HarperCollins

I have seen first hand that HarperCollins is as proactive as it is innovative in setting out to take full advantage of the digital era Publishing has seemingly found itself. HarperCollins has demonstrated it is more than equipped with ideas and strategies that allow it to take advantage of new technologies.

The recent purchase of The Friday Project, the imminent launch of a social networking site for writers, the set up of an in-house video studio, the creation of an archive of digital images to be used in text books, breaking with the traditional publishing business models, and finally, the simultaneous publication of its titles in both book and electronic format from September; these are all very exciting strategies and forward thinking.

With HarperCollins' ability to combine heritage and imagination it has the confidence and skills to produce high quality of books but at the same time experiment with digital media. HarperCollins is behaving, not as a ‘conventional’ corporation that are perhaps slower on the uptake of new ‘grass root’ ideas, but as an entrepreneurial and unique business.

My entry into publishing is currently being facilitated by a work experience placement at Collins Education where I have been working on the Interactive CD-Roms for the Key Stage Three Science series. I hope this, along with my application will show that I am the ‘unique force in the world’ you are looking for.

Is style or content more important in a book?

I had rarely expressed disdain, if at all, at a book because of its style until I started to read Black Gold: A Dark History of Coffee (this is not my example of a poorly published book). The author had abstained from a bibliography for ‘stylistic reasons’. This made no sense, even from his background as a journalist, as the impression the title gives is that it is a history book and should therefore follow the style of the history genre. Preferences for bibliographies aside, this stylistic omission greatly affected my opinion towards the content and I started to view it as academic, nay journalistic naivety. It was a bizarre twist; that the author's decision to go against what is the typical style of the genre - for stylistic reasons - should backfire.

Style for me up until this point had tended generally to operate in the more obvious manner by appealing to my sense of sight. And that meant the front cover. I have to admit I accused it of perhaps being shallow as ‘Content is [indubitably] King’. But reflection on the books I own reveals that I appreciate books in a different way with nice looking covers. Perhaps like an accessory!

Style creates impressions that content either lives up to or collapses under. The incident with Black Gold highlighted to me the more subtle but just as precarious side of the style/content relationship.

The slide show embedded in this post (from the Penguin blog) reminds me that B. S Johnson was famous for cutting out holes in the pages of his books so the reader could look ahead to a future event.

I think Style and Content need equal consideration on the many levels that exist; from the kerning to the cover.

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I am the avatar: a morning in the life of

3:49 am:- Get woken by a call from Jim Brezinski, the Avatar who runs Second Life Motors, to tell me it’ll cost $4000 Linden to flush the fuel lines on my beloved ‘69 Charger. I curse the cyber punks who poured sugar into the petrol tank.

I ask how he got my ‘First’ Life phone number. He says he was forced into buying a database of all his customer’s details from the Second Life Mafia….

……..I never imagined his voice to be so high pitched.

4 am-ish: - Now that I’m awake I attend to business and start to migrate the content of my novel, Trimalchio in West Egg, into XML. Should have written the novel this way in the first place but pen and paper is still my preferred method. I tag the relevant sections for the digital platforms it will be published in – which reminds me that Honda still owe me my share of the advertising revenue from a short story I published in NTT DoCoMo’s short story series last month.

8:15 am: Get my daily text message from TfL kindly telling me there has been a signal failure at Kings Cross and so there are major delays on the Circle Line, Met Line, Hammersmith and City Line, Northern Line and Victoria Line but all other lines are experiencing a good service!

Relieved today is not an office day.

10 am: Have put the finishing touches to the content migration and sent it off to my publishers in Sydney. By this afternoon people will be able to buy it from a POD kiosk in their local Tesco (or their local equivalent) or download the interactive version from various websites.

10:12 am Take a well deserved coffee break and dive into the deep web to look for new ideas.

Future of the publishing industry

Publishing is now available to anyone with access to the internet so there is effectively no need for the publisher, in the traditional sense, to be involved in bringing content to an audience. Yet this is not the end of publishing. It is a growing industry. The digital revolution means the publishing industry has to be innovative in selling books audiences want to read.

Technology has affected publishing before; where once there were job losses and library closures this time it’s the publishing process that is being affected. There are freelance editors, designers and proofreaders, typesetters in India and software development companies all taking part in a single project. This means the publishing company has become the spider in the web.

