Jane Morrow BDEF report 2012 - Australian Publishers Association

Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship Report 2011–12 

Going Digital: 

An Australian editor’s observations of 

developments in US publishing 

Jane Morrow 

Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12 

1

Contents 

Thanks 

3 

1. Introduction 5 

2. A note on the Fellowship 7 

3. Where I started from 8 

4. My big questions 9 

5. My plan 10 

6. Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, New York 10 

Illustrated children’s books in digital formats 

13 

What about enhanced ebooks? 

14 

What about iBooks Author? 

15 

7. Penguin placement, New York 16 

Differences in editorial departments between the US and Australia 16 

Structural and workflow changes in publishing houses in the digital era 17 

8. Other New York publisher visits and meetings 20 

Workman 

21 

Touchstone/Fireside (Simon & Schuster) 

22 

Open Road Integrated Media and publishing royalty 

23 

The elephant in the room: Amazon 

25 

Barnes & Noble and the retail situation 

26 

Mike Shatzkin 

27 

9. Chronicle Books, San Francisco 29 

10. Some thoughts to sum up 31 

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Jane Morrow, Beatrice Davis Editorial Report 2011–12

Thanks 

My deepest thanks to the sponsors of the Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship: the 

Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, Allen & Unwin, Random House 

Australia, HarperCollins Australia, Penguin Group (Australia), Murdoch Books, the 

Institute of Professional Editors, Hardie Grant Books, Harlequin Enterprises 

(Australia), Text Publishing Company, Scribe Publications, Finch Publishing, Black 

Dog Books, Melbourne University Publishing and the University of Queensland 

Press. 

Thanks also to the members of the selection committee: Sue Hines, Mandy Brett, 

Lucy Byrne, Ali Lavau, Alexandra Nahlous, Tracy O’Shaughnessy, Dee Read and Lisa 

Riley. 

To Dee Read at the Australian Publishers Association, for being like a dog with a 

bone to make sure this extraordinary opportunity continues to exist for Australian 

editors, thank you. 

Without the incredible encouragement of my former publishing manager at Penguin, 

Ingrid Ohlsson, I would not even have approached the starting line. Kaz Cooke 

cheered from the sidelines and gave much-‐needed feminist pep talks. Robin Morrow 

was my constant sounding board, emotional support and blog proofreader. Alison 

Cowan and Ariane Durkin kept me sane, in touch with Australia and told me to keep 

writing, which I was very tempted to give up on. Nicola Young saved me from myself 

by being an editor’s editor. But my husband, Nathan Buckle, with his we’ll-‐cross-that-‐bridge-‐when-‐we-‐come-‐to-‐it, 

over-‐the-‐top level of support made the whole 

thing, with a young family, not just possible but pleasurable. I am in your debt. 

Thank you to those who gave of their time and advice before I left for the US: 

Gabrielle Coyne, Laura Harris, Sue Hines, Maree McCaskill, Alexandra Nahlous and 

Dan Ruffino. 

Finally, thanks to the many talented editors and other publishing types in the US 

who agreed to meet me and gave so richly of their knowledge, opinions and support. 


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At Penguin: Molly Barton, Leigh Butler, Hank Cochrane, Kathryn Court, Jason Craig, 

Colin Dickerman, Meredith Dros, Thomas Dussel, Hal Fessenden, Ann Godoff, 

Michael Green, Lauri Hornik, Susan Petersen Kennedy, Patty King, Meg Leder, 

Colleen Lindsay, Catharine Lynch, Katherine McCahill, Tim McCall, Barbara Marcus, 

John Morgan, Stephen Morrison, Stephen Morrow (no relation), Megan Newman, 

Adam Royce, Stephanie Sabol, Dan Sanicola, Ben Schrank, Ben Sevier, Bill Shinker, 

Chris Smythe, Melissa Vuernick and Adrian Zackheim. 

At Random House: Julie Bennett (Ten Speed), Pamela Cannon, Susan Kamil, Aaron 

Wehner (Ten Speed) and Ranjana Wingender. 

At Workman: Savannah Ashour, Andrea Fleck-‐Nisbet, Lia Ronnen, Nancy Soriano 

and Christina Stoll. 

At Chronicle: Johann Alqvist, Guinevere de la Mare, Lorena Jones, Sarah Malarkey, 

Melissa Manlove, Victoria Rock and Ginee Seo. 

At Simon & Schuster: Lance Fitzgerald, Michelle Howry and Sally Kim. 

Elsewhere: Jane Friedman (Open Road), Jill Grinberg and Cheryl Pientka (Jill 

Grinberg Literary Management), Dan Halpern (Ecco), Judith Jones (ex Knopf), Nancy 

Lambert (Abrams), Karen Murgolo (Grand Central Life & Style), Neal Porter 

(Roaring Brook Press), Brett Sandusky (Macmillan New Ventures), Will Schwalbe 

(Cookstr), Mike Shatzkin, Jane Starr (literary scout) and Matt Weiland (WW Norton). 

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1. Introduction 

The particular time in which I visited the US (mid-‐February – end April 2012) was a 

time of crisis and anxiety in the publishing industry. I was acutely aware that I was 

given access to several publishing houses at just such a politically hot time. It meant 

that I had to think very carefully about everything I wrote in my blog (facetiously 

titled What Would Beatrice Do?) during the trip. 

Not that things have eased off in the weeks since. 

By mid February The Library Wars were raging. In March, Random House quietly 

began to charge public libraries three times the retail price for ebooks. Five big 

publishers pulled back from supplying new ebooks to public libraries. Library 

associations were vocal in their dismay. 

Two weeks after I interviewed the president of Penguin, the Department of Justice 

judgement came out, accusing five of the Big Six publishers (the ‘Big Six’ refers to 

Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster 

– Random House was the only Big Six publisher to be excluded from the lawsuit) as 

well as Apple of collusion over ebook pricing. Penguin was one of the companies to 

state that they would fight their case. 

When I asked questions about the retail situation, more than once the answer was 

words to the effect of: ‘Off the record, I hate Amazon. On the record, they’re our most 

valued customer.’ 

I went to the US on an editorial fellowship. I am an editor and have worked as such 

for most of my working life. But the nature of the changes in the industry in recent 

months and years made my trip investigative of the publishing industry as a whole, 

not just the role of the editor. I wanted to know what skills editors and publishers 

needed in order to survive and thrive. In previous years, an editor travelling to the 

US on the Beatrice Davis might not have been overly concerned with things like 

format pricing, changes in distribution or upheavals in the retail landscape. But right 

now the individual issues of ebook pricing, the massive change from print-‐only to 


5

digital distribution with print-‐on-‐demand, and a retail sector where hundreds of 

bookshops across the country have closed in the last two years, threaten the US 

publishing industry as a whole – and the Australian industry by extension, in this 

increasingly globalised market. It would have been blinkered of me simply to bury 

myself in a manuscript and ignore what was going on down the corridor. Or perhaps 

it’s more that I didn’t want to. There was a very real sense while I was there that 

publishers must continue to adapt, almost on a daily basis, or else shrink and 

shrink fast. 

