Contracts

Unfortunately, our survey on SurveyMonkey did not generate that many responses so I cannot really carry on with last weeks task. We are leaving it for another week to see if we can get any more participants to really get a usable number of answers. So hopefully next week I can actually give you some results!

Carrying on with this weeks lecture. We looked at contracts today. It made me realise that dropping Law after A level was a wise decision. Having to write these contracts seems a thankless task! However, the knowledge of what each clause means that you can properly negotiate with an author over what they want their contract to say. This is highly important as many authors will simply cross out sections they don’t like or argue over the need for certain aspects. Within the publishing world, contracts are issued for every aspect. There are Author Contracts, Editor Contract, Series editor contract, Amendment to contract, Co-publishing contract. This means that for each potential author pairing or writing team, there is a contract. This is highly important as certain breaches in contract can have severe consequences. Other, less serious breaches could just initiate a ‘get out of jail clause’ and some breaks could be easily solved and remedied. Life can get in the way of many clauses, so due date can be brushed over if the author is late, a change in length can be discussed or a change in pictures. Learning the contract your author has to sign means you can maybe see potential issues for the author ahead of time, can easily work out a happy medium or be ready on which clauses you cannot change.

Usually, most companies all have a word limit clause, a time scale clause, who owns international rights, who owns digital rights (massive clause and usually none nonnegotiable), who owns media rights (TV and Film), which country the legal aspect is controlled by and the publishers right to first refusal of your next book. Other clauses can be added as the publisher sees fit but the clauses over the rights are the main points for publishers and often not negotiable.

Assignments are taking up most of the tasks this week so the continuation of the SurveyMonkey is this week. Hopefully more data will be available for next time.

Market Research

I mentioned that last weeks task was to try to sell a book. My team had a book based on bioethics and I decided to try to sell the book by relating it to relevant topics at the moment such as the Ebola virus and euthanasia, both which need to be looked at ethically as well as scientifically. Happily, I was informed that this was the correct way to try to sell a book, especially one that didn’t have a sexy title to sell itself.

Following on from this exercise, we delved into the world of Market Research in publishing. This class was designed to see how we gather market information. We were given the task of researching enhanced digital books. These are ebooks that have an enhanced aspect to it, whether it be interactive, audio or visual. There is a large market in America for these kind of textbook, especially medical and science. Inkling is one company that designs and creates these enhanced ebooks for the American market. Acting like we were working for MUP we researched who was doing the enhanced e-book in the UK, who we would want to market the book to and what area of education would work best.  Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Hodder, Pearson, Open University Press are among some of the few publishers who do enhanced ebooks.

As a group we decided to focus on University students. We discovered that enhanced e-books can only be used on iBook and KindleFire. This means that we had to research how many students have access to these platforms and how many would be willing to use a textbook on an e-reader. Once this is established, we would then be able to sell the books to Universities and Lecturers showing the demand (hopefully). We used SurveyMonkey to devise our survey.

We are aiming for around 100 responses to be able to gain a good enough sample number to analyse the results.  Tune in next week to see what out results are or (if you are a student) click on the picture on the right to do the survey yourself.

 

 

 

Maintaining a list

Welcome back for another week of Editorial and Production! Last week we learnt how to build a list so it follows on that this week we learnt how to maintain current lists. Besides the obvious talking to authors about the books that they are currently writing, maintaining a list can encompass termination of  a book print run or ordering more prints of books. These other lists are called backlists and Editors need to keep up to date with them to make sure they aren’t losing money, either by having no copies in stock that could sell or having too many books in storage. For MUP, storage is outside the house so costs money per book housed. We did a little exercise in class to see which books we would do a re run of, which we would just leave as they are and which we would terminate. This picture shows the system we were using. Tony Mason (our lecturer) said that this was a very simple system and usually we would have the month by month sales listed but for the purpose of the exercise this was easiest. None of us had the same answers as each other and we seemed to be fairly over-cautious as compared to Tony.

Our next assignment is on Sales and Marketing. We have been given a book cover, synopsis and selling points about a book per group and we now have to think of the best way to get these books onto the shelves of book stores and Universities. This is an interesting assignment as we get to see another side of publishing. Once the books have been printed the hard work has only just begun. Getting it in a position to sell is critical to the book’s success and to you as an Commissions Editor. I’ll let you know how the sales pitch go and what the best way to sell a book is after next week!

