisted on was how much things cost. They handed out covers of two of their books and ask how we would market them and how much we thought everything would cost. We never got it right. Even something as small as a bookmark or a postcard was ridiculously expensive. Actually, it came up that sometimes it was the same price for bookmarks as for rucksacks! Mainly because of all the safety testing that needs to be done on anything that might go to children. Which I guess makes sense but sometimes it can be a little exaggerated.

Also, they gave us some figures for marketing budgets for individual titles. I know this is gonna kill some author who'll stumble by this post but: some books have big marketing budgets and some have none. And quality doesn't necessarily come into the equation. Publishers have to do those books that are easier to market widely and that's not always the quality book but the one with an author who's done something interesting or who's a great public speaker. With the kind of money available, you have to get value for money.

I know it is unfair. I'm something of a writer myself and someday, I hope my book will be one with a marketing budget.

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.

Books don't need to be perfect

I bet you authors are getting all angry at me for the title. Don't worry, as far as your part of the work goes, you don't have to change your work ethics. Make your manuscript as good as you can make it.

There are some reason why a book doesn't have to be worked to perfection by the editor and subsequent fiddlers. Well, one main reason anyway, MONEY! (bet you didn't see that one coming)
Editing, copyediting and proofreading take time and with a tight schedule, there can come a time when the editor says "screw this, send it to the printer". Writers get nervous about their manuscript and would probably go on editing and tweaking forever if their editor didn't stop them. During the copyediting (in which the content is edited) stage this is what's supposed to be done. However, the work moves on to proofreading stage after the typesetting. This stage is to fix miskeyings etc NOT CONTENT. The author gets to look at the proofs and mark mistakes however, unless there is a huge mistake in the content (like placing one country on the wrong continent), this is it, you don't change anything but the typos. Sorry, move on.

So: copyediting = content change
proofreading = typo repair

Depending on what type of book it is and how much it's going to cost at the end, the proofreader might do a more or less intense job. This is why you sometimes come across typos and nasty spelling errors, bad punctuation, rotated letters etc. when you're reading a book. It's not that the proofreader is bad or that the author sucks. It's just that it was decided that the book didn't need that kind of quality and investment. It's not that it's a bad book. It's just, as a reader, you expect certain novels to be at certain price. Well, we gotta get it to be that price and still make a profit, we spend too much on it, we're going to pass that on to you, the customer.

Oh, here's a little something I don't think most authors know. Of course, when your book is being published, the money should go towards the author. However, at proofreading stage, there is a small percentage of costs that are allowed for the author to make changes to content, once that bit of money is spent, the author can be asked to pay for any additional costs due to their changes in the text. This is to curb the authors natural instinct to play with their work. At this point, you just have to trust that it's as good as you're going to make it (this time around anyway). Nothing sleazy about the practice.

It's November! Yay!

Yes! It's NaNoWriMo!

I don't know why I get ridiculously excited about it when I'm not going to be participating (much). I love NaNoWriMo but this year there's too much work and a new boyfriend I'd rather not ignore for the sake of bad prose. Or maybe we could co-write a really bad, sappy romance novel... hmmm...

This has been reading week and it has not been relaxing in spite of not having classes. We had a value engineering exercise assigned. Value engineering is about as exciting as it sounds. Basically, it's all about calculating what happens to costs when you have longer or shorter print runs and when you pick certain formats and types of papers.

It's all very boring spreadsheets and Excel work.

However, it is interesting to see how the unit price of each book goes down when the number of books go up. Basically, the more books you print out, the lower the price of each individual book. And this is because there are set initial costs for setting up the printing equipment as well as set editorial costs which are what they are regardless of whether you print 10000 or 1000 books.

They look something like this: 850GBP for the first 1ooo copies

But then, for a certain amount extra (the run-on), the price is much lower, e.g. 35GBP per 1000 run-on.
The figures are examples only, there's no set amount as it depends on many factors such as paper, format, printer etc.

This is tricky in a way because although more books means you can sell each for less (usually good marketing-wise), you also have to pay more in advance before you see any money back from the book sales. It's a balancing act between how much you want to spend outright, how good a book you want to produce and what you want the retail price to be. I might post my spreadsheet after everyone's handed theirs in if anyone wants to see what it looks like and make their own conclusions from it.

It's really quite interesting but I was promised no maths and I was clearly lied to.

I think it might be informative for authors in particular as there are figures about royalties. They can also see who's really making money out of their prose (and it's not really the publisher, sadly).

More Marketing just for Marian :D

Last post on marketing for a little while :) I'll go on to other fascinating things like "the purpose of page numbers" or "what tables of content are for" or how "a book needs a spine". Yup, we talked about these in class.

