Comments on: Small Teams and Acquisitions: A Collection of Messy Thoughts

By: stacy

stacy — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:44:11 +0000

I’m not clear what you mean by acquisitions–do you mean bigger publishers acquiring startups? That’s what (still relatively small) Lee & Low did for Tu Publishing, a small press startup. Any small press is a small team. I am the only editor for Tu Books, now an imprint of Lee & Low, and I read slush, do all the editorial work, work with the freelancers who do art and copyediting, etc. I like the freedom of my small team–it’s not just me; we have marketing and sales folk, my publisher, and other people who are invested in Tu succeeding, yet there aren’t multiple levels of bureaucracy to deal with, and anyone whose signoff I *do* need for an acquisition are invested in the success of the imprint.

By: Colleen Cunningham

Colleen Cunningham — Tue, 25 May 2010 01:46:58 +0000

In the production department at Adams Media, we’ve been given free reign to build a digital workflow into our existing print workflow. We were tasked to save the company money by learning how to create digital products in-house, and now that we’ve become so familiar with the technology, the rest of the company looks to us for education as to whether books are better in the PDF or ePub format, direction on how to shape our manuscripts to better take advantage of cross-referencing and hyperlinking, and lessons on how to create a quality digital product in a fast-paced production environment. That’s not to say that this educational process is easy – sometimes I think we’re known as the “NO” people, but having this in-house discussion about the best formats for our various print books will no doubt help get our publishing program up to speed quickly on which books to invest time in converting to ePub and which titles should go the PDF route. As long as our department can get us on the same page as a company as to how to best reach our consumers with minimal friction, then the learning curve (and hours and hours of troubleshooting) will have been worth it.

By: Kassia Krozser

Kassia Krozser — Tue, 04 May 2010 22:12:22 +0000

In reply to Debbie Stier.

@debbie — I eagerly await your “lessons learned” post. You make a point that is critical: this is not an approach embraced by many. There is some comfort in working within established structure. As nonsensical as some corporate processes seem to those inside and outside the organism, procedures have been established for good reason. Though I would argue that one side effect of the small team approach is to challenge those procedures to see if they still make sense.

So perhaps an addition to my list is “willingness to challenge or sometimes subvert the status quo.”

(I do hear you on the luxury of large teams. It took a village to teach me to work a fax machine. And it was group-think that lead to my use of something I believe is called “interoffice mail”.)

By: Rebecca Springer

Rebecca Springer — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:48:33 +0000

Looking back to the distant past (2000-2001), Time Warner Book Group’s iPublish.com was another innovative digital experiment that was killed before it had a chance to take off. A small team, run like a startup, we actually made phenomenal headway in 18 months, but that’s all the time we got before TW pulled the plug. Publishers need to get comfortable with the idea of burn rate, and that not all new projects will make P&L right out of the gate. If they’re not willing to invest, well, the “future of publishing” may increasingly be happening outside the big 6.

By: Debbie Stier

Debbie Stier — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:39:30 +0000

Just to add, I’m very intrigued by Twelve at Hachette Book group and how they function as a small team. Would love to hear more from Jonathan Karp.

By: Debbie Stier

Debbie Stier — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:53:07 +0000

I always said that one of my favorite aspects of HarperStudio was that we each got to do a little bit of everything because we didn’t have “staff” — and I can’t help but wonder if that was one of the aspects that led Bob to leave (i.e. he wasn’t loving having to handle the minutea we all had to deal with as a result of having no bodies). I’m still adjusting to the new meeting schedule as well as having to go through many people to get a decision made, when a few weeks ago I used to make decisions by yelling out my office door “Bob, can I buy this book?”

All that said, it does feel luxurious at this point to have teams of people working on the books, now that they’ve been folded back into the rest of the company imprints. I honestly can’t believe how many people there are to do the work. No wonder I aged so much during these last two years.

I’ve been wanting to write a post on Lessons Learned from my HarperStudio Experience……

Thanks for the thoughtful post Kassia.

By: Chris Fagg

Chris Fagg — Tue, 04 May 2010 07:15:51 +0000

Somewhere in this discussion is a distinction between the book as content and book as object. Take children’s books for instance. Would The Hungry Caterpillar work on an Ipad? (Although a videogame based on it might.) The hundreds of thousands of kids who stood in line for the latest Harry Potter really wanted to possess that book. So, content for Kindle (or internet browser — v smart idea) but the real job of publishers is to make people want a personal relationship with the book. Small, dedicated teams may be better at this than boring corporations infested with drones and power freaks.

By: Maryann Miller

Maryann Miller — Tue, 04 May 2010 02:04:43 +0000

This is ery interesting. I was not familiar with HarperStudio, but do know about Carina. I think that publishing is definitely moving in new directions and I hope those who are working on that other side of the writing business take your suggestions to heart.