Another sad end-of-Summer moment. The last cricket match of the season at Marsh Baldon in beautiful Oxfordshire. It has not been a vintage season - played 9, won 4, lost 4, drawn 1. Honours go to Paul Denning (438 runs from 7 innings including a 173 not out and an average of 87.6); James Cookson (69 overs, 13 wickets average 15.46); Geoff Penington (our youngest player who took 7 wickets at 6.43); and our oldest newcomer Tim Coates (5 wickets from 11 overs at 9.4). And the greatest honour and thanks to the team's only full professor and almost full-time organiser Robert Denning. We won this last game resoundingly - always important to end on a high.

A busy week ahead. A speech at National Acquisitions Group Annual Conference in Reading; participating in a panel on the development of the Asian market at the grandly titled Global Information Industry Summit in Amsterdam; a meeting of the British Library Strategy Advisory Committee; and of course the usual round of Macmillan businesses including the launch of the 2oth edition of Barry Turner's Writer's Handbook.

I hate nationalism, jingoism, chauvinism, patriotism and all the isms which have led to human misery. As a result I find it hard to get excited by being a citizen of the country of my birth. However, there are certain things which make me (in spite of myself) proud to be British. Yesterday evening the BBC broadcast The Last Night of the Proms, the final concert in the 2006 season. Of course there are similar concerts elsewhere and I suspect the standards are as high or higher. Of course some of the flag-waving and cheering is silly. But there is something about the BBC's continuing commitment to supporting music and musical appreciation that is neither self-righteous nor patronising. It is simply the right thing to do and they do it brilliantly.

Incidentally the guy who runs the Proms is Nick Kenyon. I first met him around 1980 when I was responsible for Oxford Journals. One of the key journals was Early Music. It was edited by its founder, a brilliant musicologist from New Zealand called John Thomson. He edited the journal brilliantly but it constantly lost money and there were innumerable glitches and feuds. He had a staff of ten including picture researchers, in-house copy editors etc - all for a quarterly journal. My job was to try to turn round the finances of the journal which inevitably involved cutting staff. Every suggestion I made was met by the assertion that all cost savings would result in the collapse of editorial standards. After any number of rows and heart-searching John eventually decided to leave and by the best luck in the world we were able to hire Nick Kenyon to replace him. He cut the staff from ten to two, regularised the publication schedule, maintained editorial standards and turned the journal from a cash leaker into a cash generator within two years. The journal is still the best in its field and I bet it still makes money. You don't have to lose money to have the highest editorial standards - it just takes a good editorial manager.

My two book recommendations of the moment are both transantlantic, both by women and both titles incorporate an apostrophe. Go check out Elisabeth Hyde's The Abortionist's Daughter and Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children.

I am in the middle of preparing for a speech I am giving this week to a big conference of librarians. If you want to have input into what I'm going to say let me know fast.

My post about the disparity in interest between science and publishing generated some interesting comments. However, I know that most readers don't go back to previous postings and read the comments. So I am going to paste in one from Timo Hannay which says what I think but much more coherently:

Before anything else I thought I'd share with you an old piece of news which I'd hate to think you might have missed.

Greetings from sunny Stuttgart. Last night I had dinner with colleagues from the finance and M&A departments of Holtzbrinck. The 'controller' for Macmillan was there and here are his memories:

'Having had dinner in a typically Swabian Weinstube in down-town Stuttgart we were just about to leave. At that moment a very attractive, open-minded lady came to our table just having been eavesdropping our conversation. She introduced herself and conceded that she was listening to our talks for quite a while. She told us that she was looking for a British man to take her to the UK - and she made very clear that she knows what she wants: A British man, middle-aged, grey-haired, living in London and by the way, he should be wealthy. She seemed to be quite desperate. Last year she got to know a British man looking like Hugh Grant, living near Basingstoke. She found her presumed love for life via the online partner agency Parship - what are the odds? But in the end (after 4 weeks) it didn't work out.

Richard, the landlord of Parship UK, couldn't really bring himself to take her with him to London and to offer her a job (maybe as his new assistant?) and of course free living. So he made a deal with her: He promised her to get a three months' free access to Parship to find the right British man.

Will see what happens...for further report.'

If I write an entry about new writing (average readership of a first-time novelist maybe 500 people if they're lucky) or UK bookselling (average value of an account to an independent bookseller for Macmillan Distribution thus including publishers such as Bloomsbury, Walker Books, Guinness etc but excluding sales through wholesalers, less than £2000 per annum) we get a full postbag of comments and private emails to me. Whenever I write about science (average readership of a highly complex paper in Nature 15,000, total registered users 2 million) there is a resounding silence. The two cultures still operate. Why is it that book publishing only rarely closes the gap?

In any event I promised you more about our Science Foo Camp and here is the link. For those who can't be bothered to go there here is one para that sums it up:

Science Foo was the best conference I can remember in my life, and I've been to a lot of them... Thinking about what made this Foo different from all other conferences, I realized that people brought their whole selves to this conference, their hopes, foibles, humor, outrageousness, brilliance, good intent, and little to no ego in the "look at me" sense. It was fantastic.

