The British press has had a wonderful time over the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Additionally British Airways has had three of its planes suspected of having carried Polonium and thus being a risk to travellers. I use BA a lot and they kindly sent me an email with a link to the part of their website listing the flights which might have been affected. I asked my secretary to check and all was well. But she added, 'British Airways say that they would have sent you a specific email if you were on one of the affected flights because you're an Executive Club Member.' In other words, if you don't have a BA airmiles card they won't bother to tell you you're at risk. Now that's what I call real customer service - and I'm going to apply for a Polonium card to replace my gold card just in case...

This morning I'm driving to the Cotswolds in the West of England for a meeting with colleagues to discuss the future of scholarly publishing and how best to prepare for it. I guess the conversations will be about technology, changing business models, globalisation, threats to copyright, changing academic research priorities and methods, and budgets. The surroundings will be rather different and rather less contemporary - but none the worse for that. England can be very beautiful.

Last week I wrote about the takeover of Houghton Mifflin by Riverdeep. The pretty obvious headline (variations on the Ike and Tina Turner/ Phil Spector song) was used by just about all the commentators. The best analysis, in my view, was by Luke Johnson in the Telegraph. I think this sums up Mr Johnson's views:

'Riverdeep has been a whirlwind buy-and-build in the educational software field. It went public on Nasdaq in 2000, went private in controversial circumstances after three years, and just a year later its private equity backers were bought out for more than twice their entry price.

Its worth appears to have risen from €349m, to €850m, to now perhaps €1.1bn, although underlying growth of the business has failed to match the vertiginous climb in valuations. Prior to this deal it had at least $380m debt of its own, much of it expensive notes at 9.25 per cent. To help fund the project, Davy is offering 200 of its high net worth clients a piece of the action, and have also brought in $200m of Middle Eastern money. Nevertheless, it sounds like the enlarged group will not cover its interest bill twice – wild stuff.

The entire tale has so many characteristics of our times: two companies with years of reported net losses – but no one seems to care; endless refinancings at higher values, while private equity firms book huge cash profits in record time; a very young Irish financier turning into an incredibly bullish industrialist; lucrative fees ($91m on this deal alone) at every turn for the advisers; and a financing structure built on mountains of debt, all at stratospheric multiples, with no hope of ever paying off the principal through operations.'

Incidentally, I first heard River Deep Mountain High in a sleazy and wondeful pub called The Criterion in the centre of Cambridge and it's never sounded better since. Unfortunately the Cri went bust and closed.

Apparently this weekend is the begining of the 'real Christmas' buying frenzy for retailers. And, as we all know, Christmas sales of books are the key to success for authors, booksellers and publishers. It's therefore no surprise that we publishers check out the bestseller lists more assiduously than ever. The lead titles have all been despatched to bookshops and now everything depends on the sell-through as measured by Nielsen Bookscan in the UK and elsewhere.

Pan is celebrating three of the top ten paperback fiction bestsellers.

And there are more bestsellers to come. However, I'd like to put in a 'blug' for our children's publishing. We have the fastest growing children's publishing group in the world and we're really proud of the quality of everything we produce. Do have a look.

Macmillan Children's Books

Priddy Books

Campbell Books

Henry Holt Books for Young Readers

Roaring Brook

Pan Macmillan Australia Children's Books

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers

Macmillan Caribbean Children's Books

Castillo Literatura Infantil

I have no doubt I've missed some key children's links and my colleagues will remind me of any omissions. While researching these links I checked out whether we had a website for children's books in Namibia. We don't but I did discover a wonderful page of our publications in indigenous Namibian languages such as Khoekhoegowab. It is Macmillan's involvement in publishing such as this which cheers me on a Winter's Sunday morning in London.

A new month heralds a pile of packages of sales statistics and accounts for the previous month. The speed (and efficiency)with which these are produced is increasing all the time which is necessary, but it does mean that I tend to spend the first week of every month weighed down by statistics. My personal contribution to the statistics overload is to tot up visitors to this blog. So here goes.