I saw plenty of evidence of significant structural changes that have taken place in 

several US publishing houses, especially if you compare them to Australian 

publishers. It was also very apparent that there was a high state of awareness by 

everyone across publishing departments that their world was changing. But I didn’t 

see a revolution. Where I personally saw the most innovation was in businesses and 

thinkers outside the major publishing houses. 

Print is still the overwhelmingly more profitable side of the publishing business and 

digital experimentation is very costly. Publishers have had their fingers burnt many 

times. But when (and my trip to the US convinced me that it’s not a matter of if but 

when) print sales drop significantly across all genres, say in a world where Amazon 

utterly dominates retail globally, and tablet devices are in every handbag or 

backpack, the question is how publishers will create viable businesses. My fear – 

which I must say was not allayed by my experiences in the US – was that publishers 

were overwhelmingly concerned with maintaining their viable businesses, despite 

much evidence pointing to a future where this won’t be possible, rather than 

creating new ways of doing things. 

I did have several surprisingly reassuring experiences, however. When I asked a 

publishing director at Chronicle Books whether there was a strong sense of 

publishing houses fighting for their lives, she responded, ‘The hand-‐wringing has 

morphed into acceptance and readjustment.’ And that is certainly what I saw at 

Chronicle. 

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And when I asked a publisher in a different company whether they found 

themselves needing to justify the position of the publisher in the chain between 

author and reader, she responded ‘Oh, we dealt with that three years ago.’ That 

afternoon she emailed me a document she had used years before on ‘the role of the 

publisher in the value chain’. (I note, however, that since my visit, another publisher, 

Random House, has released a series of ‘Inside Random House’ videos on YouTube 

(http://tinyurl.com/7g7b5jx), which explain step-‐by-‐step the role that the publisher 

plays.) 

My impression is that we in Australia are a year or two behind the US and could 

learn from their experience (and mistakes), perhaps in picking which battles to fight 

with the most energy. I hope that my time in the US as a Beatrice Davis Fellow, and 

the following report, may be of some help in this process. 

2. A note on the Fellowship 

I first heard about the Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship (BDEF) back in about 

1999 when I was just starting to work in the publishing industry. One sweaty 

summery evening, in a bookshop in Sydney’s north, children’s publisher Erica 

Wagner (then Irving) enthused about the eye-‐opening trip she had recently returned 

from, where she had worked alongside and learnt from some of the publishers she 

admired most in the world. My interest was piqued. Whose wouldn’t be? An award 

for a mid-‐career editor of a fully funded opportunity of a lifetime: to meet, 

investigate and work alongside publishers in the biggest English-‐language market. 

Amazing! I think I probably had the BDEF in the back of my mind since that day, and 

it is one of the reasons I admired and wanted to be involved in the publishing 

industry. 

Jump forward to 2012 and publishers are making cuts all over the place, including 

many senior editorial roles. I believe that especially at times like these, educational 

awards such as the prestigious BDEF and the Residential Editorial Program held at 

Varuna, which provides such valuable mentorship for talented editors, are all the 

more important. They offer editors the chance to step outside the companies they 

work for and learn from others in the industry. They acknowledge the way editors 


7

contribute to the literary culture of Australia with a nod to the past (thank you, 

Beatrice) and enthusiasm for the future. 

At a time when Australian publishers, more and more, need to be ‘across’ 

developments overseas, so that they can act to maintain their markets and value, 

I believe overseas fellowships (the BDEF and Unwin Trust Fellowship) are of special 

value. 

The fellowships also do something rather controversial: they encourage a spirit of 

sharing in the Australian publishing industry. I fear that embattled US publishers, 

under prosecution for collusion, are tightening their defences and sharing less and 

less with each other. From what I can gather from the UK industry, however, there is 

a stronger sense among publishers that they are in this together and may as well 

learn from each other as much as possible, as evidenced by the digital communities 

they support and the attendance of senior executives as speakers at conferences. My 

hope for the Australian industry is that we might follow the UK’s lead on this point. 

The BDEF in particular also ties in neatly with the Visiting International Publishers 

program that the Australia Council for the Arts runs in conjunction with Australian 

writers’ festivals. I met several editors and publishers in New York who had been to 

Australia on one of these visits and were therefore far more likely to take me under 

their wing and share what they do, since they had some affinity with our publishing 

scene. Others I met wanted to know how to get into such a program! 

Everyone I spoke with in the US about the BDEF was in awe of the program and 

without exception wished they had something similar. 

3. Where I started from 

For 13 years I have worked as an editor of chiefly nonfiction books – both narrative 

and illustrated books. While working for small co-‐edition publisher Elwin Street in 

London I attended several international book fairs. Stepping into those vast book 

fair ‘hangars’ was enough to make an editor from Australia feel very small indeed 

(as well as to impress upon me that there needed to be a damned good reason to 

8 


ing any new book into the world). Australian publishers can’t command the print 

runs of the US, UK and Germany. And we don’t have all the ereading devices 

currently available to readers in the US and UK. In addition to this the Australian 

book-‐buying public, with a strong currency in its back pocket and a recognition that 

books are especially expensive in Australia, is more and more willing to buy online 

from overseas retailers. 

Publishers of illustrated books have the additional challenge of trying to make sound 

business decisions when the technology isn’t quite there yet to produce digital 

products that are genuinely satisfying. 

There are many ways in which we in Australian publishing can be left feeling like 

toddlers pressing our noses up against the bars in the fence while the big kids are 

playing in the schoolyard. I set out for my US trip with the assumption that we in 

Australia are a year or two behind the US in terms of many of the changes taking 

place in our industry. But also with the belief that perhaps that’s not such a bad 

thing. Sometimes it’s handy to have an older sibling who can try new things and 

make all the mistakes before it’s your turn. 

4. My big questions 

I wanted to explore: 

• What structural changes are big publishers making in response to the digital 

era? How are they adapting and remaking themselves as publishers across 

multiple media? 

• What is it like being an editor of nonfiction in the US right now? Are their 

roles changing significantly and, if so, in what ways? 

• In particular, how are publishers of illustrated books innovating? What has 

worked and what hasn’t? 

• We know that fiction is being read more and more in ebook format and that 

formats are somewhat ‘sorted’ for fiction, but what is the likely future for 

illustrated books – from illustrated nonfiction for adults through to 

children’s? 


9

In my project application for the Fellowship I assumed illustrated children’s books 

could be put in the same category as adult illustrated books – I was to change my 

opinion on this later. 

5. My plan 

My plan was to spend seven weeks in New York and three in San Francisco. The trip 

was to begin with the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, followed by a 

three-‐week placement at Penguin, another three-‐week placement at Ecco 

(HarperCollins) and a final three-‐week placement at Chronicle in San Francisco. 

In the grand tradition of previous BDEF trips, not everything ran to plan and I found 

adaptability to be crucial. 

6. Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, New York 

You know an industry is in a state of existential questioning when conferences pop 

up all over the place and are attended en masse. I was interested in going to one of 

the digital publishing conferences currently running in the US. We’ve got nothing 

like them in Australia. When I mentioned this to Kate Eltham (then from the 

Queensland Writers Centre), she said I should go to the three-‐day Tools of Change 

(TOC) Conference run by O’Reilly, because ‘It tells publishers what they need to 

hear, not what they want to hear.’ At any rate, I couldn’t be in New York in January, 

when the other major conference, Digital Book World, is held, so that decided it. 

If it was sensory overload outside the building for TOC, held at the Marriott, Times 

Square, it was brain overload at the sessions inside. They should have called Day 1 

Geek Day. This was the day for workshops on epub3 and HTML5, optimising your 

website for discovery – the technical nitty-‐gritty that is now an important part of the 

world of publishers. I discovered there are people who obsess about terrible page 

breaks and image links in ebooks more than I do and it was invaluable for me as a 

non techie to gain a rudimentary grasp of the current issues in ebook production 

from these seminars. I used this new knowledge straightaway in weeks to follow, as 

10 


I helped do the quality control on ebook files at Chronicle, or when discussing file-format 

issues with publishers, sales and production people at Penguin. In many 

ways I think this basic technical knowledge will be to editors in this new digital era 

what an understanding of print processes has been to editors in previous years. 

In that first week, at TOC, I got my head around the various devices currently 

available in the US market and went into shops to play with them so I was familiar 

with how they worked. The main differences between the US and Australian 

markets at the time of my trip were that the Kindle Fire was not yet available in 

Australia and the Barnes & Noble’s Nook devices were also unavailable. 

The session at TOC that did get me furiously scribbling notes was Peter Meyers’ 

presentation called ‘Breaking the Page: how to design next-‐generation content for a 

canvas that can do much more than print’. His premise was that immersive 

literature has found its perfect form – the long-‐form book – and we shouldn’t mess 

with it. But when it comes to illustrated books, simply enhancing print files into 

ebooks for the iPad is like using a Ferrari to get to the grocery store. What is 

required instead is a ‘total reimagining of the content available in the expansive 

canvas of the tablet device’. 

Meyers pointed to stand-‐out book apps and digital books that worked – such as The 

Elements by Touch Press, The History of Jazz by 955 Dreams, and London Unfurled by 

Pan Macmillan UK – and those that didn’t, giving reasons for his assessments. He 

also gave the following as some principles and pitfalls in publishing illustrated 

nonfiction for the iPad: 

• Don’t try to replicate print. It happens so often and it’s understandable why it 

does, but it just doesn’t satisfy. 

• Meditate on the materials. Consider the particular properties of the devices 

you’re composing for and the gestures involved: swiping, tapping, pinching 

etc. 

• Consider the kind of content you have. Websites have had the benefits of 15 

years’ user experience in making them friendlier in design. We’re just at the 

beginning when it comes to digital illustrated books. 


11

• Exercise restraint. The challenge can be what to leave out. The first wave of 

experimentation was all about adding things, which can mess with the 

immersive reading experience. Don’t eject the reader from the experience of 

reading, through distracting hyperlinks. 

• Consider carefully the reading path. Remember tablets have smaller viewing 

areas than double-‐page spreads. 

• Integrate multimedia, don’t just add it. Reader disorientation happens more 

easily onscreen. 

Several of the points made by Peter Meyers were echoed by Junko Yokota, Professor 

of Reading and Language, and Director of the Center for Teaching Through 

Children’s Books, National Louis University, Chicago, Illinois, whose session on 

children’s book formats I attended on Day 2 of the conference. She criticised apps 

for children (and even some that rated highly in Kirkus Reviews – the most 

respected US online magazine for book discovery) that detract from children’s 

ability to comprehend story. She walked us through the schema-‐setting illustrations 

of the cover, endpapers, half title and title pages of a print picture book, explaining 

how a child interacts with these, compared with the disappointing stripped-‐down 

equivalent in ebook form. The message was to select carefully material that would 

do better in digital formats, to consider tablet devices as beyond-‐the-‐page 

limitations of print books, and not simply to recast and reproduce. A big concern of 

hers was to limit interactive features unless they helped with a child’s 

comprehension. 

Some of the exciting possibilities that exist in the digitisation of books for children, 

as Professor Yukota sees it, include: 

• the potential, at the click of a button, for children to experience a book in a 

different language 

• the ability for the child to be read to by the author, no matter what their 

geographic location 

• the artistic potential for books that want to break with conventional page 

formatting. 

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While Meyers’ and Yokota’s sessions were stimulating, and got me thinking of all 

kinds of possibilities for wonderful illustrated digital works, at the top of my mind 

were several crucial problems that remain for book publishers as they approach 

illustrated book content for tablet devices, among them: 

• Digital products such as these are extremely expensive to produce and there 

is no guarantee of return on investment. 

• Truly experimental digital illustrated books that have been a success are few 

and far between. No one is talking about starting a digital-‐only or digital-‐first 

illustrated list, the way they are with other genres. 

• These kinds of digital ‘books’ are totally new for publishers. Are publishers 

best placed to create these sorts of digital books in the first place? 

Illustrated children’s books in digital formats 

While I was in New York I spent some time at Barnes & Noble stores playing with 

Nook devices in their kiosks. Fixed-‐layout illustrated children’s books were featured 

prominently by the retailer and were clearly a selling point. I wonder if the devices 

are selling to families with young children. I didn’t see them much on public 

transport but I certainly saw countless Kindles. 

Michael Tamblyn, from Kobo, mentioned at the TOC conference that he expected 

devices to be available in the not-‐too-‐distant future that catered specifically to 

children of particular ages. Perhaps we will soon see a Kobo and/or Kindle for Kids. 

If and when that happens, there will surely be a surge in downloads of the sorts of 

illustrated children’s content that so far has been only a tiny proportion of the 

market – just 1 per cent of sales according to the digital sales manager for children’s 

books at one major publisher I spoke to in February. 

I believe, for this reason, that children’s books in digital form will go a different 

direction to illustrated books for adults. In my application for the BDEF, I had 

assumed that the two might have related production processes and therefore 

related futures, but as I said earlier, I have changed my mind about this. 


13

What about enhanced ebooks? 

Enhanced Editions co-‐founder Peter Collingridge was quoted in a Wall Street Journal 

article entitled ‘Blowing Up the Book’, published on 20 January 2012 

(http://tinyurl.com/878fegg), saying: ‘Consumers weren’t waking up in the morning 

going, “I really need to have Nick Cave reading his book along with a soundtrack.” 

We were solving a problem that didn’t exist.’ 

This quote rang in my ears during my weeks of inhouse placements, as I visited 

publishers who told me about their latest enhanced ebook projects. Enhancements 

often took the form of embedded video or audio in a biography title – at the time of 

my trip a total headache to get to work across the different file formats necessary for 

different devices, but hopefully soon much easier to manage with devices supporting 

the new epub3 industry-‐standard file format. 