---

Now that I've been doing some actual marketing work on mondays, the kind that someone will actually profit by, I'm starting to understand some things in a more instinctive way. Don't talk to me about PEST and SWOT and crazy spreadsheets though.
I've mostly been doing research, making sure the journals we mail review copies or review invitations too are appropriate for the book we're trying to sell. With a small academic publisher, the list is fairly small but it can be pretty confusing because there's a lot of crossover between subjects.
However, it is crucial that you send the right book to the right place. First, because you want them to be read by people who are interested in the subject, second because you don't want to send expensive books to people who will not review them (or return them). If your books is under 15 GBP, you have a bit of room but if the book is over 100GBP and your print-run is about 250 copies, every single one counts.

Even so, marketing is expensive. I mentioned in another post that for one of the books we do, we sent out 5 copies, totaling about 500GBP. Then there is the paper and all the fliers we sent out to conferences, the order forms (with discounts!), the going to the conferences... This is why authors can't be expected to do the marketing of their own books themselves. They play their part but there's only so much they can do and so far they can go. No publisher can survive by selling their books only in the immediate vicinity of the author. It wouldn't even make up the costs of printing.

Books are made by marketers

So, as promised, a post about marketing. By the way, thanks to the people who have commented on recent posts, it's good to know the voices in my head aren't all imaginary. I've been thinking about the environment since the talk and I think I might do some more posts on that. It really bothers me that the world has to suffer so I can have my beloved books. I'm going to do some research first though. So, if you're interested in the subject, stick around.

--------

Now, back to the topic at hand. Marketing.

At first I thought the practical side of selling books would be incredibly boring. I like the idea of brainstorming to come up with creative ideas to make people see why they should buy my product but the actual number juggling? Ew.

Learning about PEST and SWOT analyses has not helped to tell the truth (nor reading through a MINTEL report on publishing - dry and painful). But overall, it's not so bad. I find I can enjoy it on a different level (do not quote Joey Tribiani at me!). For the record, PEST stands for "political, environmental, social, technological" and SWOT is ... I forgot. I'll get back to you on that one. Basically, you find factors that affect your company and the product you're trying to sell, both external and internal.

Oh! SWOT is "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats". Go me!

Anyway, all of this is important because marketing basically is publishing nowadays. Supposedly, this doesn't mean it is the end of creativity and literary quality in favor of cash. Books compete with a lot of other more or less necessary (or made to seem so) products and unless publishing is really effective in its marketing, books will quickly be left behind. You don't need books to survive, even if us bookworms think so.

Marketing is customer driven. You concentrate on them and their needs and try to find what aspect of your product is going to convince them to shell out their money for it. Therefore, it can sometimes seem that marketing is all about pushing people to buy things unwillingly. This is not so. You can't sell someone something they really do not want. I'll quote Alison Baverstock's book "How to Market Books":

"Marketing is about offering:
- the right people
- the right product by saying
- the right things in
- the right way
- at the right time and
- in the right place."

Most of those are fairly self-explanatory. What is meant by "the right things" is that you don't list every single benefit to owning your product. Instead, you pick the few most relevant. Does it come with extra items (CD/CD-Rom etc)? Will it make you smarter/prettier/more popular? etc. And this has to be said "the right way". This means you have to figure out what will convey your message more clearly. Is it in a poster? With what type of font? Writing or images only?

All of this takes a ridiculous amount of research. First, on your product. What is it? What does it do? etc. Then, on the market. Who's your target audience? What do they need? How much money do they have? You have to know the market really well and this means doing the legwork. Go to bookstores and see what people are buying. Do online surveys or paper surveys to ask people's opinions. Get a focus group going (although this costs money and we don't like that in the industry ;) ) and surf the websites of your competition to see what they are doing and how to beat them.

I have some homework to do now. I'll post more on the subject if anyone is interested :)

The Three Marketeers

I like the word "marketeer", sounds exciting. Makes marketing sounds like it might be an adventure. I guess it is for the people who've chosen to make it their career. It seems interesting, don't get me wrong, but sooooo hard! How do they juggle so many things at once?

I'm about to find out, I suppose as I just got offered a work experience placement at a local small publisher which is going to be mostly marketing with some editorial. It'll be the first time in years that I do 9-5 and the first time at all that said hours are not school related. Oh yeah, I went to the interview yesterday, I was so nervous and unprepared but my secret superpower is looking more confident the less confident I feel. It's actually very useful as far as lame superpowers go.

Hopefully, I will be able to do the job. I didn't understand exactly what they were talking about when they were explaining the job. I guess I'll find out next monday (ugh, will have to wake up extra early to catch the bus).

Work experience is a great thing. Especially when you have never had any kind of job before, like me. The professors say that even without any, just going through the Brookes M.A. in Publishing will get us a job. "You will all get a job," she said. It's very encouraging and the stats say 96% of us get a job. I don't know what's up with the last 4%, did they die or something? With the epidemic of fresher's flu that's going on, I wouldn't be that surprised.

I have to go to have breakfast - er, change first, my jammies do not entirely cover all of that should be - and then class but I'll write more about marketing this afternoon unless the birthday/block party starts earlier than I expect. Yeah, studying publishing is so hard. There's all these parties to attend...

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.