In November we had 63,375 visitors, 16% up on October and bringing the year-to-date tally to 339,547. I don't have the software to tell me how many of these are unique. On a particular day I guess that most are unique but of course a highish proportion of people come in more than once a month (or never again!). I can also only guess how many are Macmillan employees and what the geographical split might be. I'll see if I can borrow some software from PublisherStats to improve the reporting.

If you click on nature.com today there is a huge banner ad 'Another great moment in science'. This doesn't refer to a scientific breakthrough or another Archimedes moment and it is unlikely to feature in the next edition of Giant Leaps. However it is a major moment in the world of classified advertising.

Traditionally classifieds (or small ads) are the bread and butter of magazines' and newspapers' income. They are not glamorous like flashy ads for perfumes but they do bring in the money. It has been a rather unsophisticated business. If you sell by the word, make the typeface small. If you sell by the inch make the typeface large. It is now, predictably, a battleground on the web and it is one of the reasons that newspapers are having to revisit their business models and their strategies. Perhaps the most signficant straw in the wind was last year's sale by Rupert Murdoch of the Times Educational Supplement which lives on classified job ads.

In any event, Nature has decided to gamble on making it free to post a job on its website. This means kissing goodbye to some revenue which is always hard to do. It also means that the Nature site becomes an even more essential tool of everyday life for the working scientist, thus pulling in more readers more regularly and allowing our advertisers better results, particularly if they decide to add to the free ads with more information and more sophisticated linking. It is fingers-crossed time because such a change is not without risk but in the web world the only certainty is that non-adaptation is fatal. Here's what EPS Newsletter thought of our move:

Until last week, recruitment advertising at Nature had followed a very traditional path: jobs placed by advertisers in the print title were also viewable online at no additional charge to the advertiser. That model has now been turned on its head. NPG believes that its core strengths now lie in the online environment, and has re-evaluated its recruitment advertising model to reflect this: advertisers can now place single or multiple job ads into the naturejobs.com database free of charge.

The naturejobs.com business is now structured around an upsell model whereby added value options that increase visibility and impact are sold to customers taking a basic free listing. Advertisers placing a single or multiple job adverts on naturejobs.com for free will be contacted by a member of NPG’s sales team to be upsold a range of services including contextual advertising, where job ads will be placed alongside relevant content across the nature.com platform. This means, for example, that a job in the neuroscience field would be placed alongside articles on the niche site for the Nature Neuroscience journal and next to neuroscience articles published across the nature.com platform including Nature itself.

This has proved very popular with recruiters, as it increases the audience for the job ad and attracts passive jobseekers who would not necessarily have used the naturejobs.com site. Other added value offerings include job of the week placements, highlighted jobs, and the ability to add logos to a text ad. Advertisers placing multiple jobs online will be contacted by the sales team who will try to sell them a quarter or half page print ad to ensure that they achieve the maximum benefit. Print advertisers’ job ads will still be placed online, with sales teams working to upsell the online services. Other services for print advertisers include lineage ads. This will enable Nature to target advertisers with lower budgets – previously, the only print options were to purchase a quarter or a half page.

Nature is one of the strongest science brands online, through its core Nature title and associated niche journals. The nature.com platform (which encompasses all of these titles) claims 35 million page impressions per month. Competition does exist. New Scientist is strong in Europe with a global print circulation of 170,000, while Science is a key player in the US (global circulation 130,000); at 60,000, Nature’s print circulation is lower than either of these.

However, online it is a different story, and Nature is a much stronger competitor. NewScientistJobs.com claims 1.4 million page impressions against Naturejobs.com’s 1.5 million, for example. Recruitment services from all three publishers allow users to create a CV online and offer features such as e-mail alerts and careers advice. Price is now a key differentiator, with NewScientistJobs.com charging UKP850 to post a single vacancy (UKP295 to NHS and academic advertisers) and ScienceCareers.com charging from USD425 for a single posting, to USD299 per posting for more than 50 ads. Upsells are, of course, also available from both players, with limited contextual placement available - recruiters with NewScientist.com can choose to place an ad alongside a specific upcoming feature, while Nature.com’s contextual advertising option is automated across the platform.