Publishers and editors I spoke with described a surge in excitement about producing 

enhanced ebooks a couple of years ago, but added that since then interest has 

waned. Success stories for these ebooks have been few and far between – the 

Jacqueline Kennedy: In Her Own Words enhanced ebook published by Hyperion an 

oft-‐cited exception to the rule. While one might think that video content for a history 

or biography would be of great interest to ebook readers, most people I spoke with 

said there is not yet enough evidence that readers are willing to pay a few dollars 

extra for enhanced content that might have taken a book editor many, many hours 

to select and curate. 

A week after I attended TOC, I sat in the office of a publisher of young adult books 

who discussed with me his latest experimental project, which involved a print 

graphic novel with accompanying app. Several weeks after that I asked him how the 

book and app were selling. Not well was the answer. ‘My sense is that anything 

hybridised, anything weird, just is not immediately embraced by the consumer in 

the way that we hope,’ he said. 

I wonder if this situation will change as digital-‐native young people become tablet-‐ 

buying adults, or if we are best steering clear altogether of enhancing narrative 

14 


ooks. For now, I think most publishers are opting for the more conservative ‘wait 

and see’ approach. 

What about iBooks Author? 

A couple of weeks before I arrived in the US, Apple released its iBooks Author tool, 

targeted first and foremost at the textbooks market, to allow publishers and authors 

to produce illustrated ebooks that are more satisfactory for viewing on the iPad than 

the simple pdf-‐style reproductions made available to date in their fixed-‐layout 

format. It is clear that Apple also intends the tool to be used by general trade 

publishers of illustrated content. 

iBooks Author enables ebook creators to produce attractive, though limited in 

format, digital books that make the most of the iPad screen size without the 

limitations of breaking the screen into ‘double-‐page spreads’ the way fixed-‐layout 

does. Animation and slideshows of imagery can be created without the expensive 

development work usually required from out-‐of-‐house vendors. Beautiful ebooks 

can be created directly by editors and designers. 

The big downside, however, is that files cannot easily be converted from InDesign to 

iBooks Author. They first need to go back into Word or into proprietary Apple 

applications such as Keynote. And of course we’re talking about creating a particular 

file format (a production headache) that can be sold by only one retailer at a low 

price point (a sales headache). 

iBooks Author hasn’t yet taken off in Australia – perhaps we will see that happen 

later in 2012. It certainly demands a close look and experimentation by creators 

of illustrated books. I asked digital managers at three US publishers whether they 

intended to create illustrated ebooks for the iBookstore with this new tool. None 

of them said a definite yes. All said they’d take a look and consider it but were 

generally hesitant about adding a whole separate workflow to their already-‐under-stress 

production departments. I guess there will be some initial experiments, and 

the sales figures from those will determine how readily the tool is exploited by trade 

publishers for illustrated books. 


15

7. Penguin placement, New York 

Months before my arrival in New York the wonderful HR Director at Penguin US, 

Melissa Vuernick, asked me to email through a wishlist of people I wanted to meet 

with at Penguin. I did – and I didn’t edit it down. She was so helpful, setting me up 

with my own office space and meetings arranged, I wanted to hug her. 

I couldn’t quite believe my luck with my three-‐week access-‐all-‐areas pass at 

Penguin. While I wasn’t attached to any particular editorial department, I was free 

to arrange meetings with whomever I liked, and I was made to feel welcome. 

The Penguin Adults and Young Readers divisions occupy side-‐by-‐side fairly ugly 

buildings in downtown Manhattan, near West Village. As opposed to some of the 

other major publishers, such as Simon & Schuster, Random House and 

HarperCollins, which occupy prime-‐real-‐estate Midtown offices, Penguin has a less 

corporate feel. Inside the building, editors work in rabbit-‐warren offices where the 

layout affords no landmarks (I found I was perpetually lost!). 

From my understanding, Penguin, and the other big publishing houses, operate as 

fairly loose groupings of individual imprints. People work in tight teams on their 

particular imprint, with dedicated publicity and marketing staff. But the downside is 

that an editor of nonfiction at The Penguin Press might never have met an editor of 

nonfiction at Dutton (a Penguin-‐owned imprint), though they may be interested in 

several of the same authors and find themselves bidding on the same books. More 

than once I found myself providing a kind of professional matchmaking service, 

saying, ‘You really should meet X down the hall. You work on similar kinds of books.’ 

It was all rather strange for an Australian, coming from a much smaller industry. 

Differences in editorial departments between the US and Australia 

Following is a brief summary of how publishing departments are structured in the 

US. Anyone who has had some experience of publishing in the US, or read reports by 

previous BD fellows, will be aware of how different things are from the Australian 

situation. 

16 


An editor at a US publishing house acquires new works (something usually 

restricted to the role of commissioning editor or publisher in Australia). They make 

offers to authors and agents and usually do structural or developmental work on a 

manuscript, in liaison with the author, but the copyediting is done either out of 

house by a freelancer or inhouse by a production editor. Editors-‐in-‐chief or vice-presidents 

(what we would call the publisher) also do structural edits. They are 

simply more senior editors who oversee the imprint’s list, but they do many of the 

same tasks editors do, keeping their close ties with particular authors. 

Assistant roles to editors-‐in-‐chief are genuine pathway jobs. A pathway might be to 

go from assistant, to assistant editor, editor, senior editor, editorial director, then 

editor-‐in-‐chief. At editorial meetings assistants and junior editors have a genuine 

voice at the table and are often involved in acquiring books. 

This spreading-‐of-‐the-‐load means that not one single acquiring person is required 

to have all the contacts and find all the authors. Ideas come from everyone at the 

editorial table, and usually a range of ages and interests are represented there. 

I found the whole acquisitions process in each of the publishing houses I visited in 

the US far more collaborative than those I have seen in Australia. 

One of my best experiences at Penguin was attending editorial meetings for The 

Penguin Press. Ann Godoff (ex Random House) heads up the imprint that publishes 

fiction and nonfiction by such authors as Michael Pollan, Zadie Smith and Joshua 

Foer. Editors have their own specialist areas of interest, but freely discuss at the 

meeting manuscripts they are considering and auctions that are taking place. 

I admired the intellectual rigour of the discussions as well as the sense of 

commitment to upholding the value of the list. It seemed to me to be deliberately 

structured as a safe place away from critique by other departments (sales, publicity) 

for the development and honing of ideas and for giving advice about how particular 

works should be edited. 

Structural and workflow changes in publishing houses in the digital era 

For at least five years most publishers in the US have had in place some kind of text-‐ 

only (or ‘mono’) ebook conversion team. In the early years, and certainly after the 


17

Kindle was released to an eager market in 2007, publishers operated something of 

a triage system to determine which books should be rushed through the conversion 

process. And it pretty quickly became policy to produce ebooks at the end of the 

traditional print process for all mono frontlist titles. The conversion teams used to 

be out of house – far-‐flung coders that editors had little to do with. Now for the 

larger publishers, these roles are inhouse, with their own divisions, quite separate 

from the print production department. I found it interesting that the person who 

heads this team at Penguin in the Adult division reports to an associate publisher, 

so it’s all looped back into the creative process. At the other houses I heard that 

these conversion teams report to a dedicated digital director. 

