“Keeping the end state in mind”: A Q&A with Ken Brooks
The publishing industry has been facing ongoing labor and supply shortages, but fortunately we have folks like Ken Brooks to help us out. Ken has been a voice for innovation in the publishing industry for years and we aren’t the first to ask him to speak about the issues at hand. He’s been featured in many Publishers Weekly articles on the subject, in webinars, and as a speaker at the monthly Supply Chain meetings with BISG. He knows the day-to-day operations necessary to keep publishing afloat and has fared many storms from shifting 90% of titles to an XML-first workflow at Cengage Learning, to consolidating 18 international business systems into a single cloud-based capability at McGraw-Hill, to implementing a new title management system with cloud-based project management tools at Wiley. He has a history of facilitating massive changes at large presses, and we thought he’d be a great person to talk to about the issues our industry is facing today.
You help publishers address disruptions in their market, products, and business models through various means: lean processes, technology adoption, metrics, and analytical methods. How has Covid and related supply chain issues changed the priorities of publishers and the problems they are facing? How has this affected the solutions/plans you work to create with them and their teams?
Covid has pretty much accelerated innovation in content and product development, supply chain and operations and even business models across the board. What’s interesting is that none of these operational innovations are particularly expensive — it’s often just a different way of looking at things.
In education the shift to digital has increased. On the content development and production side, I’m seeing a focus on continuous publishing (some call it edition-less) where updates get rolled out on a continuous basis. It opens the door to interesting processes and organizational models.
In all sectors publishers are consolidating physical distribution with Third Party Logistics (3PL) companies or publishers that are trying to leverage their fixed warehousing infrastructure and systems to provide distribution to other publishers.
The publishers with strong Sales, Inventory & Operations Planning (SIOP) capabilities are having less trouble with disruptions than the ones that don’t.
The kind of strategies you utilize seem to require a company-wide commitment. How are you able to achieve this kind of buy-in from publishers, especially when they have established procedures or ways of doing things?
Publishers are some of the most innovative folks around — their entire business is staying up to date and pushing new ideas in all aspects of life to a wide audience. The key in making change happen within organizations is making it *their* idea. And that’s best done through an attitude of inquiry — you’re mutually exploring new ideas. Even though I might have what I think is a great idea, it only works if everyone is involved in its development and implementation. And I’ve very seldom had an idea that wasn’t improved in the process of communicating it.
There is some really great work going on in technology product management, technology development, and data analytics that are directly applicable to publishing… but with appropriate modifications. People are seeing results from applying some of these approaches.
And there are things that just don’t make sense. Why should books take over 9 months in production is a key example of that.
It’s hard not to see the things that are going on in the world (like AI and NLP) and ask how they could apply to what we’re doing.
In an ideal world, publishers would adopt new processes and take a holistic approach to addressing issues within their business. However, most publishing staff find themselves using all of their energy plugging holes and applying patches. What are some small changes staff can make to improve their day-to-day challenges while also working to a greater effect in the long term?
One thing that’s worked well for me is to always try to solve problems for the long term with each patch you do, by keeping the end state in mind. You can think of it as being lazy in a good way. You’re figuring out how to make your work easier and everyone’s life better as you’re working. Let’s say that I’m always dealing with manually removing hyphens from my eBook conversions. I could just keep correcting the problems as they come up. I could also build dictionaries to find the problems automatically. But I could also change my composition specs so that my suppliers never insert hard-breaks to begin with. When I’ve been faced with this in the past I’ve selected a combination of 2 and 3 so that we reduce the root cause of the problem, but still put in place tools to quickly find the problems before they get into the market.
Always be asking if there’s a better way to do things and keep bringing them up. You’ll learn something either way.
The other key is to not be afraid of showing that you don’t know something. If you keep asking questions and devote time to learning, you’ll end up much farther ahead of colleagues that don’t.
And one last thing: stay up-to-date on technology and best practices by reading industry newsletters and asking yourself how that might work in your world. There are a few that I would definitely recommend: Publishers Lunch can let you know what’s going on in the publishing industry and what people are doing. Publishers Weekly is another one which also focuses on the industry and publishes articles of interest. I generally read the various newsletters that O’Reilly puts out on a variety of topics — they’re all technology related, but very thoughtful and usually have something worth applying. Kathy Sandler also has a weekly newsletter. Benedict Evans has a good one too. And Jane Friedman’s The Hot Sheet. I also love hearing other people’s recommendations — that’s how I found many of these in the first place.
