The tedium of the winter holidays has passed, and life has returned to what can perhaps be described as "complete madness". Classes are back, extra lectures are back, SYP events are back, group meetings are back. I'm not doing any work experience at the moment, but I'm back at paid work (I have an irregular schedule, where sometimes I don't work for weeks on end, then I get a whole bunch of work thrown at me at once).
This semester is a bit different from last as this time around we all have different schedules. In the first semester it doesn't matter which MA you're doing (regular Publishing, International Publishing, Publishing and Language, or Digital Publishing), everyone does the same classes. In the second semester, everyone who is full-time does New Product Development (part-timers do it second year). Digital people do Digital and E-Publishing. Publishing and Language do a class by the same name with one option. International does (surprise) International Publishing Management, and an option. And those of us on the regular Publishing track get two choices. In addition to what I've already listed, this includes things like Rights Management, Book History and Culture, Journals, Magazines, and Children's Publishing.
For my options, I'm doing International Publishing Management and Rights, but I'll talk about both of those in later entries so as to keep this one from becoming too long.
New Product Development (NPD) is kind of like Editorial on steroids. Actually, it's like all of our classes last semester rolled in to one, with extra stuff thrown on top for good measure. In the end, we have to produce at 15,000 word report, and a 25 minute presentation. Luckily this is group work, otherwise we'd all be screwed. As it is, the fact that all the other lecturers seem to be planning deadlines as far away as possible from NPD's deadline makes me a bit worried. The general consensus from lecturers and past students is that NPD will be a huge beast. I have yet to find any evidence that might contradict this opinion.
The premise of this project is that we all work for a company called Buckley Publishing (Buckley is the building where the publishing department have their offices) as members of its various divisions. There are, I believe, 9 divisions: STM (scientific, technical, and medical), trade non-fiction, social science and humanities, ELT, AAD (art, architecture, and design), textbooks, education, children's, and fiction. They socially-engineered the groups only so far as to make sure each group had a guy (there's a huuuuuge gender inequality on the course), and they tried to give each group someone with good design skills, but other than that, I have no idea how they assigned the groups. We weren't asked our preferences or anything, so it could have easily gone quite horribly as the only two I really would have enjoyed were children's and fiction. As it is, I count myself incredibly lucky as I was, indeed, assigned to children's.
Each division is responsible for, surprise, developing a new product, preferably some sort of series. Apparently last year's Fiction group did erotica which... seems like a gutsy thing to go with. We were all given descriptions of the state of Buckley Publishing as a whole, and of our individual departments. Children's has had past success with illustrated books, but sales have started to decline recently. We've never had much success with genre series like HP or Twilight. We have a strong history of selling rights to Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. And... we need a new product (series, really, by which I don't mean genre series, just more than one book).
We each have jobs within our groups, which we decide amongst ourselves. We were told very clearly that we MUST have a Managing Director, and that they have the final say on everything. (They said there's always one group that tries to be democratic about everything, which always seems to fail miserably.) Other than that, what positions we have and who has them is up to us. My group's first order of business was to decide who was going to be our finance person: as practically everyone on the course is a humanities graduate, finance tends to scare the crap out of damn near all of us. After several tense moments of silence after asking for a volunteer, our token guy raised his hand and the rest of us rejoiced. The end result of our job delegation was: Managing Director, Deputy Managing Director, Rights, Editorial (x2), Sales and Marketing(x2), Design and Technical, Production and Finance. I'm doing rights and I'm the deputy MD as well.
We're already having a fair bit of fun with the project, which is awesome. We talked about ideas last week, and bouncing it all around was great, which is good, because the children's project SHOULD be fun. Kids have got to like our idea, and if it puts us to sleep, we're doomed. This also means that we absolutely must have the most entertaining presentation. We've also been warned to avoid "death by PowerPoint" with our presentations, so we're all trying to think up ways to spice it up.
So that's NPD. For comparison, our dissertations also have to be 15,000 words. It's going to be a nightmare, but I've got a fun assignment, we've narrowed things down to three fun ideas, my group is well-organised, and I think we're going to do well.
More on IPM and Rights later.
