So this Tuesday there were two guest speakers at uni to give us an insight into their two very different publishing careers in travel publishing and as an author. While initially I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about either of these topics, I am very glad I went.
First there was Stephen Mesquita who came to talk to us about travel publishing. He took us through the history of travel publishing, how it evolved from the Victorian era to the world of Tripadvisor and Google Maps that we know today. It was interesting to see how, more than a lot of other books, travel guides really rely on visibility to attract their audience. Branding and design play a big part in sales decisions and so a presence in physical book shops is important. And it's because of this and the rise of free online content and user-generated review sites that travel publishing has been experiencing a steady decline in the last ten years.
But despite the doom and gloom attitudes surrounding the travel publishing industry at the minute, I found the talk really interesting because it was showed
First there was Stephen Mesquita who came to talk to us about travel publishing. He took us through the history of travel publishing, how it evolved from the Victorian era to the world of Tripadvisor and Google Maps that we know today. It was interesting to see how, more than a lot of other books, travel guides really rely on visibility to attract their audience. Branding and design play a big part in sales decisions and so a presence in physical book shops is important. And it's because of this and the rise of free online content and user-generated review sites that travel publishing has been experiencing a steady decline in the last ten years.
But despite the doom and gloom attitudes surrounding the travel publishing industry at the minute, I found the talk really interesting because it was showed
how heavily influenced travel publishing is by social and technological changes. It was also interesting to see how this sector acts as a microcosm for publishing as a whole industry, with a few names dominating the market while a lot of smaller companies try to break through, although in the travel industry the big names are refreshingly different (with the exception of Penguin).
The second talk of the day was by Andrew Rossenheim. It was supposed to be about creativity vs. commerce but, as Andrew believes that this rivalry is non-existant and that the two rely on each other, it turned into a journey through Andrew's career history. He began in digital publishing in the 1980s and then went against the current and moving away from digital and towards print, finally ending up as books editor at Penguin in the late 90s/early 00s before giving up publishing to focus on his career as an author.
This seemed like such a backwards way of doing things to us. We have been constantly taught about how things used to be in print-only publishing but how digital is changing everything and we are actively encouraged to always include digital products or possibilities in work we do. To meet someone who went against the tide and moved away from digital as it was becoming more instrumental to the publishing industry (for whatever reasons) was truly refreshing.
It was really strange to talk to someone who could remember the days before everyone had computers and those that did couldn't store more than 100k of data unless they bought extra floppy disks. I just take it all for granted now. But one thing I won't take for granted after hearing from Andrew is the importance of digital rights as in the beginning the small upstart company he was working for managed to get Random House to sell them the digital rights for the dictionaries indefinitely! This just proves the importance of not taking the value of things for granted because something you sold cheaply because you thought was useless can come back and bite you later.
But it wasn't just his interesting career trajectory that made Andrew such an interesting speaker. He was so full of anecdotes and advice because he has had such a varied career and met so many people and seen so much change. And to finish things off he is an author, a job that is notoriously had to get into and very hard to sustain. He just showed how many possibilities there are in the one industry and how they all compliment each other.
So it was a day of variety to say the least and while I still don't much fancy myself as the next Michael Palin, I still really enjoyed learning about the travel industry, authorship and learning about a digital revolution that predates me but has influenced so much of my life (including being able to blog about it!) from someone who was there at the start.
The second talk of the day was by Andrew Rossenheim. It was supposed to be about creativity vs. commerce but, as Andrew believes that this rivalry is non-existant and that the two rely on each other, it turned into a journey through Andrew's career history. He began in digital publishing in the 1980s and then went against the current and moving away from digital and towards print, finally ending up as books editor at Penguin in the late 90s/early 00s before giving up publishing to focus on his career as an author.
This seemed like such a backwards way of doing things to us. We have been constantly taught about how things used to be in print-only publishing but how digital is changing everything and we are actively encouraged to always include digital products or possibilities in work we do. To meet someone who went against the tide and moved away from digital as it was becoming more instrumental to the publishing industry (for whatever reasons) was truly refreshing.
It was really strange to talk to someone who could remember the days before everyone had computers and those that did couldn't store more than 100k of data unless they bought extra floppy disks. I just take it all for granted now. But one thing I won't take for granted after hearing from Andrew is the importance of digital rights as in the beginning the small upstart company he was working for managed to get Random House to sell them the digital rights for the dictionaries indefinitely! This just proves the importance of not taking the value of things for granted because something you sold cheaply because you thought was useless can come back and bite you later.
But it wasn't just his interesting career trajectory that made Andrew such an interesting speaker. He was so full of anecdotes and advice because he has had such a varied career and met so many people and seen so much change. And to finish things off he is an author, a job that is notoriously had to get into and very hard to sustain. He just showed how many possibilities there are in the one industry and how they all compliment each other.
So it was a day of variety to say the least and while I still don't much fancy myself as the next Michael Palin, I still really enjoyed learning about the travel industry, authorship and learning about a digital revolution that predates me but has influenced so much of my life (including being able to blog about it!) from someone who was there at the start.
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