At the same time however, publishing companies also need to become more than a publishing company; they will have to become a technology company or a design company in order to be innovative. HarperCollins is taking this step by launching HarperMedia and partnering with BSkyB to source news footage for it’s Interactive CD-ROMs.

Technology is also allowing people to experiment with writing but this does not warrant the hyperbole about the death of the book and changing the way we read. Maybe the misaligned comparison with the music industry has led to this and the overshadowing of importance of Digital Rights Management for example. However the consensus is that there are “unknown unknowns” about the digital revolution and these are to publishing’s advantage.

Overall the digital revolution contains the tools to provoke an entrepreneurial spirit in the publishing industry centred around the prestige of the book.

What excites me about the digital revolution

I believe the digital revolution is concomitant with the internet which gives four examples that excite me almost daily. These are:

Open Source

The ability to find out anything one wants

Interactivity

Progress (social, economical, political)

Open Source is free distribution and free licensing of anything from programmes to operating systems. Programmers make the programme code available for others to copy and use as they wish. It is responsible for everything from the 25,000 on applications on Facebook to sleek operating systems such as Ubuntu.

Knowledge, or perhaps information, is now readily accessible thanks to the internet. 81% of internet users in the UK go online specifically to find information (ONS). Interactivity is a key feature of this information. Anyone can respond to an opinion piece from a newspaper, groups form to discuss consumer products and quite possible every niche sub-culture is represented online.

I am not suggesting any explicit link between access to information and political, economical and social progress on a structural scale – maybe with time - but I do believe greater access to information has played a significant part in bettering the day to day experiences of people in both developed and developing countries. For instance: being able to earn an income from advertisements on a frequently read blog, voicing and garnering dissenting opinion through forums, working as an IT specialist for an overseas company, or searching for the cheapest plane ticket.

This is all possible because we can transmit information digitally around the globe. The fundamentals of this is very exciting!

An example of a well published book and a poorly published one

The Eyewitness Travel Guides are books I consider to be well published. They have a distinct style and layout that uses pictures and text in equal balance. They are a good example of a popular series embarked upon by the publishers that have turned into a successful and reliable brand. It is also now possible to download (ten) of the travel guides to your mobile phone or hand-held device

To mention a second, more briefly if I may, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is an example of where the publisher has taken advantage, intentionally or not, of a conspiratorial post 9/11 clash of civilisations world (2003) and published a book that fed into the frenzy of religion, dark forces and heroes to become a big commercial success.

A book that has been very poorly published is Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground by Penguin Reds (2006). Essentially the book has been misrepresented for the sake of marketing. I understand this may have been done to attract new readers but the synopsis seems a little too patronising and the cover too contrived.

My personal hero?

This was an enlightening exercise. I originally had a shortlist of surfers, punks, a philosopher and Nelson Mandela but didn’t really feel like they were personal heroes (and they are shorter in real life when you meet them). However they did represent admirable qualities and had inspirational achievements. The problem was this lack of personal connection whereby, for example, I could call them up and get their venerable opinion. I had trouble elucidating why they were heroes beyond the standard answers and wouldn’t be able to say so with conviction.

As such I had inadvertently made this question harder until my girlfriend asked (without a hint of irony) why she wasn’t my personal hero. And in truth she is. She is very supportive and understanding of what I am trying to do. And that is all I need.


I Wipe My Ass With Showbiz



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A Blaze of Charm: An Autobiography

My self-proclaimed maxim that pretentiousness is solely the preserve and obligation of the young, provided me with the occasional but much needed respite from self-doubt and trepidation during those emo-years.



That, through the imagination of others I have experienced a reality that has often exceeded my own imaginings is something I will be ever grateful for.

What I want from a career and where I expect to find it

After A levels earning some money and having fun was more important to me than having a career. To be honest at the age of nineteen career was a word without meaning.

After working in manual employment for two years I learnt there were two things - a job or a career. I soon realised that if I wanted to have a career I needed to continue my education. I had a passion for reading and knowledge and I thought about studying English, but decided that Sociology with Development Studies would satisfy my need to understand different societies and cultures and my interest in business.

After leaving University I worked at the Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners for eighteen months. I decided to broaden my experiences whilst I was still young and single by going travelling. One constant during this time was the written word. I knew that when I returned I wanted two things (a) a career and (b) to work in publishing. My work experience at HarperCollins has reinforced this. I am twenty seven and now ready to embark on a career and work hard. I want to develop and grow with an organisation and be part of the organisation’s success and its future.