Challenges in an extraordinary year

There is no escaping the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic has badly damaged many publishing businesses. In a survey of nearly 130 Independent Publishers Guild (IPG) members in October−November 2020, nearly three-quarters (71%) said that they have seen their print sales fall in the last six months. The closure of bricks-and-mortar bookshops, the collapse of Bertrams and the cancellation of festivals, launches, conferences and other events cut off important sales channels. There were severe problems throughout the supply chain, and more than two-thirds of independents say they have experienced distribution challenges of some kind in the last six months.

These challenges have been echoed around the world. With so many retailers closed, widespread delays to printing and freight and the abandonments of the London and Frankfurt book fairs, both exports and rights sales have been compromised.

This has led to around one-third (32%) of publishers reporting problems with credit control. Aside from the consequences of failures of businesses like Bertrams, some IPG members reported that some customers are taking much longer to pay, which puts cashflow − a concern for small businesses in particular at the best of times − under more pressure.

All these difficulties have prompted over one-third (37%) of publishers to take advantage of the government’s furlough scheme, and some IPG members have taken government-backed loans, secured grants or found other types of financial support to sustain them through the pandemic.

Reasons to be cheerful

But while 2020 has brought unprecedented threats, it has also highlighted the resilience of publishers. The independent sector has always been resourceful and agile in responding to challenges and finding the upsides − and this year they have grasped opportunities in two areas in particular.

The first is on the digital side of publishing. While print sales have been reduced, half of IPG members (51%) said that their digital sales have increased in the last six months. With the physical supply chain so slow, publishers have been selling more ebooks and investing in ecommerce platforms that help them trade direct with consumers. Independents have been very creative in their online marketing too, using websites, social media and video-based events to fill promotional gaps. Publishing’s migration to digital sales and promotion was already well underway, but the pandemic has compressed change that might have taken years into a matter of months.

The second positive development in the year of Covid-19 has been the evolution of working habits. Nine in ten IPG members (88%) say their switch to home working has been successful, and video conferencing and cloud-based technology have helped to maintain productivity while improving work-family balance for a lot of publishing professionals. A new flexibility in working styles is very likely to endure long after offices properly reopen.

Home working doesn’t suit everyone of course, and it brings with it the challenge of keeping people engaged. The pandemic has reminded us that publishing is very much a people industry, and that all staff − especially those who have been furloughed for any length of time − need to feel connected to their work, motivated by a purpose and empowered to do their jobs.

This has made online events like the IPG’s Virtual Spring and Autumn Conferences, where people can connect with others and feel part of a community, very important. It makes the work of the Publishing Training Centre even more important too, and the very successful switch to virtual delivery of courses has been crucial in helping publishers to maintain their skills and learn from one another.

Looking to the future

If we can maintain our connections in these and other ways, there is good reason to be confident about the future. Over half of IPG members reported that they feel either very optimistic (9%) or quite optimistic (47%) about the next six months, and only 15% are pessimistic. There is still a long way to go before publishing returns to anything like normal, and some things in the industry will have changed forever. But with the support of the IPG, PTC and others, we feel sure that independent publishers will not simply survive the pandemic but thrive again afterwards.

Bridget Shine is chief executive of the IPG.

For more about the IPG, click here. 

Around the world

In the UK, the publishing and book industry is recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic. Coronavirus caused bookshops to close, publication dates to be pushed forward, and had a huge impact on teaching and learning. With Bertram’s collapsing into administration, the impact was most felt on independent publishers, already suffering from the loss of bookshops sales. But shops are now open, Amazon is selling books again, the bigger publishers are posting better-than-expected results, and there is a bonanza of new autumn titles.

In the US, the AAP reports a decline of 4.2% in revenues comparing the period January−June 2019−20. Whilst sales of consumer books have increased year on year, and ebook and audio download revenues are up, education sectors have suffered the most. Overall, the UK and US industries are faring much better than in other places around the world.

African countries have perhaps been hardest hit by the pandemic. Their book markets are 90% educational, with a heavy reliance on print. With schools closing, the market has shrunk considerably. This has advanced the need for digitisation of Africa’s educational sector, which has begun in some countries, but is recognised to be a huge priority for publishers and governments alike.

India saw a complete halt in the market for six weeks, including online sales via Amazon and Flipkart. A cyclone in Kolkata wiped out bookstores and publisher warehouses. A new education policy may mean a new curriculum, and could also affect the already devastated educational books market.

In the Far East, where many bookshops are now open again and online book retail is growing, distributors are still reporting a big decline in book sales to bookstores. It’s a market where customers like to feel books before they buy, but people are still afraid to enter shopping malls and stores.

