Reflection on ‘What Use Is A Publisher?’ Nicholas Jones, Strathmore Publishing.

This is the question posed to us by Nicholas Jones in Kingston University's second Masterclass of the year, who came to talk to us on Monday from Strathmore Publishing, a company he founded with a view to offering services to publishing companies who have cut back and outsource their editorial and production. So, not the traditional business model for a publishing company; Mr Jones saw an opportunity to offer some of key services of a publisher and had the entrepreneurial spirit to go ahead with it.

This neatly encapsulates two of the key ideas running through Mr Jones’ lecture; firstly, that a Publisher needs to take risks and be entrepreneurial, or even, that they need to be innovators. Secondly, with the rate of change occurring in the industry, that publishers need not to get too hung up on the traditional model of publishing and look to a trans-media approach; one where all different forms of media come together and collaborate, and content is perhaps much more interactive with the user. Mr Jones’ company quickly expanded into audio publishing, for example, and is now a leader of the audio publishing world, utilising the media of radio to publish stories. Emphasized throughout the lecture was the point that perhaps a publishers role in the future will not be so easily defined as the publishing we know today,  instead meshing medias forms and creating products less easily defined as ‘books’.

Because Nicholas Jones liked to describe himself as a ‘media-agnostic’, meaning that as a consumer, he doesn’t mind what form the content comes to him, be it a printed book, e-book or app; he cares more about the content itself. I think that this is somewhat true of most of the users out there these days who have begun to use and get used to digital forms of media but who still also use the printed book; and I for one have no plans to give up buying and reading the printed thing just because I sometimes consume my content digitally. Different formats are good at different things.

The theme of the lecture though was undoubtedly the questioning of what is it that the publisher brings; what are the specific skills & abilities that make the publisher invaluable? In an age with internet and the ‘unconstrained world’ as Mr Jones put it, there is no longer such a need to get work out there; the problem more is findability. How do you, in the crush of online information, make your product visible over all the rest? Mr Jones drew attention to the fact that in the last 5 years, half of Britain’s bookshops have closed; people are using bookshops more as a showroom to go home and buy their finds on the internet, than actually buying from them. Thought needs to be put into what buyers still get from buying a printed book in a bookshop – the personal, specialist selling, the special, gift-like quality of books.

The Masterclass ended with an idea that publishing is about communication, while the means of getting that information doesn’t matter. Awash with examples of apps attempting to blend books with animation and interactive features, the lecture clearly demonstrated the possibilities for new formats and approaches but also highlighted the fact that this is all still largely experimentation, and lots more work is needed to figure out how to use these new forms to their best advantage. According to Nicholas Jones, publishing is about packaging the information, and the risk-taking talked of above, where the publisher must be bold to go out and explore new ways of doing things.