How effectively do you believe publishers are utilizing automation to eliminate the burden or waste of certain processes and what aspects can be improved upon? My impression is that many publishers focus on automation within the context of marketing and sales, maybe even some project planning, but for the most part production is less of a focus. This can lead to some rather out of date, labor intensive processes continuing to dominate staff time. How can we shift the focus of automation as a tool for marketing and sales to a tool which can be utilized in all aspects of book production?
The easiest way to do this is by looking at “what’s in it for me” (WIFM) for your staff. People will often want to use tried-and-true methods for their day-to-day responsibilities. There’s no risk in that. But if they can see the benefit of reduced time, reduced email, and reduced rework, they’re more apt to not only accept automation, but also look for it.
One promising opportunity is enabling collaboration without having huge email and coordination overhead. In content development, collaborative editing, WYSIWYG rendering, and push-button distribution are three key levers. If you can get nice-looking pages practically instantly, for example, without a multiple week lag, authors and editors can make changes practically up to the last minute without any incremental cost — everyone wins.
For education and reference publishers, getting fast feedback from customers is key. O’Reilly has been doing this forever and it works well for them.
In your Publishers Weekly article Coping with Supply Chain Issues you talk about capacity planning within the context of paper shortages and how important it is for publishers to know the projected printing for each book project not only to budget but also to prioritize projects with more print needs. Forecasting plays a massive role in determining this, but what is the role of production in this process? What kinds of changes can be made on the production side to minimize manufacturing costs and budget overruns? I’m thinking of things like more accurate castoffs, for example, which is something we’re working on at Hederis, but I’d be interested to hear about other potential roles for production.
You’re right — in that article I was talking mostly about Sales, Inventory, and Operations Planning (SIOP). At the same time there are many things that can be done in development, design, and production. Pretty much most of the cost of a title is baked in by the time print files are generated.
The big issue with paper is the variation in paper roll sizes and grades. The more variation, the harder it is to forecast need and to make long term supply agreements. And it’s the long-term consistent relationships that will keep you supplied when times are tough. Consequently the biggest thing that can be done on the production side is to establish long-term relationships with printers, focusing ideally on consolidating printing of a single spec family (trim-binding — color-paper combination) at a single printer. Then do your best to standardize on those spec families by using common trim sizes and paper grades and avoid specialty formats. Of course some books require more artisanal treatment and will require longer lead times and risk greater supply chain delays, but really ask yourself if it’s worth the risk of delay or stockout.
The need for accurate cast-offs is clearly important to get forecasted demand for materials right. It also helps authors, editors, and designers make sure that they’re not creating too much material or too little material. If you’re able to do WYSIWYG paging on-the-fly, it also reduces overall errors in the books and lead times. For some evergreen publishing applications this reduces cost of correcting errors, but can also translate to earlier on-sale dates and truly incremental revenue. By “evergreen publishing” I mean publishing books that will likely have a long backlist life, maybe with revision and maybe without. When you have a title like that, the sooner you get it to market, the sooner it starts earning revenue. If you’re able to publish it in 4 months instead of 6 months, it works out to 2 months of additional revenue that you never would have had before. Of course, if the book has a more traditional frontlist spike and then drops off to nothing over time, you’ll still accelerate the revenue, but there won’t be any incremental revenue over what you would have earned in its total lifetime.
Typically, innovation in most industries takes a top down approach, and publishing is no exception. Yet in recent years, calls for change have come from people at all levels within the publishing industry. I am thinking of the push for remote work, calls for pay transparency, calls for greater upward mobility for better staff retention, and so on. How do these issues factor into the conversations you have with publishing executives? Are any of these calls from workers in the industry affecting the goals of publishing organizations and how they pursue organizational change and growth?
These calls have highlighted the need to engage staff in the mission of the business, which in publishing is rewarding pretty much regardless of sector. The openness of these calls for equity and transparency mean to me that industry executives have created the environment where this kind of input is welcome. Not only is it driving new and interesting conversations and ideas, but it’s also driving ways to plan and execute the traditional business in a way that enables us to get away from the bureaucracy and Taylorism of past generations.
There is a huge opportunity for creative expression in all facets of publishing. I’d encourage individuals new to the industry to be curious, ask questions, make suggestions, and expect good answers. Even if the suggestion isn’t practical for some reason, you’ll learn from the process, increase your visibility, and demonstrate your engagement and commitment to making things work better.
One other suggestion is to look around at how other industries do things. Some of my best ideas have come from outside of publishing, but tailored to meet the special needs of the industry.
If you want to learn more about how you can use Hederis to improve your forecasting and castoffs, visit our website.