For most publishers this ebook conversion stage – whether it’s a text-‐only or 

illustrated book turned into fixed-‐layout or reflowable layout – is still pretty much 

just an extra step at the end of a linear production process. Ebook files go back to 

editors for quality control, but it seems an endless job for editors to check ebook 

files on all possible devices and by that stage they’ve really mentally moved on to 

other projects anyway. Honestly, I doubt many publishers or editorial directors ever 

look at the ebook files – and certainly not in the way they scrutinise pages before 

print. That’s such a problem when, for some imprints, ebooks make up more than 

50 per cent of sales. 

But what if files were prepared for ebooks first, as one digital director is 

considering? Only after the digital version of the book was final and signed off, 

would the print pages be prepared. It would mean a big shift in workflow, but this 

director is hoping it might save money down the line and embed digital thinking at 

the heart of how editors and designers work. And of course make them care – a lot – 

about the quality of the digital product. 

At Crown (Random House), they are considering a concurrent workflow for 

illustrated print and ebooks. The workflow of the future might look something like: 

• pool the assets for the title (text, images for print, extra images for digital, 

video etc) 

• editor and print designer develop look-‐and-‐feel for all editions of the work 

• editor and print designer work on print 

18 


• editor and digital designer/developer work on digital products from the 

same asset pool and look-‐and-‐feel, referring from print to digital products 

and back again frequently to ensure they don’t diverge too significantly. 

But what about more complex digital projects? 

Everyone seems to be doing it a bit differently. Katherine McCahill, Senior Manager 

of Digital Product Development at Penguin, told me that a lot of New York publishers 

have a strong digital group whose remit encompasses websites and digital 

publishing. Until recently these departments had an executive who took over a lot 

of control of individual projects. Now the trend is to push projects much more into 

publishers’ hands. 

One solution has been quickly to bring in a team of multimedia developers – to ‘buy’ 

digital talent to work as a digital-‐product factory. In 2011 Random House bought a 

digital marketing and development company, Smashing Ideas, based in Seattle. Now 

the issue is integrating what editors in New York do with the techs in Seattle, when 

both groups have vastly different creative backgrounds. In many cases the kind of 

personality attracted to book publishing is the exact opposite of the start-‐up tech 

mentality. Mucking around with XML is not what editors signed up for when they 

started in publishing 20 years ago. Diplomacy issues can be rife. 

At Crown, they are implementing a digital steering committee, where interested 

people across departments can bounce around ideas for digital projects, report in 

and learn from each other. The aim is to empower people, to ‘calm editors down’ 

so that they can be content-‐led and not feel that they must be working on digital 

projects. 

At Penguin the concern is that hiring a team of people with multimedia expertise 

might be a quick way to get digital products to market but would allow editors to 

keep digital projects at arm’s length – digital would simply become someone else’s 

job. So the structure now is to provide a kind of digital development and consultancy 

service to editors and publishers, who themselves drive the projects. A small team 

with a variety of publishing and multimedia backgrounds works across imprints 


19

to act as a sounding board, to advise, handhold where necessary, and provide a kind 

of translation service and ‘buffer’ between editorial and outside vendors such as app 

developers. They regularly meet to discuss and decide on new enhanced ebook or 

app (read high-‐cost) digital projects, and editors are welcome to pitch ideas. I 

admired this structure, but it did seem that these few people were overburdened 

with work and perhaps not afforded the space, time and funding that might foster 

the most innovative digital projects. 

One of the only commonalities among the people I met who work specifically on 

digital projects is that, five years ago, they couldn’t have imagined what they are 

doing now. They worked as editors, marketing execs, an art director and now they 

have jobs that sound like something from The Jetsons. The other commonality I 

noticed: without exception these people are all utterly overworked. They fight an 

uphill battle each day. I wondered how long they might remain in the publishing 

industry. 

8. Other New York publisher visits and meetings 

After my Penguin placement, I had arranged to spend three weeks with Dan Halpern 

and his team on the Ecco imprint at HarperCollins. For years I have admired Dan’s 

list, which features literary fiction and nonfiction as well as several food books such 

as those by Anthony Bourdain. But when my emails went unanswered a couple of 

weeks before I was to start at Ecco I knew something was wrong. Dan phoned me at 

the last minute to say that the placement couldn’t go ahead, that HarperCollins 

wouldn’t allow non-‐employees to spend such a lot of time in their offices. He 

suggested it was a policy from on high, at NewsCorp level. Out of his hands. 

As a BD Fellow travelling to the US I found that coming from one of the Big Six 

publishers, albeit from as far afield as Sydney, was more of a negative than a 

positive. Of course, on the one hand it opened doors in a big way for me at Penguin 

in New York. And since everyone in the US knows Penguin, they had a level of 

respect for me and what I do. However, I believe it also made people from the other 

major publishers more wary of me, and less likely to share. When I introduced 

myself and told them a little about the Fellowship, several people said something 

20 


along the lines of, ‘So, you’re spying for Penguin, are you?’ When I explained that 

for my time overseas technically I was not employed by Penguin, but was there on 

behalf of the APA and the Australia Council, the response was, ‘Yes, but you’re going 

back to your job and Penguin, right?’ 

I found that the success of my meetings with people who expressed such concerns 

relied utterly on my ability to make warm personal relationships with them and 

show them that I had connected with several people from different companies they 

knew and respected. 

So with a three-‐week hole in my program, I set about making the most of this less 

structured time. In fact, I relished the opportunity to pursue leads. Penguin allowed 

me use of the office for an extra week, Dan Halpern gave generously from his 

Rolodex, and I followed up a ton of recommendations, a couple of which ended in 

mini-‐placements. 

Workman 

While I was based at Penguin I had lunch with Digital Publishing Director at 

Workman, Andrea Fleck-‐Nisbet. We found we had endless things to talk about and 

I was pleased to have the extra time in my schedule to ask Andrea if she would have 

me for a couple of days in the Workman offices. She generously agreed. 

The Workman offices are a block away from Penguin. Light and bright, they feel like 

the books they make – well designed, functional and hard-‐working. The family-owned 

medium-‐sized company has the prestigious Artisan cookbook imprint, as 

well as a fiction imprint and several craft/hobby specialty imprints. Their big-‐brand 

publications are What to Expect When You’re Expecting, 1000 Places to See Before 

You Die and the Brain Quest series for children. 

As a publisher of primarily illustrated books, Workman is very busily investigating 

ways it can adapt to the digital marketplace. Andrea leads a small team made up of 

ebook production people, a digital editor and a couple of staff dedicated to websites. 

While this smaller company might not have the financial clout of one of the Big Six, 

I was deeply impressed by how quick-‐thinking and creative they were. Workman is 


21

much more open to exploring partnerships with outside companies in order to 

exploit digital opportunities for their cookbooks and other nonfiction titles than any 

other company I came across while in the US. They work with a sense of urgency and 

an understanding that they need to encourage editors and designers to think more 

digitally – to consider a workflow that allows for multiple formats coming from the 

same content. The two days I spent at Workman inspired me to consider ways I 

could adapt illustrated book projects for the digital environment. 

