Working as a Publisher - 1988

I joined the company on one day a week in January 1988 but after one month that became two days a week! There were other small deals I did such as publishing the annual proceedings of the Annual University of Manchester Broadcasting Symposium and books for the Institute of Local Television but it was really to Europe and beyond that I was looking both for books and marketing lists. At the same I was investigating a third strand of our publishing activity – conference attendance.

Surprisingly finding European institutions interested in publishing with us was easier than might be imagined. It was doubly interesting given that these organisations additionally had to pay all translation costs as a small publishing house such as ours was in no position to pay for such expensive activities. Not wishing to bore the reader with the details of the negotiations or the very large range of books published, these organisations included the following:

Reporters Sans Fontières – Annual Report (France)
The Institute of Media Economics (Italy)
The Council of Europe
International Institute of Communications (UK)
The International Directory of Electronic Arts (France)
The International Olympic Committee (Switzerland)
Voice of the Listener and Viewer (UK)
The Catalan Government (Spain)
West Deutscher Rundfunk (Germany)
European Commission/Eureka Audiovisuel
Article XIX (UK)
The European TV Fiction Observatory (Italy)
The Media Business School (Spain)

As a result of all this European activity the Publisher also agreed to inaugurate a second series of research monographs, commissioned by me and financed by him, called the European Media Research Monographs.

The publishing house also moved into the area of journals and began publishing three – one French and two British. One of the British ones is worth commenting on because it was a prestigious journal about journalism which was financially supported by a number of British media organisations. Fine as it (still) is it suffers from the problem of all such publications – journalists expect to receive all their publications for nothing as part of their occupation!

Constructing international mailing lists and conference attendance was a closely related experience. I drew up a list of the major international media conference organisations and discovered that some of them provided complete membership lists absolutely free of charge. These too were then entered onto the company’s databases.

The Publisher also agreed to experimenting with either one or both of us attending conferences and mounting book stands. There are a number of good reasons for attending conferences.
• Selling books – obviously!
• Publicising the list and the company.
• Meeting new potential collaborating organisations.
• Finding new authors.
• Meeting with, and representing, current authors.
• Hosting the occasional reception.

And more. However, on top of this the main intention is not to make money but hopefully to at least cover costs of transportation, residence and attendance. This doesn’t always happen but I can think of more than one occasion where what I can only describe as panic buying occurred and within two hours all the books were sold! On one of these occasions the conference was being held in a beautiful hotel on the Brazilian coast and there wasn’t anything to do after two hours but to enjoy oneself!

Of course there were also conferences where sales were dismal which can always be a little dispiriting. In such situations the one thing we always did was not to ship the leftover books back home – expensive and potentially damaging to the books themselves. We always donated them to the local university and they were always mightily pleased!