Publishing’s remarkable resilience is amazing: Hachette UK’s David Shelley

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From LiveMint:

In 18 short years, David Shelley has gone from being an editorial assistant and then publishing director at independent publisher Allison and Busby, to becoming chief executive of Hachette UK last month—a career that’s nothing short of phenomenal. Along the way, the Oxford graduate in English literature has also been the CEO of Little, Brown and Orion.

Shelley is seen as one of the hottest young talents in global publishing and has worked with authors such as J.K. Rowling and Mitch Albom. A passionate advocate for publishers adapting to the digital environment, Shelley also oversees Hatchette UK’s inclusion initiative, Changing the Story.

. . . .

Congratulations on your new position David. What are your plans now for Hachette UK?

I think one thing is really exciting: there is the potential for understanding consumers better. Very successful businesses like Amazon or Netflix are extraordinary in the way they use data, algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning. In book publishing, we’re just sort of starting on that. So I feel for me this is an exciting time coming to the job I’m doing. At the moment, we’re publishing a book, putting a cover on it and hoping for the best. I think it’s really probable that in the years to come, we will test a book before we publish it. We will also look to see what people’s reactions are. We ought to know how to describe a book in a way that excites people, and what cover to put on that really interests readers. We’re only as good as the authors we publish. On the other hand, we will be a brilliant partner for authors if we can get them to as many readers as possible.

. . . .

Opinions are divided within the sector about the health of the publishing industry. What’s your take?

I think that publishing is a little bit like farming. If you get a group of farmers together, they’re always going to disagree about the harvest or the market. I think it is the same for publishers. It often feels like something very big is happening—certainly in the UK, a few years ago, supermarkets started keeping books and this started destroying small bookshops. Now we have Amazon. I think these things come and go; the amazing thing about publishing is its remarkable resilience, and that’s because of people’s desire for long-form content, both fiction and non-fiction. If you look at book sales, then the value can go up and down but actually the number of sales remains very stable and strong. The industry probably needs to become more a part of the digital world. And that doesn’t mean just publishing e-books, but how we operate in the digital environment. We need to understand online retail very well, as well as the connection between offline and online retail. We are in a pretty strong place, with some challenges.

Link to the rest at LiveMint and thanks to Suzie for the tip.

Testing a product with potential customers before releasing it has been routine in the reality-based business world for 60 years, maybe more.

PG suggests the bar for qualifying as one of the “hottest young talents in global publishing” is extremely low.

21 thoughts on “Publishing’s remarkable resilience is amazing: Hachette UK’s David Shelley”

  1. “PG suggests the bar for qualifying as one of the “hottest young talents in global publishing” is extremely low.”

    Or they are trying very hard to find anything positive to say about how things are currently going – and whether this guy has even a chance of turning things around.

    “The industry probably needs to become more a part of the digital world.”

    Probably? This in itself proves he’s afraid of rocking the boat hard enough to do them any good …

  2. The great reading public can seldom tell the difference between absolute ‘remarkable’ and relative ‘remakable.’ They are routinely manipulated into believing things which are not so.

    I blame the lack of an education in statistics. Nothing major, you understand, just the small orange book called ‘How to Lie with Statistics.’

    • You ever tried to eat whole roast pig?
      Very tasty but the skin needs a light saber to cut through. Definitely resilient.

      • My family bought a roast pig once to barbecue, having purchased a special pig-roasting crate-thing for the purpose. Unfortunately, the special-ordered pig was quite a few pounds larger than what we’d actually ordered, and did not fit in the crate.
        I’m sorry that I no longer have the video of my father attempting to trim the pig to fit, working his way up through various power tools– to little effect — until he got out the chainsaw. That worked fine.

        • It’s not uncommon for moose hunters here to have a small dedicated chainsaw just for that purpose. They lubricate the chain and bar with cooking oil rather than the normal stuff. It’s a useful thing to have when your 1,200 pound moose is miles away from any form of transportation, and you need to get it cut up and out of there before a bear shows up for lunch.

          • That’s smart, cooking oil. I had to clean that chainsaw after and it wasn’t very nice.
            But yes, Felix, the pork was tasty. The kit came with a syringe and a large bore needle so you could inject the pig with lime juice, and it turned out very well.
            As a side note, the raw hocks that were cut off got used for crab bait, and it was *way* more appealing to the crabs than any other bait we’d ever used.

  3. “Testing a product with potential customers before releasing it has been routine in the reality-based business world for 60 years, maybe more.”

    And how exactly would you do this with books? Option a manuscript and distribute copies to a select group of confidential readers who are paid not to review or discuss the book or disseminate it anywhere? And when you multiply this by the number of titles a major publisher releases, it becomes to initiate and manage.

    • And how exactly would you do this with books?

      This is easy to do with ebooks. Look at the way Baen handles their eARCs. Not only do they distribute pre-release electronic copies of their forthcoming books, they’ve actually persuaded their customers to pay extra for the privilege.

      With respect to testing, you just show half of the site visitors cover #1 and half of them cover #2 and note which one attracts more downloads. Then you repeat the process with blurbs (or any other differentiator).

      This is called “A/B Testing” in the web development world, and there are numerous frameworks available to help you set up the tests and process the collected data.

      • What I had in mind was trying to devise a system of market testing a book without the publisher suffering the expense of acquiring a manuscript. In order to distribute eARCS, you have to spend the money to acquire the manuscript. Ideally, market testing should inform a manufacturer if there’s any significant demand for a product before they invest heavily in manufacturing it.

  4. PG suggests the bar for qualifying as one of the “hottest young talents in global publishing” is extremely low.

    Yep. Since when does 18 years (!) in an industry make you a “hot young talent”?

    • Yeah, that says something about publishing. Nothing good, you understand, but something.

      I imagine this conversation taking place: “Hey, Bob, I hear there’s this hot new trend called ‘ereading’. Maybe we should look into that.”

      “Don’t be ridiculous, George. Nothing’s going to come of that, people want to hold books in their hands.”

      Date of this conversation? 2118.

  5. You are way tooooooooooo humorous for an attorney!!!

    “PG suggests the bar for qualifying as one of the “hottest young talents in global publishing” is extremely low.”

    I’m still laughing!

    More, More, More, please.

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