Touchstone/Fireside (Simon & Schuster) 

During my first couple of weeks in New York I made a friend of an acquaintance I 

had worked with years ago when in London. Back then, Michelle Howry had been 

Senior Editor at Perigee (Penguin). Now at Touchstone, a Simon & Schuster imprint, 

Michelle acquires commercial nonfiction in areas such as health, self-‐help, biography 

and popular science. I asked her if I could spend some time at S&S with her. Her 

boss, Sally Kim, who had been part of the Visiting International Publishers (VIP) 

program at the 2007 Sydney Writers’ Festival, was happy to have me attached to 

her editorial team. 

It was a wonderful experience to be a fly on the wall at S&S editorial and 

acquisitions meetings. Decisions about acquisitions, and setting print runs and retail 

prices, take place around an immense boardroom table at which sit about 25 people 

– key account managers for chain and discount stores, publicity and marketing as 

well as editorial. Editors presenting their own new titles need to be fearless and able 

to justify each suggestion they make about format, cover design and so on. 

Touchstone is interested chiefly in ‘big books’ – books that will make it onto ‘The 

List’ (the New York Times bestseller list) or at least those that can command big print 

runs. At the editorial meeting, again and again, when a decision was made to pass on 

a manuscript, the reason was often ‘it feels a bit small for us’. 

Editors at imprints such as Touchstone – and this must be true of so many 

publishers in the US – nowadays require an unusual mix of extroversion and 

introversion. The ability to persuade and sell to colleagues is mandatory, but so too 

are those qualities that are more often found in bookish introverts: the ability to sit 

22 


quietly with a manuscript or proposal, to analyse what works about it and what 

doesn’t. 

I also thought it interesting that publishers such as S&S are outsourcing some of the 

editorial work they used to do inhouse. While they do the structural editing inhouse, 

all of the copyediting and proofreading work is sent out to freelancers. Additionally, 

many authors of the sorts of books Michelle acquires are hiring freelance 

ghostwriters or editors before the manuscript is submitted, in order to turn in more 

polished works. As Touchstone acquires books from many nonfiction authors who 

might not be natural writers, it’s incumbent on those authors to bring on co-‐writers 

to help produce a publishable book. Several former inhouse editors have made the 

transition to freelance co-‐writer or ‘book doctor’ working with authors directly. 

As Australian publishers seek to publish fewer but ‘bigger’ books, I think it likely this 

trend will emerge in Australia too. 

Open Road Integrated Media and publishing royalty 

While at Penguin, I met publishing royal Barbara Marcus. Barbara used to run 

Scholastic and was the publisher of Harry Potter – so, you know, she can do 

whatever the hell she wants now. Barbara currently works a couple of days a week 

at Penguin, advising on their Young Readers lists, but she also consults a couple of 

days for Open Road Integrated Media, just down the road from the Penguin offices. 

Barbara asked me if I’d like a tour of Open Road and of course I agreed. I had read 

about Open Road: that former CEO of HarperCollins worldwide (and my old über-‐ 

über-‐ über-‐ über-‐boss from years ago) Jane Friedman, with private-‐equity backing, 

was now shaking up the publishing industry from the other side of the fence. I had 

also read that HarperCollins had brought a lawsuit against Open Road in relation to 

electronic rights for one of its authors. Did I mention these were hot political times? 

When Barbara showed me around the Open Road offices, we must have caught Jane 

Friedman at a good time – she invited us in for a long chat around her table, and 

introduced me to Luke Parker Bowles (yes, royalty in a different kind of way), who 


23

oversees the creation of the extraordinary author video footage Open Road shoots 

for the promotion of its books. 

Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher providing a slick marketing 

platform first and foremost for ebooks of backlist titles. It offers authors, and 

authors’ estates, whose titles they feel are not being promoted sufficiently by their 

publisher, the opportunity to have their books made available once again (as 

ebooks) and to be promoted continually through the year. Marketing staff at Open 

Road connect with hundreds of influential book bloggers, providing author video 

content for their sites, which include at the end a ‘buy the book’ button, taking 

viewers to a retail site of their choice. 

Of course author contracts didn’t include electronic rights for books until publishers 

had an inkling that they would be useful one day. Jane Friedman told me she knew 

most contracts before 1995 didn’t have a clause about electronic rights, ‘Because I 

put it in the HarperCollins ones myself.’ Now that ebooks are a growing piece of the 

pie, the contracts departments at every major publishing house are busily trying to 

clear e-‐rights on old contracts. Many authors and authors’ estates are signing over 

these rights, but many are not, unsure that their publisher is in a strong position to 

exploit the electronic rights, or unconvinced that being offered the industry-standard 

25 per cent of not much as a royalty is really worth it. 

That’s where Open Road is getting in and invading the space of traditional 

publishers. Open Road offers authors an alternative platform for the digital editions 

of their books, with a 50/50 revenue split. 

Jane Friedman spoke passionately about the satisfaction she gets from breathing 

new marketing life into old titles that deserve to be read by a wider audience by 

authors such as Iris Murdoch, Pat Conroy and James Gleick. She seems entirely 

unperturbed about upsetting the establishment in the process. In fact, I got the 

feeling she rather enjoys stirring the pot. And she is definitely doing that now Open 

Road is acquiring frontlist (‘e-‐originals’). In the Open Road office I met two editors 

specialising in genre fiction who had come over from other publishing houses and 

been there only a matter of days. And while I was still in the US, several more 

24 


announcements were made about editorial appointments to Open Road. A couple 

of weeks after my Open Road visit, Friedman also announced that it would offer a 

selection of titles as print-‐on-‐demand via Ingram. 

I asked a few publishers what they thought of Open Road and was surprised to hear 

some didn’t really care. One publisher told me she didn’t dislike Jane Friedman 

personally but hated what she was doing. This publisher’s company was working 

through an enormous backlog of contracts to negotiate ebook rights. Some authors 

or authors’ estates were agreeing, others were holding out, wanting 50 per cent, 

‘and we’re just not going there’. She said it was terribly disheartening when authors 

her publishing house had been publishing aggressively for decades considered 

taking their ebook rights elsewhere. However, she said that ebook sales for backlist 

and midlist have been small, so she wasn’t sure how Open Road was making 

revenue. I wondered whether that publisher pushed backlist ebooks as much as 

Open Road does. 

The elephant in the room: Amazon 

‘What do you think of Amazon?’ I asked several editors, publishers and salespeople. 

‘I hate them’ was the response that came surprisingly quickly. I couldn’t believe how 

vehement some people were. Of course no one would speak on the record, since the 

publishers are now in a bind where they need Amazon as a customer, and yet by 

many accounts Amazon is a law unto itself, using negotiation strategies such as 

threatening to remove ‘buy’ buttons from a suppliers’ book listings if they do not 

agree to their terms. 

I tried but I couldn’t get a meeting with anyone at Amazon, whether in its sales, 

technical or publishing divisions. At virtually every meeting I had they seemed to be 

the elephant in the room, however. I found it creepy how often, when talking with an 

editor at any given publishing house, they would tell me a colleague of theirs had 

recently left to go to Amazon for a better-‐paying job. 