Building a list

Today we learnt about building lists. Lists are what commissioning editors have which include authors, book titles and points of interest that they want to explore. As a new editor in this position it is imperative that you review this list, add to it and even delete from it. Within academic publishing, such as Manchester University Press, peer reviewing is very important. This is where you would get a proposal from an author that you want to add to your list or have already got on your list and have at least two people from the same field as the proposal review it. Obviously as an editor your field of knowledge is publishing. Peer Review just means that you have help in an area you probably don’t have that much experience in. Without this, you could be publishing books that are ancient in their view, wrong in their assumptions and ultimately be a very bad investment for you as a publishing company.

As well as learning about peer reviews, we also covered how budgets would be estimated for a proposed book. As an editor you would receive a proposal, once you have had it peer reviewed and given the all clear from an academic point of view, you need to see if it would be financially viable. We were given an Excel spreadsheet with formulas already programmed in for us. This calculated how many pages an amount of words would equate to and enable you to find the total price spent on making the book, how much you would make and then the total profit. We were informed that for a book to be viable, the margin percentage had to be at least 65%. This means that the publishing house would be making enough money to be able to re-invest into other projects.

Our task for this week was to choose one proposal out of 2 and assess where we would get it peer reviewed from and if they had the potential to be within the desired margin percentage. I’ll let you know how this progresses next week.

Reply to the email!

To follow on from the last post, I said I would tell you what happened with our emails to authors. 

 

“Dear Megan

 

Overall a good response – the first two paragraphs should be merged together for stylistic reasons. The ‘good news’ line might begin with a ‘But I have…’ – sounds more human and spontaneous if you’re trying to make a connection with the author. Taken together, though, it is clear and makes the points well. I liked the way you opened with a friendly ‘Hi’ and ended with a ‘Thanks’

 

Best wishes

Thomas”

The tone and content of the original email were clearly what he was looking for in a commissioning editor. Clearly the conversational “Hi” and “Thanks” were received warmly and just added to the friendly tone. As expected, the replies to the harsher emails sent were received badly. The other group’s author responded very angrily to the email and showed how quick and easy it is to loose an author and the good relationship needed to sustain a healthy work environment for both Editor and Author.

 

 

Welcome

To any of you that stumble across this blog I issue a welcome. Every week I shall be posting about my Editorial and Production module within my Publishing Masters degree. Anyone who has in interest in publishing I invite you to take a look through and even to follow on to my book review blog.

This week we were introduced to our lecturer, Tony Mason, the Senior Commissioning Editor for Manchester University Press (MUP). For those that do not know, there are two types of Editors; A commissioning editor and a copy editor. Both are highly important to the publishing world. A commissioning editor commissions authors and books (shocker I know) and a copy editor proof reads the manuscripts and other related things (more to come on copy editing later in the academic year). Tony  talked us through a quick run of the life of a commissioning editor and the structure of MUP. Our exercise for the day was to contact an author already commissioned by Tony and deal with a query by that author. My group were handed Thomas Hennessey of Canterbury Christ Church University, who had a question about the stocking of his book “Britain’s Korean War” in Waterstones. Within my group, we devised three replies; one simpering to the author, one really harsh response and one in the middle. The response I devised was the medium response as shown below.

“Hi Thomas, 

                        Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, I have no control over Waterstone’s stock or knowledge of which stores stock which books due to a central ordering system by them.  I have asked one of our local MUP sales reps to look into this for you so as soon as I have any information I will let you know.

 I do know Waterstone’s work on a demand base so if you and any friends go into the store and ask for the book on multiple occasions it could be re-stocked.

 I have some good news to tell you! Your book has been earmarked for paperback release in Spring 2015. This will be at a more attractive price for high street bookstores to potentially sell more.

 I’ll email you again as soon as I have any more information.

 Thanks

 

Megan Pollard

 Editing Commissioner”    

We are waiting for the responses and we shall be going through them in the next class. Hopefully we shall be able to find out which response works the best and learn that different authors need different approaches. I feel that the really harsh response will generate a negative relationship with the author which, in the world of commissioning editing, is the last thing you need.