The Middle Eastern publishing industry has another problem: its reliance on book fairs to sell to the consumer. Every country in the Arab World has a book fair which caters to the general public and local professionals, such as teachers and librarians who use the fair to buy their year’s supply of books. No book fair has taken pace since the Casablanca International Book Fair in February 2020, leading to a complete wipe out of sales for Arab publishers.

The new normal

Book fairs around the world have come to a standstill, and most are experimenting with an online presence, both for content and rights trading. Two recent examples are the Moscow International Book Fair and the Nigeria Book Fair. The Tbilisi Book Fair in Georgia had a physical presence in September. For the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, there will be an ambitious online offering, including matchmaking tools.

The other major impact for international trade has been the cost of freight. Some distributors are reporting air-freight prices increasing threefold, making it unsustainable and affecting new titles reaching the market and stock control. In markets such as New Zealand, this is having a positive impact for domestic publishers, whose books are often overshadowed by big names imported from the UK and USA. Ultimately, this will impact the consumer, who will be faced with shifting to digital editions where possible, or increased pricing.

On a more positive note, we have had a summer of online literature festivals beamed into our living rooms. For those who would love to travel to the Jaipur Literature Festival, or experience the Hay or Edinburgh Literature Festivals, the world has opened up. Authors are gaining global audiences in ways they could not imagine in the physical world. Whilst digital may not replace the actual festival experience, for authors, it has its advantages.

Publishers have also sought solace in their communities. Local groups such as language publishers in India now meet regularly to discuss shared opportunities. A global network has emerged through a Facebook group I helped co-found called “Publishers Without Borders”. Publishing has always been a collaborative and social business, and the pandemic has only strengthened that sentiment.

What will emerge from this experience? Will we see a fast-track shift to digital consumption of books? Will local print-on-demand replace the shipping of physical books around the world? Do we need so many book fairs to carry out our business trading? Will literature festivals now be a digital-only phenomenon? We can be sure that we are all in this together, and there will always be a need for high-quality content. Publishing and bookselling around the world will continue to innovate and serve the reader and will be stronger as a result.

Emma House is Managing Consultant of Oreham Group and a Trustee of the PTC. Follow Publishers Without Borders on Facebook.

At The Literary Consultancy (TLC), we oversee the writing and sending of 500−600 manuscript assessment reports a year. Each manuscript is hand-matched by our team to the editor (or Reader) we feel is most suited to the job, to ensure a ‘best fit’ that will serve the writer. All reports are checked before being sent on by the office. It’s a delicate process, but a hugely enriching one, and one that can be transformative for the writer. To have an editor whose skills and affinities align with the writer and the work giving objective, professional feedback is a gift, and we’re very lucky to have been able to facilitate this process for the last 25 years.

Manuscript assessment – a huge amount of skill

Manuscript assessment isn’t governed by the same rules as copy-editing or proofreading, but that isn’t to say it doesn’t require a huge amount of skill. There’s a great deal we can learn from this process that can be usefully applied to all editorial service provision. Mostly, this comes down to understanding how best to serve both the writer, and the writing.

For our Readers, who are all experienced freelancers with other work either as professional writers, teachers of creative writing in academic institutions, book reviewers or publishing professionals, the feedback process can sometimes feel like it’s happening in a silo. They don’t read each other’s work – we are after all dealing with sensitive information and intellectual property – and so it can be hard to know what’s working well, and to learn from each other.

The same happens in the wider world of freelance editing. Even specific skilled work like copy-editing and proofreading that carry the option of qualifications with organisations like the PTC could have more peer-to-peer learning, to ensure we’re delivering top-notch services that are attentive to the nuances of the landscape and the shifting needs of writers. At TLC we actively partner on research projects with organisations like Kingston University and the Royal Society of Literature (A Room of My Own), to stay up to date with the key issues facing writers today. And we keep a close eye on any trends emerging from our own daily conversations with writers.

Nurturing a strong author-editor relationship

The most important thing is to remember that there is a lot of anxiety when it comes to the writing process. Writers are often dealing with self-doubt, sometimes imposter syndrome, and thinking they have to achieve a certain outcome to have ‘made it’. When they come for feedback, often writers are also looking for validation of their effort. It can be easy to forget this when we are (necessarily) safeguarding ourselves as freelancers, processing incoming jobs and sending out reports and marked-up work as quickly as we can.

The balance is hard to strike, and it’s a lot to ask of a freelancer, especially if you’re a sole trader. That’s why we set up the Being A Writer platform, which focuses on helping writers to cultivate creativity and build resilience, empowering them to develop a toolkit to better navigate an industry that is trying to change, but which still isn’t completely transparent to the average person jotting down ideas in a notebook.

Three key factors for excellent editorial service

It can be good to have some touch points to keep things on track and delivering at the highest possible level. For us, there are three constants to providing an excellent editorial service, and they are based on a solid understanding of:

* What writers say they want;
* What writers actually need; and
* How to navigate the gaps in between.