Nature is already one of the premier titles which authors target when trying to publish a paper, and NPG intends that naturejobs.com should mirror this positioning, becoming one of the first places that science recruiters and jobseekers think of whatever their recruitment needs. NPG is also very aware of the challenges that B2B publishers and newspaper publishers have faced from services such as Monster and Craiglist, both of which already carry some science jobs, and sees this reversal of the traditional model as an early move against these potential challengers.

 

Yesterday the highest number of visitors came to this blog after searching for Riverdeep or Houghton Mifflin. This is because it was announced that the former had bought the latter for $3.5 billion. I know very little about Riverdeep but HM is clearly a great publishing company with a long tradition and excellent books but it's hard to figure about the commercial logic of the price. HM has changed hands several times and, apart from the doomed Vivendi escapade, sellers have made money at every turn. Presumably the private equity owners will have extracted cash and no doubt hordes of professional advisers will have sent in astronomical bills for their wisdom. But who, in the end, pays for all this? Publishing is not an easy-profit business and bookbuyers (general or educational) are not flush with cash. I wish the team good luck but I fear Riverdeep might find the mountain rather high to climb.

Yesterday afternoon I visited Nature Publishing Group's industrial-chic new offices in Varick Street in downtown Manhattan.

The offices are brilliant and by chance I was able to participate in a meeting with a hugely important medical society. It reminded me what the business is about and I was further reminded by Jonathan Eisen's blog where he commends Nature for its foresight:

Most surprisingly to me is that a reasonable number of my papers in Nature are freely available on the Nature web site as part of their Genomics Gateway program. Nature deserves serious kudos for doing this and they stand out compared to Elsevier journals (which do not seem to ever do this) and even Science. This is disappointing as Science is published by a scientific society but apparently does not seem to care much about access to publications. Nature, a commercial publisher, is in my opinion doing more for scientific openness than Science. Now, Nature has a long way to go, but I am SO glad I listened to their editors like Chris Gunter and Tanguy Chouard who made a big deal about the Genome papers being free. I did not think it was that big a deal, but in retrospect they were ahead of me in thinking about availability. Plus Nature clearly makes more of an effort to provide free online material than they have to - and certainly make more available than Science.

Not so long ago MPS technologies had a an idea for a new product. In this world of online information librarians are rightly insisting that publishers prove that people are actually using the material being purchased. Each publisher is obliged to supply statistical information to the librarians on agreed 'Counter-compliant' criteria. The problem is that each publisher supplies the information on spreadsheets in a slightly different way and librarians were having to spend time and scarce resource aggregating the data so that they could review it sensibly. ScholarlyStats was developed to automate that process and save libraries money. And yesterday it won the Best Library Product award at the International Information Industry Awards - and here are the happy winners accepting the award from PanMacmillan's very own John Sergeant.

When you're wide awake at 3am in a New York hotel you tend to review the previous day's work. I and a number of colleagues spent the whole day in a meeting room in the wonderful and refurbished (thank goodness) Flatiron Building

at board meetings of the various Holtzbrinck USA companies - St Martin's Press, Henry Holt, Farrar Straus Giroux, Picador, Tor, Audio Renaissance, Bedford, Freeman, Worth and others. It was an awesome display of American publishing and innovation. Although each of the businesses is independent and follows its own editorial and market development there were some common themes. Technology. The need for continuous improvement in quality and efficiency. Flexibility and the ability to move fast. Price pressures. The absolute requirement for growth. The size and vitality of the US market make it a world to itself. At the end of it I was completely shattered!

Of course, the business of America is business but it's not a monopoly. Europe, through business schools like INSEAD, is fighting back. Steve Rutt writes about our latest initiative.

