Publishing for Profit: Successful Bottom‐line Management for Book Publishers

Citation

Turner, J.R. (1999), "Publishing for Profit: Successful Bottom‐line Management for Book Publishers", Library Management, Vol. 20 No. 8, pp. 447-455. https://doi.org/10.1108/lm.1999.20.8.447.4

This is a first‐rate book which, unfortunately, may be of only marginal interest to readers of Library Management. It will not even help readers to recognise a good publisher or a well‐published book because the results of following Thomas Woll’s advice are invisible, except to the firm’s bank manager. However, book publishing is a related field to library and information work and Woll has an extremely readable style which grabs the reader’s interest from the start.

The work deals with exactly what its title claims to do. There are already plenty of books explaining what a publisher does and how to do it effectively, and also books explaining how to perform various jobs within a publishing house, such as how to be a copy editor, or how to design books – a list of titles especially strong on those aspects of publishing work which have a clear, practical element. Much rarer are books which show how to make a profit, how to run a financially successful business. There is nothing here about how to persuade an author to write more logically, or how to order print, but everything about how to plan and manage the business to achieve a profit. Subjects are defined, explained and examples are given: thus, pp. 31‐5, show what a mission statement is, then, why is it important, and finally gives examples of mission statements suitable for a publishing house.

The book is aimed at small publishers or people thinking of setting up in the business and the underlying assumption, without causing any offence, is that the reader knows nothing. For example, p. 107 discusses how to deal with agents:

In dealing with an agent, you must be realistic. Most agents will send most books to their larger clients because those larger clients may pay bigger advances than smaller publishers will. I say “may” because there is a feeling among smaller publishers that agents always get big advances for their books. In fact this is not at all true. Many manuscripts are sold for between £1,000 and £5,000 ... The key again is not to overpay.

It is possible that the book could be of use if a library is considering a programme of publication or of issuing just one or two items. Woll shows how a manager can keep control from the first idea right through to the sale of finished copies. It is clearly explained how to estimate the likely income of a proposed new book, how to check that the estimated income is still possible as the book proceeds through the publishing process, how to plan a publishing time‐table and make sure (as far as possible) that the book is keeping to schedule. Suggestions are made throughout on charts and spreadsheets to help in all this. There are also useful sections, similar to the one quoted above about agents, on free‐lance help that may be available in, for example, design, sales distribution or warehousing.

The presentation, as one would hope in a practical book on publishing, is very accurate and I found only three typos – one in the passage quoted above on agents where a space has been omitted before “£1,000”, one on the last line of p. 220 where an apostrophe is omitted, and one on p. 223 where a space has been omitted between “is” and “difficult”.

Thomas Woll is an American and an American edition last year preceded this British edition, but the revision has been careful and thorough. Almost all the examples used in the text are British, references to money are in sterling, all the supplementary information (for example, the list of “Official and Trade Bodies” in the Appendix) and the bibliography are British; in fact if Woll did not declare his nationality most readers would probably not realise.

Even though the book is of no direct interest to library managers, if any of you are looking for a career change, find a niche in the market and follow all Thomas Woll’s advice and you would have a very good chance of becoming a successful publisher.