From Shaken and Stirred:
Publishing twitter is having a very important public conversation, touched off by the announcement by Molly McGhee yesterday that she was leaving Tor after being refused a promotion, when her first acquisition hit the New York Times list this week. In her post, she detailed the large scale problems that led to this decision, including scads of administrative work she was also expected to do.
Link to the rest at Molly McGhee and Shaken and Stirred and thanks to C. for the tip.
Makes me wonder what Data Guy is doing and how he’s faring with book publishers.
Exploiters gonna exploit
On the one hand, this is a story that it not alien to the long-term trends of the inside-publishing-house-career history (“all you need is love”).
But, as a career IT person, I think it’s actually emblematic of an older trend — the distaste and delay in conventional tech automation that besets some industries who think they can afford it (of which Publishing is a prime example, and Academia/Education another). These are industries that never really adopted computer automation as part of their business, something as fundamental as reading and writing.
How can I say that? They use wordprocessors to edit, their bookkeepers use accounting programs, etc. Yes, I agree. But it seems as though none of the core individuals that run these companies and provide their strategic backbones has really ever shown evidence of coming to terms with adopting these tools as fundamental parts of their jobs. They’re like diplomats on steroids — they have staff for that. They never got their hands dirty with it before the last few decades; why do it now?
These are the last people in the world to derive insights from data analysis, much less the ordinary data upkeep that is a prerequisite for it. (After any look into Publishing metadata upkeep and maintenance, and its inability to take advantage of unexpected market opportunities, ordinary tech-savvy persons can only shake their heads in incredulity.) They’re not just not tech-savvy; they’re actively tech-blind or tech-hostile. They are so far removed from wanting the tools to understand their business better that they can’t even see what “ordinary” companies achieve with them, where so many people can analyze and improve the various levers of their business. Too much disdain for banausic work.
It’s no wonder they are the last people techies want to work for. The assistant editors may be motivated by the love of publishing, but the techies (at all levels) want to be appreciated as something better than low-class plumbers, a necessary evil. They want to be business partners, but you can’t partner with people who don’t value what you do or want what you can provide. If the industry doesn’t want tech, it doesn’t get tech. It’s a vicious circle for industries like Publishing who think they don’t need it.
Most damning is that tbese days they don’t even need to have an IT dept. They can outsource everything to a services company who’ll deliver a cloud-based turnkey system. All they need to do is write a few checks.
But as you say, they don’t know or care what they are missing out on.
Besides, if they brought on a team of consultants (PwC?) to evaluate their processes they might run away screaming.
For all we know tbey’re still using a single 286 PC and a stack of floppies as their document management system. (True story from a while back. This century.)
High-powered consultants can’t help.
When a company calls in consultants for this sort of thing (or used to — they’ve mostly all made the transition by now), they may be embarrassed to need outside assistance, but they (or their bosses) are convinced that they need the benefits of real data for analysis at all levels, so you can usually make headway, if you can soothe the middle management in the process.
For the Publishing industry, they have no idea they can benefit from this and, besides, they’re too mighty to need to stoop to boring work like that. It’s infra dig. Not the sort of topic that comes up at their famous lunches.
If I were to meet someone who told me she/he worked in IT for a traditional publisher, my immediate thought would be, “This person couldn’t get a job anywhere else.”