Here are some excerpts from a review of Hugh Paxton's novel Homunculus in the The Star newspaper in Johannesburg ( I cannot find the link to the review itself):

Apologies for starting with the back end of this novel, but Hugh Paxton’s afterword bears quoting. “I’m proud to say” writes this splendidly immodest British journalist, ‘”that Homunculus is probably the most bizarre work of fiction ever to emerge from the African continent (African presidents’ memoirs and autobiographies excepted).” Bizarre it certainly is. Also horribly political incorrect and remorselessly downbeat on our current continent.

In Paxton’s defence, let me say at once that he’s cynical not only about Afro-lunacy, but also about everyone who sticks their nose into our affairs, do-gooders not excepted. These include foreign mercenaries (South Africans especially); foreign intelligence agencies, foreign correspondents (such as Paxton himself); UN aid agencies and ‘peacekeeping’ forces; and the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo (remember Tokyo subway sarin gas attack?). Even those with frankly commercial – okay, homicidal as well – involvement are not spared Paxton’s satire...

...I well recall the impact Tom Sharpe made on the literary scene in 1971 with   his first novel, Riotous Assembly, set in the “Piemburg” of those days. Where Kommandant van Heerden of the SAP longed for the heart of an English gentleman. Published at the height of apartheid, its fierce mockery exposed the idiocy at the heart of the system.

Some interesting statistics from Oxford University Press about the reaction to their open access experiment for publication in the journals they publish. In essence they offer authors whose research has been accepted for publication the option of paying £1500 (or £800 if their institution already subscribes to the online version of the journal in question) to have their paper made available absolutely free to anyone in the world. Open access is being encouraged by a number of research-funding organisations and this 'mixed-economy' response is clever. OUP benefit from being seen to be scholar-friendly, they earn money from the author fees, they encourage institutional subscriptions and they still retain the vast bulk of their subscription income. They are also seen to be transparent in publishing the results of the experiment widely. However, none of this answers the fundamental question of why paying for publication is likely to result in better scientific literature than the existing subscriber sytem. Time will tell and it's great to see practical experimentation rather than hypothetical debate.

From some interesting experimental findings to a report documenting the 'bleeding obvious'. Google have discovered that 16% of visitors to the Google BookSearch web page then move on to a bookshop site (Amazon, WHS etc). Well, shiver my timbers. Who would have thought that some of the people who visited a book page on Google might have wanted to see more about the book and perhaps even buy it? Much more interesting is why on earth the remaining 84% did not visit an online bookshop.

At a dinner last night I was asked what the successful British TV show, Richard and Judy, could do to encourage even more new writing and enjoyment of literature. Their book club has been enormously successful in every way and it was really hard to see how they could do better what they already do. But there is one thing. They could invite their millions of viewers to visit their local public library and demand that the library stocks more books, particularly those by new authors. Libraries seem to have been hijacked by some politicians as out-reach centres or IT retraining camps. Libraries are there for readers and for books. Richard and Judy could be a huge force for good if they marshalled their troops accordingly. They could start by asking how much the library service has spent on management consultants, PwC, compared with their book purchasing budget over the last few years. Libraries are very definitely open access (see above) but there's no point having open access if the choice of books is limited and inappropriate.

Well, Richard offered me three paragraphs to cover the various challenges-i-mean-opportunities presented in setting up a new company, which is clearly not quite enough. Instead I thought I would offer a few of the stages that we went through prior to becoming TFP proper and hopefully Richard will allow me the space later to elaborate.

1. Plan. In March 2005 I went to Anthony Cheetham with a forward list. Yes, just a forward list. Most people in publishing know that Anthony is an experienced publishing entrepreneur, but to look at a list and see an entire business is a skill that Anthony has for which I am extremely grateful.
2. Money. A great idea is not enough. You apparently need to put your money where your mouth is so I remortgaged my house. No, no, please don’t worry about Jake, 5 and Edie 3 – the cardboard box is fine.
3. People. All of a sudden there is an office and some contracts with authors and you’re in business. The office is good as it means there is an option beyond the cardboard box but we do have to pay for it and all of a sudden we have people in it. They are ‘staff’. Another terrifying concept, for me at least.

I’m not oversimplifying. A plan, money and people is really all that you need to start a publishing company, or any company, and this is where I found myself a few months ago.

At this stage though, I found myself with some great books (in theory at least) but no sales and distribution channel. I looked at a few distribution options but they were expensive and not very satisfactory. We went to Macmillan and were lucky enough to be accepted onto their third-party sales and distribution system, but what would we have done otherwise? What should we have done? What would you do? As a bookshop, does it matter? As a Publisher, does it? As a consumer I guess it makes no difference? Is there an alternative?

I’ve failed to squeeze even a fraction of the issues I face as a new publisher into this post so I started with this initial one. I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts on the distribution issue. There are a million and one other things we face every day as a new start-up. I might cover them at www.thefridayproject.co.uk/vox but perhaps Richard might allow me to mention them here too. Who knows?