There are many things that can blow a publishing programme off course - late delivery of manuscripts, legal challenges, rows with retailers, stock deliveries going astray etc. Yesterday we suffered a new one.

Apparently part of the Kings Cross development programme suffered a fire. On the site there are fuel containers which might explode potentially sending topploing cranes onto one or both of our buildings. Pretty Hollywood. In any event the outcome is that we had to evacuate the buildings yesterday and probably today as well. That means we'll have lost some 1000 person days at a crucial time of the year. Fortunately many people are working from home or from our other UK sites - Oxford, Basingstoke, Swansea - but even so... The other plus is that our disaster recovery plans moved smoothly into action and all business-vital activitiesperformed perfectly. What might have been seen as a bureaucratic exercise has proved its worth - not for the first time.

And Nigel Beale wrote a comment yesterday. It appears that the software on my comments won't allow hyperlinking and so please check out www.nigelbeale.com where you can find some really interesting interviews with authors, publishers and other literary figures alongside interesting blog critiques and debates.

And I want to show off a bit more about Macmillan Science. This is an experiment to see if we can take a particularly difficult part of general book publishing (popular science is in some senses a contradiction in terms) and create a different business model and still publish well. The model is that we only publish books where the author grants us world rights (no territorial restrictions, no arguments about who owns the Turkish book club rights etc), there is no advance but a high gross income related royalty, low expectations of bookshop support and hence lowish discounts, simultaneous global English-language publication, promotion to the scientific community through Nature and Scientific American, and most important of all an editor who understands popular science, scientific journalism and how to help authors promote their own work.

You only have to click on any of the covers on the website to get a feel for the quality of what we're publishing and we're doing it without all the hype of 'traditional' general book publishing. It's a simple formula. Spend money only where it's necessary. Keep editorial headcount to a minimum but make sure the editor is the very best. Reward authors who sell and don't reward (via unearned advances) those who do not. And don't forget that the world of books is global and that they do speak English in a little place called America.