The advantage of working at consultancy level is this mix of bird’s-eye view (the landscape, the market) with on-the-ground, face-to-face contact with writers (the personal, the holistic). We regularly bring our freelance pool together, previously at our offices but more recently online, in order to share learning and establish best practice that then gets embedded into TLC’s editorial guidelines, which get updated every three years or so. These include our key reading principles, which touch on both editorial points, and how to handle and manage expectations and anxieties. That’s where we come in as a consultancy, too; as a second layer to help make sure this process is as supported as possible, for the writer and for the Reader.

A little TLC goes a long way

There are some things that are consistently true about best editorial practice, and some things that feel newer, around identifying barriers that we might not as an industry have always been attuned to. It’s critical in this environment of hope and rejection, fear and ego, that we understand that what we are doing as editors is so much more than mechanical. We are supporting creative writers’ dreams, bringing them in line with the visions the writers have for them, within the parameters and expectations of an at times brutal market. We could all do with a little more TLC in our lives, I think, and I truly believe that editorial practice is enriched when we remind ourselves of this.

Aki Schilz is director of TLC, the UK's first and leading manuscript assessment service.

Follow TLC on Twitter @TLCUK.

With the vast majority of publishing people currently working from home, flexible working has become the norm and we’ve all had to embrace a more agile way of doing business. But have you ever been tempted to go one step further and set up on your own?

Back in 2017, I took that plunge, stepping down from my role as Editorial Director at academic publisher Rowman & Littlefield International to set up my own business. Parrot Street Book Club is a subscription book club for children aged 5 to 11. Each month we send our subscribers a brand-new book to keep, along with an activity pack with games, puzzles, facts, craft activities and more, all inspired by that month’s book.

My new venture is quite a departure from my old life. In a few short months, I went from commissioning academic monographs to buying and selling children’s books. But as it turned out, the skills I had acquired in my editorial career set me up very well for launching Parrot Street. So, what is it about publishing people that makes us such good entrepreneurs?

We are agile

Whatever your role, whether you work for a small independent publisher or a bigger organisation, the chances are you’ve had regular exposure to many areas of the business you work in. Even if you are early in your career, you will understand much more about how your business works than you might realise. As publishing employees, we have to be agile, often assuming a range of creative, financial and operational responsibilities.

We’re used to building business plans and we know how to get to the nub of what makes a project unique. I commissioned hundreds of new titles in my editorial career. For every book I commissioned, I had to run a Profit & Loss, assess the market, and build a brand. The original business plan for Parrot Street and the brand identity we have built for our children’s book club were devised in exactly the same way, albeit it on a larger scale.

We are expert networkers

Publishing is a collaborative business and publishing people thrive in a supportive environment. We’re all used to networking and to working in multidisciplinary teams. As an editor, I collaborated with authors, academic readers and in-house colleagues from across the spectrum of our business. I learnt very quickly that being a good editor is as much about building communities as it is about commissioning good books.

Those people skills came into their own when we launched Parrot Street. Having the confidence to reach out and to be persuasive is essential for getting any new initiative off the ground. I had spent 15 years building a community of authors, readers and collaborators around my publishing lists. We applied the same principle to Parrot Street, building a community that includes parents, teachers and children, as well as authors, illustrators and publishers.

We are creative, passionate – and we don’t give up!

Being a successful entrepreneur isn’t just about paying close attention to the numbers (although that’s important, of course!). It’s just as much about being creative, having ideas, and being prepared to experiment. Publishing is a creative industry. We work with words, images and ideas on a daily basis. And we tend to be passionate about what we do, which matters enormously when you are running your own business.

An entrepreneur must be prepared to take risks – and to fail. Every book I published had an element of risk attached to it. For every bestseller, there is the book that bombed. We’re used to taking those risks and bouncing back from them, and that has set me up very well for life as a small business owner.

As any independent publisher or bookseller will tell you, running your own business is hard work, but publishing folk are resilient. At Parrot Street we regularly collaborate with independent publishers and other small businesses (shout out to our friends at Firefly Press, Old Barn Books, Wacky Bee Books and Knights Of, amongst others). They all work exceptionally hard and care about what they do. They’re my favourite people to work with.

If you’re tempted to strike out on your own, but aren’t sure if you’re ready, remember not to underestimate how much you already know about running a business from your current role. Have the confidence to use your network, connect and surround yourself with supportive people. And, of course, make sure you really care about what you do and why you’re doing it. For my business partner and me, it was our belief that every child should be a reader and that we could help them discover the incredible, inspiring and diverse array of children’s books and authors out there that drove us forward.

Go for it and good luck!

Sarah Campbell is co-founder of Parrot Street Book Club. Follow them on twitter or Instagram, @parrot_street.