International Publishing Management

International Publishing Management, IPM, is the third and final module I'm taking this semester. It's taught by Clare, who also ran Marketing last semester, so that was a bit of forewarning about how much work it was going to be, but I still did it any way. Not only that, I did it in combination with Rights, which only two other people were crazy enough to do to themselves, and one of those two people is an Erasmus student, so she perhaps didn't fully realise what she was getting herself in to. Any way, point is: LOTS OF WORK.

IPM and its connected name degree (MA in International Publishing) are unique amongst publishing programs to Brookes. Even the UCL guys I interviewed with who spent the entire interview going "We're better than everyone else because we're UCL! You don't need anything more specific than that! WE'RE UCL!" admitted that Brookes are experts in the field of international publishing. So having this module available to me was something I viewed as a great opportunity, and I jumped on it. With Clare as the teacher I knew it would be a lot of work, but Clare is also a teacher you learn a lot from.

I'm not sure exactly what I was hoping to get out of IPM, I just thought that with an increasing trend towards globalisation in business in general, it'd be a useful background to have. As it turns out, IPM has been very business-oriented. In fact, there's so much of a business focus that the business schools considers it an acceptable optional module for MBA students, and we consequently have two of them in the class. (Side but related note: the publishing deparment is currently in the process of moving from the arts and humanities school to become part of the business school.)

What we've been looking at in IPM is, basically, how to take your publishing company global. How do you choose which new country you want to go in to? How fully do you comit when you do/how do you enter the market? How do you maintain control over your brand, and is this even a priority? What are human resource issues you need to consider when operating abroad? What are some of the strategies established publishing houses like Macmillan, OUP, and Elsevier use? Why would you want to expand abroad in the first place? We've also looked at financial issues, building on some finance lectures we've had before in other modules, looking at profit and loss, balance sheets, cash flow, and how to use things like liquidity ratios to make all these numbers mean something. The finance bit actually surprised everyone, I think, as it ended up being unexpectedly interesting and enjoyable.

We've had a few guest speakers in so far, and have a few more lined up. This past week as probably the highlight, with a lecture from the head of international development at Random House. He covered (briefly) publishing on a macro scale (big) as well as micro (just Random House). He actually shared with us a lot of RH sales information, which publishers tend to guard very jealously, which was fantastic and incredibly interesting. He told us how much of RH's sales are from exports, who they mainly export to, how things such as fluxuating exchange rates can destabalize existing supply chain models. He pointed out that you need to be aware of formatting issues, like the fact that mainland Europe tends to have small bookshelves, so you can't sell trade paperback format there as those books literally won't fit on the shelves. He also stressed what Clare has been stressing, which is that one size does not fit all and each market needs to be approached with its own strategy.

It has so far been an incredibly intersting class. We obviously don't have the time to cover every country in the world, but we've looked at a few as case studies and learned what it is we should be looking for when we want to go in to a new market, and, most imporantly, how to find that information. I have a feeling the second assignment is going to be a giant headache, but at masters level most assignments are.