Back in September I wrote about a Pan nostalgia website. Just for fun and with the polonium case in mind I reproduce one item.

This great website is run by Tim Kitchen and he wrote to me recently. It seems that people's interest in what his wife calls an obsession and he calls a hobby has encouraged him to do even more:

'I was going to stop at about 1963 when the number was added to the logo on the front cover and I do have all 1500 titles apart from two and these are all on the site. I then carried on with the later titles which still used PAN's eclectic number system. I definitely stop where ISBN comes in. Of the later titles I have over a thousand still to scan in with about 200 left on the wants list.'

On Thursday I attended a round table meeting at the Smith Institute where a group of very senior politicians, librarians, and managers met to discuss how best to ensure a first-class public library system in the UK. The debate was intelligent and constructive and clearly everyone is aware of the issues of efficiency, management and the need to deliver a service which the citizen wants. The Museums, Libraries,and Archives Council is the body charged with strategic oversight of libraries and they have produced a number of excellent reports over the years.

I have two concerns. First that, in spite of much protestation to the contrary, I'm not sure that books are really seen as central to the library system by some of of the participants. These are the objectives for libraries as set out on the MLA website:

• Provide safe, neutral, shared environments for people from all walks of life 
• Support formal education and learning at all times of life
• Act as centres of creativity
• Serve as focal points for their neighbourhood
• Are at the forefront of universal access to the internet and e-government

No mention of books at all.

The second concern is hard to express and hard to prove. I have a feeling that many of the key figures in the library world believe that libraies are somehow too bourgeois and middle class and that they should be changed fundamentally for a 'more inclusive' system. However, most people in the UK are middle class or are aspiring to be middle class. I think libraries do serve the middle class and they should be encouraged so to do. By creating great libraries all citizens will use them and gain educational and cultural benefits. By artificially trying to change the customer base of libraries we risk losing everything.

The Soviet Union in the days of From Russia with Love showed how counterproductive it is to impose ideologies on people. I do hope the library world will resist any attempts to use it as an agent of political change.

Last night I attended one of the regular dinners of this society founded in 1921. It meets eight times a year at the Savile Club in Mayfair.

The Chatham House Rule applies, so I cannot share with you what was said by whom and technically I cannot reveal the name of the speaker (but I do have his permission). It was Stephen Prickett and he gave a fascinating description of his current job which has one of the longest titles in my experience - Director of the Armstrong Browning Library and Margaret Root Brown Professor for Browning Studies and Victorian Poetry, at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, as well as Regius Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland - phew.

But the most embarrassing moment was when neither of us could remember what he'd worked on for Macmillan. He edited the series 'Romanticism in perspective'.

If the Society of Bookmen has a rather traditional feel, the Centre for Creative Business could not be more 21st century. It is a partnership between the London Business School and the University of the Arts London which I represent on their committee. The strange thing is that both the Society and the Centre have very similar aims - to inspire, facilitate, network, enjoy and help sustain creative businesses, the former restricted to writers, booksellers, publishers and other members of the book trade, the latter a wider group.

Off to rainy Basingstoke today. Apparently there are rumours that Basingstoke can deploy nuclear weapons in less than an hour. I'd better check out this new element on the axis of evil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally an excellent piece by Bryan Appleyard in The Times about the importance of popular science books. His last para says it all.

'These new, humble, wondrous books — and, indeed, that great TV testament to wonder, Planet Earth — are an unalloyed good. They restore the true faith, and will, in time, send children to seek out whatever maths and physics courses they can find amid the debris of the science faculties.'

Every now and again I feel moved to do an update on Macmillan New Writing, our programme for finding new fiction talent which was memorably described as a Ryanair (cheap and basic) concept in Charlotte Higgins's piece in The Guardian. The publishing business model is quite simple. If we can avoid losing money on individual titles the occasional discovery will allow us to make a modest profit overall. We've managed the first part of the equation successfully. All the titles have performed decently but none of the authors has 'broken out' into the really big time. We think we may have found our first mega-seller and I've asked Will Atkins, the editor of MNW, to tell us about it.

'Never Admit to Beige puts Jonathan Drapes firmly on the map as one of Australia's most talented new writers.' - The Big Issue

 

On Wednesday night we launched Jonathan Drapes’s novel Never Admit to Beige. There were canapés, inflatable palm-trees and (this being an Australian novel by an Australian author) plenty of wholly ungracious bragging about the cricket.

 

 

BBC Five Live’s Simon Mayo Show has recently begun a Book of the Month slot and Never Admit to Beige is its December selection. It’ll be discussed live on Five today from 3pm, with Jonathan and a panel of guest reviewers; there's also an online forum where listeners can comment on the book.

 

 

 

Never Admit to Beige is the fourteenth Macmillan New Writing novel to be published since our first books appeared in April. It's an anarchic comic romp across Australia's Gold Coast, following guileless young Englishman Trigger Harvey as he searches, with increasing futility/desperation, for his lost luck. (Jonathan, incidentally, tells me he hadn't heard of his character's Only Fools and Horses namesake when he wrote the book). It includes shootouts with Japanese mafia, a run-in with a couple of coke-dealing OAPs, and probably the most violent round of golf in literary history. It's also turned out to be rather hard to classify - on its website, Five Live has a commendable bash: 'A kind of James Bond meets Inspector Clouseau with Men Behaving Badly'.

 

The Five Live Book of the Month slot is relatively new, so its impact on sales remains to be seen, but we've put through a pretty sizable paperback reprint, and Borders will be carrying the book in their Christmas 3 for 2 promotion.  Never Admit to Beige is funny and loveable and bursting with energy; turns out it's also rather prophetic:

 

“Next Ashes series,” one of the novel’s minor characters goads Trigger, “you guys don’t stand a bloody chance. Not if Warney’s on form.”

 

I suugest that non-cricket lovers and anglophiles give this a miss.

When I went to bed on Monday night in the Cotswolds I calculated that the England cricket team would boringly bat until teatime on the last day of the test match in Adelaide thus scuppering any chance of a victory and ensuring a feeble but safe draw. Being an optimist I thought that maybe, just maybe, one of the batsmen would shine and we'd be able to get ourselves into a position where we had more than three hours to bowl Australia out and level the series. It was only when I woke at the ungodly hour of 3.30am that it occurred to me that England's batting might collapse and leave Australia a gettable target. I immediately realised that this was a wholly irrational nightmare and went back to sleep. On awakening I logged into BBC Sport and the excellent ball-by-ball commentary of Ben Dirs. This is what he had to say and there's nothing much I or anyone else can add:

18.53: That was the biggest load of rubbish I have ever seen. Lots of Aussies going berserk in Adelaide, lots of Englishmen looking like they've arrived home to find the French doors have been smashed and their new plasma TV's been stolen. Thanks for staying with me for the last 10 days - it's been a mix of emotions, but mainly depression and boredom, with a bit of anger and embarrassment thrown in. I'm off to Venice this weekend though, that should be nice, they don't even know what cricket is there. Bye.

 

 

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.