A cursory look at deals on Publishers Lunch shows Amazon is very actively 

acquiring titles and authors and for big bucks. It appears Larry Kirshbaum’s 

publishing division at Amazon wants to get big fast, as the rest of Amazon has done. 


25

On 18 June 2012 The Nation published an extensive feature by Steve Wasserman 

entitled ‘The Amazon Effect’ (http://tinyurl.com/86n6qub). I highly recommend 

reading it. 

Barnes & Noble and the retail situation 

I was in New York seven years ago and spent hours at many of the big Barnes & 

Nobles and Borders stores. During my BDEF trip I returned to the Union Square 

B&N. It was confronting to see so much of the floor space occupied by non-‐book 

items – stationery, toys and games, and a Nook kiosk. Hank Cochrane, who has sold 

to B&N for Penguin for more than a decade, told me floor space devoted to books 

had shrunk by one-‐third over recent years. This makes it a bun fight for publishers 

to get their books visible to buyers. 

Rumours are rife that B&N stores will shrink in size and sell print-‐on-‐demand books. 

One publisher I spoke with expected B&N to spin off and sell the Nook. He claimed 

that the future of bookselling will be in the community bookshop where books, 

book-‐buyers and authors interact in real time and space. ‘It’s not what we would 

have thought. Amazon has forced the chains into a sort of weird irrelevance.’ 

This rang true for me when I visited the bookshops. There are many wonderful 

independent bookshops in New York, but I must say I found Barnes & Noble 

uninspiring. Years before, when I had last visited New York, I noticed publishers 

loved to hate B&N, claiming it had become too powerful and complaining that it had 

decided to compete with them as a publisher as well. Now the situation is so very 

different. According to an article published on 28 January 2012 in the New York 

Times and entitled ‘The Bookstore’s Last Stand’ (http://tinyurl.com/8ypdkpg), 

publishers are keen to do anything they can to keep B&N in business. Without B&N, 

how will customers not fortunate enough to live near a surviving independent 

bookshop discover a publisher’s books? The obvious answer: on Amazon. 

26 


Mike Shatzkin 

In my last week in New York I was fortunate to get a meeting with industry observer 

and consultant Mike Shatzkin (he of The Shatzkin Files – http://www.idealog.com). 

He was very generous with his time, but I must say I left feeling rather depressed. 

I asked him in which direction illustrated books – both for adults and for kids – 

would go. In his opinion, illustrated books for children will go a very different way to 

those for adults. In the US, parents are starting to hand down to their children their 

old iPads and Kindles. As this device hand-‐me-‐down process continues, and as 

devices come onto the market that are better suited to children’s needs, it follows 

that children will become more and more used to reading onscreen as well as on 

paper. Enhanced ebooks that children consume on these devices will be some 

combination of what a book is today, what a game is today and what animation is 

today, according to Shatzkin. He posed the question, in which of these three groups 

would you rather be: the publishers, needing to hire the gamers and animators; the 

animators, hiring the gamers and book publishers; or the gamers, hiring the 

animators and book publishers? 

‘I think the last thing you’d want to be is the book publisher and hiring in the gamers 

and the animators. You would want to be in command of the mode. I think gaming is 

the key,’ he said. He argues that there is so much that gaming experts know about 

how children of particular ages interact with devices – knowledge gained through 

costly research and development – that book publishers are at too much of a 

disadvantage to catch up. 

While I think Mike Shatzkin’s view on this is extreme and tends towards the black-‐ 

and-‐white (well, mostly the black), our discussion certainly gave me pause for 

thought. 

I had become convinced that my original thesis – that illustrated children’s books 

might be lumped in the same basket as illustrated books for adults in terms of their 

futures in a digital world – was indeed wrong. There seems to be so much scope for 

growth in digital books for children at the moment in the US (and I was to see plenty 

of evidence for that at Chronicle Books just a week later), and especially once the 


27

new industry-‐standard epub3 is widely supported by various devices. I now think it 

likely that in the short-‐term future in the US, ebooks for kids that include audio, 

video and/or animation will be very widely available and consumed. 

At the same time, the children’s editors and publishers I met with spoke of record 

sales in print picture books. At Dial Books for Young Readers (Penguin), they are 

ramping up the picture book side of their list, and Neal Porter at Neal Porter 

Books/Roaring Brook Press (Macmillan), who has published numerous Caldecott 

Medal-‐winners, attests to print picture books continuing to be extremely strong in 

the US market. He has no intention of scaling back production of print picture books. 

And in what direction will the illustrated nonfiction book go? 

I would argue that many illustrated nonfiction titles require their print format, that 

they are special because of their design and very bookish, tactile qualities. But if 

what Shatzkin suggests comes to pass, there is a question over what value the 

‘inspirational’ nonfiction book will have once the practical ‘how to’ is available 

cheaply online. Because illustrated books produced by most publishers rely so much 

on being discovered in a shrinking number of bookshops, they are at risk of 

becoming collectors’ items. 

We’ve already seen this with thousands of free – and excellent – recipes available 

online. Cookbook sales, for now, continue to be strong, though they are certainly not 

growing like they used to. But there are question marks hanging over them. Will 

consumers still want the physical book if and when they can get the recipes much 

more cheaply on their device? 

So far there has been a handful of really successful illustrated book apps. But 

Shatzkin, and several editors I met in my travels, believe they represent a small 

number of one-‐offs – nothing that builds to a picture we can learn much from for 

developing, for example, a digital-‐focused illustrated publishing program. Shatzkin 

goes further: ‘There is [as] yet no evidence – none, zero – that illustrated books work 

digitally.’ 

28 


While I think many in the publishing industry intuitively believe that illustrated 

nonfiction will find its place in the ebook market once devices are sophisticated 

enough, conversations such as the one I had with Mike Shatzkin were very sobering. 

9. Chronicle Books, San Francisco 

Leaving New York feels like leaving the centre of the world – nothing very important 

could happen elsewhere, could it? But I was excited to be moving to my three-‐week 

placement at Chronicle Books, in a city I’d never visited before, San Francisco. 

Chronicle Books might not be one of the big players in the US publishing scene, but 

deep down I think everyone wants to be them just a little bit. I lost count of the 

number of New York editors who said they would love to know what Chronicle is 

like. Chronicle has the coolest office, the coolest editorial and design talent, the most 

imaginative sales channels and those books that you pick up and say, ‘I knew it was 

going to be a Chronicle book.’ Authors and illustrators are very keen to be published 

under the Chronicle imprint. 

The physical environment of the office says a lot about the company philosophy. The 

Chronicle office is a thoughtfully designed, creative, environmentally friendly space. 

There’s yoga at lunchtimes; a formats library for designers and editors to refer to; a 

whole floor of meeting rooms of different sizes; and even a readings evening when, 

over beer and pizza in the library, staff read excerpts of what they’ve been writing 

lately (the first chapters of a YA novel, a blogpost from a year of travel . . .). Creative 

Director Michael Carabetta has overseen Chronicle’s aesthetic in every way, I was 

informed. 

