I was in Oxford yesterday at the Macmillan Education offices in the former car-building (and now new Mini building) area of Cowley. Driving back I thought I might indulge in one of my favourite pastimes - listening to international cricket on the radio (Test Match Special). Unfortunately the English team were so dreadful and unprofessional in being beaten for the fourth time in a row by Sri Lanka I couldn't bear to listen.

Instead I tried to calculate the size of the publishing industry in Oxfordshire (Oxford and its surrounding area). It is a really impressive bunch of companies. Big daddy in terms of employees, sales and profits is probably Oxford University Press itself. Reed Elsevier has two major units - Elsevier Science in Kidlington (which incorporates the famous and brillian Pergamon Press of Robert Maxwell fame) and Harcourt Education in Jordanhill (incorporating Heinemann Education, Ginn, Rigby etc). Blackwell Publishing is up the road from our offices and, not to be confused with its retailing cousins, is a hugely successful and profitable academic and scientific publisher. A little further South near Abingdon are the main offices of the academic divisions of Informa (Taylor & Francis, Routledge etc). Also in Abingdon we can find Hodder's distribution centre Bookpoint. And there are scores of smaller but no less significant specialist and general publishing firms scattered around the area.

I estimate total sales of publications emanating from these companies at well over €3 billion and profits close on €500m. I reckon this is more than the total profit emanating from London and maybe even New York. Explanations please.

Yesterday's blog (the bit about Macmillan Science) elicited a comment from Peter Collingridge who runs a design consultancy for publishing clients called APT. It's well worth reading as a constructive critique of the way Macmillan and others are approaching web marketing and the use of the Internet.

I have discovered one way of increasing traffic to this blog is to write the words 'Jeffrey Archer'. However, on this occasion I am not interested in increasing the number of visitors here but to encourage you to look at Jeffrey's blog which is part of his official website.

And while on the use of the Internet as a marketing vehicle, President Chirac has inaugurated a French version of Google Earth (although they deny that this is what it is). It launched last week and the interest has been so great that the following page comes up

http://www.geoportail.fr/excuses.htm.

I've left the url as it stands because there's something about the word 'excuses' which is perfectly fine in French but in English says it all. And some governments still think they can do a better job of web publishing than private enterprise....

And finally an excellent article in Nature which analyses the financial standing of the most important open access organisation The Public Library of Science. What the article shows is that the 'author pays' model for scientific publishing is likely to be unsustainable without charitable support. I don't think that scientific publishing should be a charitable enterprise. Its innovation and growth has been driven by commercial market pressures to improve which have always been the best guarantee of high-quality service. The alternatives nearly always end in bureaucracy and protection of the status quo.

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.

I seem to have bored one of our regular visitors by moaning about the airport in Paris. He has a fair point. Whingeing travellers are a pretty boring lot. In mitigation I had spent 10 hours in the air flying to Chennai, a day's solid work and then ten hours back.

But where I disagree with the correspondent is that international travel has nothing to do with understanding book buyers. My critic runs an antiquarian bookshop in middle class England and I have no doubt he understands his clientele. My job is to manage an international publishing house and our most important clients are school teachers and scientists in emerging markets such as India, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The universe in which I travel is very different from Clive Keble's but I'd contend that kids in India represent the real world just as much as traditional book lovers in England - and maybe just maybe it's more important to work on developing these markets than on specialist antiquarian bookselling in Middle England.

Incidentally, who said anything about first class? A rule in Macmillan is that we seek the lowest cost travel wherever feasible.

And finally.... Macmillan's imprint for first novels, Macmillan New Writing, has attracted a great deal of attention, some positive, some negative, but most of it serving only to promote it further with authors and booksellers, all of which is very helpful. But one somewhat amusing trend is now emerging - a stream of submissions from, how shall I put it, 'incarcerated'  individuals, hoping that somehow their artistic endeavours might serve as a 'get out of jail free' card....

I'm posting here a letter recently received at the MNW offices:

"I am an artist and I’ve recently written two (2) books. One of the books is completed the other is still in the works. The completed one is Hot! (Not to toot my own horn) ....

The problem is this- I am incarcerated (since 2004) in a California state prison, on some bogus conviction. Due to the fact that I wasn’t financially able to afford a “real” attorney I was given a court appointed “dump truck” thus the results being a 16 year conviction.

What I offer is this - I will give you the completed book, original manuscript, copy rights, and all the profits from the book sales.

What I want is this – I want a lawyer that can get me out of this position I am in. If he / she can’t get me “out”, at least get me a sentence reduction (although I know nothing in guaranteed through the courts) I want to be recognized as the author and a flat 10.000 ( ten thousand dollars).

So basically there is no loss for your company. To make it even better, I will give you the book in hand, manuscript, copyrights, and al the profits as well as the “author” title for a flat 20.000 (twenty thousand dollars).
That’s without the lawyer.