INSEAD Business Press is a partnership between INSEAD, one of the world's leading business schools and Palgrave Macmillan. The combination represents a dream ticket with significant global reach and has the ambition to publish high quality, innovative and influential books that will inform debates for people in business and at business and management schools worldwide.

INSEAD was founded in 1957 in the Forest of Fontainebleau, not far from the famous chateau and has established itself around a unique global perspective and multicultural diversity that is reflected in research and teaching with two main campuses at Fontainebleau in France and Singapore in Asia.

There has been significant collaboration between INSEAD and Palgrave Macmillan on a number of projects including the INSEAD story, "INSEAD: From Intuition to Institution by Jean-Louis Barsoux;

INSEAD Business Press represents a new level of partnership with the first three books on topical and compelling subjects, "Service is Front Stage" by James Teboul, "The Marking Enterprise" by Jean-Claude Thoenig and Charles Waldman and "Mergers: Leadership, Performance and Corporate Health" by David Fubini, Colin Price and Maurizio Zollo.

Spring 2007 will see a new book by one of Europe's leading business gurus, Manfed Kets de Vries

and his team at the INSEAD Global Leadership Centre "Coach or Couch: The Psychology of Making Better Leaders"

In a world with many business and management books the unique positioning of INSEAD Business Press is for rigorous yet accessible, perhaps bringing to mind the words of Albert Einstein:

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"

As Richard is currently laptop-less in New York, so has asked me to post about the Pan Macmillan effort at the annual PEN Quiz on Monday night.

For those of you that don't know, PEN is an international organisation which "exists to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere, to fight for freedom of expression and represent the conscience of world literature."  The fundraising quiz was organised by Jonathan Heawood, the director of English PEN, who, as always, did a wonderful job.  The great and the good of the media and publishing worlds made up 36 teams, and rolled up to the Cafe Royal in Piccadilly to do battle.  The teams included delagations from The Times, The Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Hodder, Penguin, Faber, Orion and Random House.  Quiz 'mistress' for the night was Mariella Frostrup, whilst the not so dulcet tones of Piers Morgan were employed for the raffle.

To properly set the scene, I should mention that Pan Macmillan were the winners of last year's quiz, in a tense tie-break situation.  So, our reputation was on the line, and it was with some relief that we came in at third place, after HarperCollins, and quiz sponsors, Colman Getty PR.  Those of us with a sweet tooth were particularly delighted with the third place result, as the prize was a box of luxury chocolates from Hotel Chocolat.

Congrats to all the Pan Mac team, which consisted of Booker-winning author Alan Hollinghurst, William Fiennes (author of The Snow Geese), Tim Dowling (author of The Giles Wareing Haters' Club, which Picador will publish next June), Tim Adams (Observer journalist and future Picador author, and James Walton, who won the tie-break for the team last year.  There was some controversy at the time, with shouts of 'Ringer' flying about the place, but for the information of those who might wonder about the connection, he is the cousin of our Deputy Picador Publisher, Ursula Doyle. In house team members were Richard Milner (team captain), Andrew Kidd, Camilla Elworthy, Ursula Doyle and Emma Giacon.  Can't wait till next year...!

This comes to you from the offices of Scientific American on Madison Avenue.

'SciAm' has been part of the Holtzbrinck group since the 1980s and has grown every year since. The big challenges now are to maintain our print subscribers and advertisers while building for an Internet future. Fortunately, wherever technology leads editorial standards will drive reader loyalty and we have the best editorial team around - unsurprising perhaps given that SciAm is the world's leading scientific magazine for the general reader.

Apart from publishing every month SciAm is also involved in major awards such as SA 50 (for the 50 researchers, businesses and policy leaders who have made a difference) and the Weizmann Women and Science award won by Dr May Berenbaum pictured here (centre - n.b. British spelling).

And I've been reminded to mention the fast-growing magazine Scientific American Mind. More on New York and other things later.