At Chronicle it was such a joy to sit alongside a couple of editorial teams, to attend 

meetings and generally get to know how the place worked. Having worked on 

illustrated books for many years, it was my Mecca. 

The thing about Chronicle that jumped out at me early on was that it thrives despite 

the closure of Borders and some other bookshops because it has so many links with 

special markets (thanks in part, I presume, to its gift lists) as well as robust business 


29

development. Clothing and homewares chains are key accounts. And they put on a 

couple of thousand new accounts every year! 

I heard that it was company tradition that, on the release of their Fall titles, editors 

and designers were allocated a couple of phone numbers of individual accounts and 

encouraged to phone them up for a chat. According to one publishing director, the 

practice resulted in publishing staff having a deeper appreciation of their sales 

colleagues (how hard it is to sell) and individual accounts were thrilled to have a 

personal connection with someone involved in the creation of one or two Christmas 

titles. 

The editorial and acquisitions meetings I attended at Chronicle could not have been 

more different from those I witnessed in New York. At Chronicle, the focus is less on 

big print runs and more on whether the title is a fit with their list and how it would 

do in special sales channels. New acquisitions are discussed at very collaborative 

publishing group meetings attended by team members from editorial, design, 

marketing, managing editorial and production. But not sales! Apparently Chronicle 

discovered some years ago that sales predictions discussed at acquisitions stage 

were far from an exact science, often extremely conservative, and the acquisition 

process was more effective when discussions concentrated on the content of the 

books and how readers would respond to them, rather than obsessing about how 

the gatekeepers (e.g. buyers for chains and discount stores) would respond. 

With its very strong identity, Chronicle is able to publish some titles that bigger 

publishers couldn’t find a home for, but the flipside is that they cannot compete with 

New York on big advances. 

I had wondered if I would encounter, in this illustrated publisher, a business fighting 

for survival because of the recent closure of many bookshops, and perhaps urgently 

testing new business models. What I found was a company that had enjoyed a 

couple of its best years ever, and was forward-‐thinking without being panicked. 

It was a joy to meet Lorena Jones, former publisher at Ten Speed Press, who is 

currently Publishing Director at Chronicle, overseeing the Food and Wine as well as 

30 


Lifestyle lists and running the digital publishing program. She did three years ago a 

lot of the thinking that I’m only beginning to do now about how illustrated books 

might find their way in the digital future. Lorena was ridiculously busy but we 

managed to squeeze in a couple of discussions face-‐to-‐face as well as on email – 

much of which has been so helpful to me in writing this report (hat-‐tip to Lorena). 

10. Some thoughts to sum up 

We need to get beyond the argument about digital taking away from print sales. 

Consumers are going to take the content of what is currently in books in whatever 

format they want – we just don’t yet know what all those formats will be. We can try 

to keep hold of the physical market but ultimately, if consumers want digital, we 

have to provide that and adjust our business models accordingly. I must say I was 

more inspired by the vision of the smaller publishers I visited than the larger ones 

when it came to this point. 

Sales of ebooks, enhanced ebooks and other digital versions of illustrated titles for 

both adults and children are in their infancy. They’re far more complicated to get 

right technically, and there are countless formats of print books not yet worth 

converting to ebooks because of the quality that would be lost in the conversion. It’s 

expensive to invest in researching new formats for illustrated content, but 

necessary. Just think of all the trial and error that went into determining the best 

print formats. We need to do the same with digital formats. 

I am frustrated when I hear of senior managers in some (typically larger) companies 

in the US and Australia making pronouncements that certain digital formats have 

been proved to be a waste of time and money (‘apps are going nowhere’ or ‘we 

won’t do another enhanced ebook’). The investment is quickly removed from 

whatever the digital experiment was. What is it that traditional print publishers do 

other than assess risk each time a new project is acquired? Every publishing season 

there are very many print projects that lose big bucks for the very same publishers, 

who don’t threaten to junk the format. 


31

If digital teams are not given the time, space and other necessary resources to 

experiment within the publishing house structure, this innovation will take place 

outside of traditional publishers, who then won’t own the knowledge. 

But this experimentation and testing of the market is happening, sometimes in big-name 

publishing houses, sometimes in home offices. The question is when the 

devices and file formats have sorted themselves out, perhaps in five or so years’ 

time, when illustrated publishers know what readers want and what will work for 

them, who will be ready to supply the wonderful digital illustrated books for readers 

of all ages? 

The chief concerns at the moment for illustrated publishers are getting a format-agnostic 

workflow in place, i.e. one that can cope with producing titles in multiple 

formats (print, ebook, enhanced ebook, web); making sure those workflows produce 

books of as high a quality as the rest of the list; getting staff skilled-‐up; and all 

without taking their eye off the production of print books where these are 

continuing to succeed. The role of the editor in this process (and the author, and the 

designer, and the production controller . . .) has expanded and will expand even 

more to make this happen. 

I believe the real growth opportunity for illustrated digital publishing is in children’s 

picture books, but that this doesn’t necessarily mean a decline in print books for 

children, as long as bookshop doors – particularly those of independent bookshops – 

remain open. 

Cookbooks might have any number of format solutions that will work for different 

users, but we are some years away from knowing what these will be because there is 

still so much fragmentation in devices and software. My suspicion is that straight 

digital representations of printed cookbooks might never work. Many readers will 

want a print edition if only as a collector’s item; many more, I suspect, will want 

recipes served to them digitally. Some will want both. 

Gift/lifestyle/art books might remain strongly forever print-‐only and perhaps move 

to become even more high-‐end, high-‐priced with short print runs. Chronicle is 

32 


seeing evidence from some book-‐buyers against all things digital when it comes to 

these sorts of titles – that readers want the printed book as a precious object. 

The opinions of individual editors about the state of the publishing industry right 

now seem to run on personality lines. Those who are used to or willing to try 

innovating in formats, business models and ways of working tend not to be 

frightened of the disruption, but rather see it as a challenge. Those for whom a 

change in the successful-‐thank-‐you-‐very-‐much way of doing things produces anxiety 

tend to see the disruption as purely a threat. 

I hope that there might continue to be room in the industry for both personality 

types in editorial across this spectrum. In nonfiction and illustrated books 

particularly there will be so much more editing and content development to do that 

those who don’t want to be involved in producing all the different formats can be 

enlisted to do the deep editorial work and feed this to those who are perhaps 

happier to work across platforms, devices and formats. 

It seems likely also that there will be more and more work for freelance editors and 

‘book doctors’. One executive editor I spoke with said she didn’t fear for the role of 

the editor. It wasn’t a question of whether there would be work for editors; it was a 

question of who we’d be working for. She suggested many editors might find 

themselves working directly for a number of authors rather than for a particular 

publishing house. 

However the digital shakedown of formats for nonfiction and illustrated books 

occurs, it was underlined to me again and again that the editor both now and in the 

future is of utmost value. Developers, coders and designers all offer indispensible 

expertise for a modern publishing house, but they don’t do what an editor does. 

Editors are skilled and experienced at analysing text for meaning and value, and at 

helping authors present their very best. This role will continue to be vital. 


33

Jane Morrow BDEF report 2012 - Australian Publishers Association

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