As you can see my main focus is getting out of prison and/or getting a real lawyer. If that means I have to give up “all” my rights to the book just to get enough money for a lawyer then that’s what I’m willing to do."

Now that's what I call a tempting offer...

 

There are different opinions about President Charles de Gaulle of France. But there can be little argument that right now the airport named after him has turned itself into a premiership class rotten airport. The present design involves huge distances for travellers, impenetrable signage, unhelpful staff, lousy acoustics. Chennai was a place of peaceful efficiency in comparison. Is there or should there be a good airports guide so that people can plan their trips around avoiding particular black spots such as LAX, Lagos, and now league leader Paris. Incidentally, the PC in the lounge has only some of the keyboard working and no way of linking to another site - so please forgive lack of hypers and any spelling mistakes.

This comes to you from Chennai (formerly known as Madras) which is the headquarters of our Indian operations. It was the Annual General Meeting this afternoon after a series of exceutive and Board meetings this morning. We now employ more than 3000 people in India and it is our fastest growing market. The shareholder issues today included complaints about the colour of the paper in our annual report, the lack of takeaway presents for attendants and the lack of a bonus shares or a share split. On the other hand there was enthusiasm for our strategy and our brilliant and diligent Indian team.

During the courese of the day I came across some wonderful words and phrases. I particularly like:

Blamestorming - a meeting to decide who to blame for bad performance.

PDCA - plan, do, check, act - the antithesis of most publishing procedures.

Strategy without action is daydreaming; action without strategy is a nightmare.

And as I left the meeting an ex-employee grabbed me and said that the difference between Indian and American (or British) business is that the Indians don't 'go with a smile'. My experience says the opposite.

Back to the plane - incidentally free advice, avoid Delta Airlines.

Jonny Geller is a well-known literary agent working at (or is it 'with'?) Curtis Brown. He is well known for being 'cool' and 'sharp' and getting good deals for his clients. What isn't so well known is that he trained as a rabbi and is publishing his own book later this year. I was very keen for Macmillan to publish it but Jonny, being used to getting the top deal for his clients, managed to get great contracts from Bloomsbury in the USA and Penguin in the UK. I still reckon he should have come to us for the best if not the top deal. Nevertheless the book should be read and enjoyed as widely as possible and here is a link to a blog Jonny has created as a taster for the book.

Of course Jonny's advance didn't compare to Alan Greenspan's $8.5m from Penguin but as he says: This much money for a jewish banker? Can this be good for the jews? I'm worried..

Enjoy.

'Anon’ commented on this blog yesterday that the first law of blogging is that ‘all blogs before too long stop addressing the issues for which the blog was established and start talking about the act of blogging.’ Apparently this makes me a ‘true blogger’, a label which I happily accept. And I suppose that like any ‘type’, we bloggers do like to discuss and debate the very activity to which we are so committed. But I hope it doesn’t indicate that this blog has become a navel-gazing exercise in any way. The thing that continues to motivate me to blog is the chance to talk about the issues and challenges of publishing today and to engage with others who are excited and challenged by the same things.

Speaking of which, one of the things challenging most publishers right now is how we continue to provide services and products that ensure we are relevant and useful to the communities we serve. One such initiative is Macmillan Medical Communications (MMC), which launches this month. A strategic medical communications agency, MMC is set up to provide customized products and services for partners in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and biotechnology industries. It uses the full range of communication and publishing strategies to develop high impact campaigns and services including novel internet-based approaches.

MMC will specialize in the creation and localization of content for target audiences throughout the world, including some of the fastest growing pharmaceutical markets such as Far East Asia, India and Latin America.  MMC will offer a broad range of services including local language reprints of Nature Publishing Group (NPG) articles, website development, targeted supplements, seminars, and strategic consultancy on publication and information dissemination strategies.

As the division of the Macmillan Group servicing the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, MMC has exclusive access to some of the world's leading journal content, including journals from our own Nature Publishing Group <http://www.nature.com/>  (NPG), publishers of Nature <http://www.nature.com/nature/>  the international journal of science, Nature Medicine <http://www.nature.com/nm/> , the Nature Clinical Practice <http://www.nature.com/clinicalpractice/index.html>  series of journals, and a large number of major medical society titles.

MMC’s first live service is an experimental collaborative medical news site called Dissect Medicine (www.dissectmedicine.com), developed as a joint initiative with Nature Clinical Practice.  MMC’s activities will also include identifying local language sponsorship opportunities for Nature Clinical Practice titles, organizing seminars and conferences in regions where MMC teams are active. MMC will also work with some of NPG’s society journals to help develop special projects outside the regular publication of their journals. These may include training and advocacy related projects. MMC will also run the production of local language editions of existing titles such as Kidney International, which is currently published in Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese.