News Archive

Fifteen years in British publishing was neatly segmented for Melanee Winder into five years each with HarperCollins, Penguin and Little, Brown ending up as deputy group sales director for Little, Brown.

So what brought her home? “My family are here and I wanted life to calm down a bit and not live with grey skies. They say it is the British weather that gets you in the end!” As compensation, Melanee, her husband who is an academic and their children have arranged for two summers back to back.

A graduate of the then fledgling Whitireia course in its second year, Melanee worked for HarperCollins here before taking off on her OE.

Highlights of her UK career have been working on the Stephenie Meyer books, and before that the Harry Potter series at its height.  “To have that sort of phenomenon happen twice in a career is incredible – I must have just been in the right place at the right time.”

She returned to New Zealand without a job in mind, but has now been appointed Sales and Marketing Director for Hachette New Zealand.

Kevin Chapman said Melanee brings marvellous experience with companies and authors inside the Hachette group. “It is important that she also brings a fresh outlook, different experiences and a different point of view back to New Zealand – it can be difficult to get outside of the accepted way of operating in our small industry.”

Each year PANZ manages a New Zealand collective stand offering a space for local publishers to exhibit and promote their titles in an international arena. The Frankfurt Book Fair is the premier international book fair lasting five days and attracting more than 7,400 exhibitors from over 108 countries. It is the biggest annual rights fair and both New Zealand and international publishers regard it as the most important book fair in the world to attend.

About 20 local publishers typically exhibit on the stand with more than 25 people present. Creative New Zealand is our current partner for the Frankfurt Book Fair, providing funding for the stand and also assistance for four publishers to travel to the fair and exhibit on the stand. In addition to this, we host a stand party each year which approximately 200 international guests attend and it is always a very popular event on the Frankfurt calendar.

You can follow this year’s events and the build-up to the 2012 Guest of Honour programme at our Publishers Association New Zealand – NZ at Frankfurt 2012 Facebook page.

For a list of New Zealand publishers attending the Frankfurt Book Fair 2011, see this link.

Frankfurt 2010 saw the launch of a new Creative NZ translation grants project which offers foreign publishers funding to support the costs of translating NZ works. For further details contact Anne de Lautour anne@publishers.org.nz

Media release

12 October 2011

                         

 

New Zealand Culture is Strong in Educational Publishing

New Zealand educational publishing is an international success with concepts and text translations used in many markets. Those innovation and design strengths are also shown locally in the presentation of our own culture, says Gillian Candler, chair of the CLL Educational Publishing Awards which announced its awards shortlist today. (October 12)

Judges’ Comments

This year the judges were delighted by the number of strong entries in all categories, submitted by a greater range of publishers than in 2010. Shortlisted entries covered the range of individual titles for reading, textbooks, websites, CD ROMs and books for teachers, which added to the judging challenge. Submissions also covered many different curriculum subjects. The judges were particularly pleased to see entries that support learning in te reo Maori. “In every area from tertiary to primary there are titles with a te reo or Maori cultural focus, even a graphic novel,” says Candler.

Candler, an independent education and publishing consultant was joined on the judging panel by Libby Limbrick, Head of School of Arts, Languages and Literacies, Faculty of Education University of Auckland; and David Greeney, former academic textbook manager at Lexis Nexis.

The judges noted that several of the shortlisted titles were published with support from the Ministry of Education or other organisations, and that this makes a significant contribution to ensuring quality New Zealand educational content is available to New Zealand schools.

The CLL (Copyright Licensing Ltd) Educational Publishing Awards acknowledge excellence in presentation, content and appropriateness for New Zealand schools and tertiary institutions.

 

Best Book in Higher Education Shortlist

Contested Ground Te Whenua I Tohea: The Taranaki Wars 1860–1881 ed. Kelvin Day, published by Huia Publishers

Human Resources Management in New Zealand Fifth Edition by Richard Rudman, published by Pearson

Principles of Accounting Fourth Edition by Murray J. Smart, Nazir Awan and Richard Baxter, published by Pearson           

Professional Foodservice Second Edition by Pip Duncan and Julian Jensen, published by Pearson

Teaching Primary School Mathematics and Statistics: Evidence-Based Practice ed. Robin Averill and Roger Harvey, published by NZCER Press

 

Best Book or Series in Secondary Education Shortlist

English With Attitude by Stephanie Chamberlin, published by Pearson

Gamma Mathematics: NCEA Level 1 by David Barton, published by Pearson

Mathematics & Statistics for the New Zealand Curriculum Year 11: NCEA level 1by Anna Brookie, Joye Halford, Anne Lawrence, Robin Tiffen and Jan Wallace, published by Cambridge University Press

Ngarimu: Te Tohu Toa by Kawata Teepa, published by Huia Publishers

Te Hikuwai: Launch Yourself into Te Reo Maori by Ian Cormack, published by Cengage Learning NZ Ltd

 

Best Book or Series in Primary Education Shortlist

Figure It Out: Energy and Figure It Out: Forces ed.  Susan Slaughter, published by Learning Media

Hina ed. Hana Pomare, published by Hana Limited

I've Got Something To Say: Leading Young Writers to Authorship by Gail Loane with Sally Muir, published by Aries Publishing      

School Journal Part 4 Number 3 2010 and Part 3 Number 3 2010: ed. Susan Paris, published by Learning Media

 

Best Digital Publishing Solution Shortlist

Hina online published by Hana Limited

Living Olympic Values published by South Pacific Press

Sails Shared Interactive published by Pearson

 

CLL Educational Publishing Awards of $5,000 each will be made for each category. The Awards will be announced at a function held on 17 November 2011 at the National Library, Auckland.

Proposed by Linda Cassells

Seconded by Adrian Keane

David was first elected councillor in 1998 and, aside from a brief break, has served on the council since that time, and under seven different presidents.

During  David’s early years on council, PANZ (or BPANZ as it then was) was administered by CLL, and David played a pivotal and active role as treasurer. In those days our finances were extremely slim. David’s attention to detail and tireless dedication to this role not only ensured that our accounts were always well organised and clearly presented, but also that the association extracted the maximum benefit from what few resources we had.

Without David’s dedication, it would have been impossible to have kept the association running.

David has also for many years now been the PANZ councillor responsible for all industry award activities. This is no small portfolio. It includes PANZ representation on the committee of the New Zealand Post Awards (and previously the Montana New Zealand Book Awards), and the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards.  As past president Tony Fisk acknowledges, David’s contribution to these book award committees at a time when major changes to the administration and structures of those awards were being made was impressive. His objective approach to the challenges around the issues and representation of the views of the PANZ council helped to shape those awards into what they have now become. A fellow committee member also recalls David’s kind, generous and supportive qualities and comments that his was always the constant voice of reason and reassurance.

David’s industry awards portfolio has also included the administration and revitalising of the PANZ Book Design Awards, which has resulted in a greater public awareness of the role of book designers and of the publishing industry generally, gaining coverage on television. And more recently David has been instrumental in the establishment and management, with Association Director Anne de Lautour, of the CLL Educational Publishing Awards. Our current president Adrian Keane appreciates the attention to detail that is critical for the success of these events, as is a vigilant eye on the financial requirements – and these are qualities David has in abundance.

Of course David’s role as councillor has extended well beyond his specific PANZ portfolio. In the course of any one week, he could be asked for a reasoned opinion or judgement on any number of industry issues. His responsiveness is collegial. Councillor Kevin Chapman remarks that he always brings a sensible, independent and friendly approach to the decisions PANZ has to make. David’s wider contribution to PANZ has also meant that during his time on the council many dynamic and progressive advances were made, including the employment of our Association Director.

David has selflessly dedicated significant time and effort on behalf of the association over the years, something which cannot always have been easy given the demands of his own business. For over 12 years PANZ has benefitted from his experience and knowledge as well as the continuity of his presence on council. His has been a long and valuable contribution.

I therefore nominate David Ling for Life Membership of PANZ and note that the nomination has the full support of the current council (which includes three of the presidents David has served under), and is also heartily endorsed by past president Michael Moynahan.

Linda Cassells Calico Publishing

The nomination was accepted unanimously at the recent PANZ AGM.

As Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2012, New Zealand has a unique opportunity to profile its literature, its culture and society to the German public, the German speaking region and the world’s literary and publishing community.  
 
Culminating at the October 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair, a year-long programme of activity throughout Germany will showcase New Zealand literature and other art forms, leverage trade and tourism opportunities and strengthen political ties through cultural diplomacy.

For more information on New Zealand’s programme please contact:

Project Manager – Sarah Ropata
sarah@publishers.org.nz

For more information on the Frankfurt Book Fair please visit the Frankfurt Book Fair 2011 website. Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage also has a site dedicated to the Fair. And you can follow our progress on Facebook.

 

 

 

Media release
15 July 2011

Young Designer shortlist rewards book designers who take creative risks

Book designers Pieta Brenton, Sarah Healey and Spencer Levine make up the shortlist for the 2011 Awa Press Young Designer of the Year Award, announced today.

‘The designers’ ability and willingness to take creative risks was impressive,’ said judges Dexter Fry and Sue Reidy. ‘These three shortlisted designers stood out markedly from the rest of the pack.’

The shortlisted designers’ portfolios span the glamour of architecture and fashion photography, the intimacy of poetry and the energy of children’s books, all with a demonstrable consistency of design.

The Awa Press Young Designer of the Year Award was introduced in 2009 to showcase and encourage young book designers. Designers under 35 years of age present a portfolio of book designs to be considered for the award, which is a major feature of the PANZ Book Design Awards. These are judged on artistic merit, innovation of form and appropriateness to the intended market.

Pieta Brentonis currently ‘in her dream job’ as a freelance book designer. She started her career at the boutique studio Inhouse Design, where she worked for three years. She then worked in what she describes as ‘book heaven’ as the head designer at Random House New Zealand.

Sarah Healey joined Penguin Books (NZ) as an in-house designer in February 2011. She loves the scope and variety of book design: ‘my favourite briefs have allowed me freedom to illustrate, photograph, draw or paint, and develop concepts that visually reflect the author’s ideas’.

Spencer Levineworks in his own design studio in Wellington. Levine describes designing books as ‘a responsibility that I take very seriously and cherish deeply’.

Judge Dexter Fry is a freelance designer and illustrator, and was a judge for last year’s Awa Press Young Designer of the Year Award. This year he is joined by Sue Reidy, a full-time corporate writer and project manager who is involved with graphic designers on a regular basis.

The winner of the Awa Press Young Designer of the Year Award will be announced at the PANZ Book Design Awards ceremony in Auckland on 25 August.

ENDS
The list of shortlisted titles and high-resolution images of the books are now available at www.bookdesignawards.co.nz

Find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/PANZ-Book-Design-Awards-2011/
Contact: YuliyaNikonova, 04 237 3103 (ext.) 3976, 022 691 7862, bookdesignawards@whitireia.ac.nz

Media release
27 June 2011

 

 

 

 

Judges of this year’s PANZ Book Design Awards expect some controversy with the release of their shortlisted titles for the hotly contested accolades.

“These awards are all about design, not the quality of writing or how much was spent on production values. Some of the books failed to make the shortlist due to a lack of consistency between the cover design and the interior pages. It had to be a complete package,” says convening judge Sharon Grace. “Fortunately the overall standard of entries was so high that choosing the books in the shortlist, though it was by no means easy, has resulted in a selection that the book design industry can be proud of.”

The Publishers Association of New Zealand (PANZ) announced its shortlist for the 2011 book design awards today. The list is remarkable for its diversity. It ranges from large-scale art books such as Hauaga: The Art of John Pule to small format works on popular culture such as It’s in the Post:The Stories Behind New Zealand Stamps. No matter how much argument the choices generate, the list certainly reflects our diverse design profile.

Among notable features in this year’s awards is the entry of the New Zealand School Journal, which is shortlisted in the educational book category. . The judges were pleased to see an increase in the number of books entered and the standard of design in the educational book category. And there is double acknowledgement for No Fretful Sleeper: A Life of Bill Pearson which appears in the non-illustrated book and cover shortlists.

One reason for the high level of interest in the awards is that they can bring overnight success to designers, says one of last year’s winners, Kim Dovey from Book Design Ltd: “We were totally unprepared for the impact this award would have on our business…..We found that our business became more reputable overnight.”

The 2011 judging panel is Sharon Grace, a designer and judge of the PANZ Book Design Awards in 2010, Eden Potter, a visual communications designer and educator, and Paul Little, New Zealand books editor for North and South magazine. The judges selected these titles from 136 entries, from 33 publishers.

Since 1997 PANZ has run New Zealand’s only competition for book design, recognising outstanding work by New Zealand book designers.An exciting new development is the new dedicated website for the PANZ Book Design Awards.

The list of shortlisted titles and high-resolution images of the books are now available on the new book design website

The winning designers will be announced at an awards ceremony in Auckland on 25 August, along with the Awa Press Young Designer of the Year.

It was a privilege to participate in the Visiting International Publishers programme at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. To spend a week with 15 other international publishers – from the UK, US, Canada, Hungary, Spain, France, Norway, Taiwan and fellow Kiwi Alison Brook – and to have the opportunity to get to know how they operate, what works in their markets, and to make contact for future international events, was invaluable.That all of this was against the backdrop of the imposing Sydney harbour and landmarks in very well-organised, welcoming sun-filled week made it a memorable experience for all the VIPs.

Highlights for me included being able to talk about all aspects of publishing – systems and procedures, what’s working and what isn’t, challenges, what’s hot – with like-minded people, and then to be able to apply that to New Zealand, and specifically to my role, list and team. In light of this exchange of information and ideas, I could step away from the books I’m working on and objectively assess how to build on our successes in the future. I got a stronger sense of what international publishers are looking for and how New Zealand books are perceived internationally – it was a good way to contextualise our publishing in the world market.

It was also a week of learning and inspiration at the Sydney Writers’ Festival (including sessions about translation markets, English markets internationally, marketing and twitter, the pros and cons of young adult/cross over fiction, the chance to hear Markus Zusak, Sonya Hartnett and Fatima Bhutto speak). I was struck by the popularity of the festival – even during the week, the queues to go into sessions right throughout the days snaked a long way down each pier.

I’d like to extend my thanks to Creative New Zealand, PANZ and the Australia Council for the Arts for giving me the opportunity to experience the VIP programme, and I plan to be involved in future VIP programmes in Auckland.

Picture shows Alexis Walsham from Random House (US), left,  Annaliese Monaro from the Australia Council for the Arts and Diana Murray.

 

Alison Brook reports

In May I was lucky enough to be asked to attend the Visiting International Publisher’s Programme at the Sydney Writers Festival. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but as well as being a hugely fun and social week it felt like an intensive seven day immersion course in the world of foreign rights sales. It also gave me a fantastic snapshot of what was happening in the global publishing scene.

Despite the major trends that unite most of the global market: fragile economies in the wake of the GFC, and the impact of digital publishing, what was most interesting was the differences between countries. In highly regulated publishing markets like Norway, Holland, Denmark and Hungary book publishing is still thriving largely because of fixed book pricing, limited incursions from digital publishing  and strong government financial support for publishers. Independent bookstores and literary publishing are buoyant.

As a general rule, where Amazon hasn’t yet arrived, digital books are highly priced and ebook sales are low.

By contrast, the UK and the US, where Amazon has a local shopfront, are facing the full onslaught of digital publishing. The big issues in these markets include working out an economic publishing model that is sustainable (How can you protect and build authors when ebooks are selling for 99 cents, let alone run a publishing company?) and containing the digital piracy which is now rampant in these markets.

Other than this, I had the most fascinating discussions with my fellow VIPs around what works, and doesn’t work, in various markets. Some of it is intuitive, but other differences are harder to fathom. For instance, the French delight in Irish literature and the Greeks love to read about themselves (especially when it is from the viewpoint of a foreign author).

In Germany, they can’t get enough of Australian outback sagas. In fact they literally can’t get enough: the market in Germany for these books is so strong that they have taken to writing their own – sending German authors to Australia for a few months to write books and then publishing them under an Australian-sounding pseudonym!

To all my fellow VIPs, to our fantastic attentive hosts at the Australia Council for the Arts, to Creative NZ, and the Publishers Association of New Zealand, a big thank you. The publishers from the year of 2011 have formed a friendship and an invaluable network for many years to come.

Martine Poiree, Nielsen BookData’s National Manager, briefs PANZ members

A new way of linking published text, is starting to be introduced world-wide, and as an ISTC Registration Agency for New Zealand and Australia, we (Nielsen Book Services) will be responsible for the allocation of ISTCs for your publications.

ISTCs relate to the textual content of books, and it stands for International Standard Text Code. It is an ISO standard used to identify textual works independently of any specific publication or format. 

Before your eyes glaze over, let me give you an example of a situation where ISTC will create order out of chaos: let’s say a bookshop customer looks for a particular title on a bookselling web site, it would be extremely useful if the results popping up on the screen showed ALL the various manifestations of this book, including hardback, paperback, film tie-in, translation, audiobook abridged and unabridged, CDs or cassettes, large print, and of course eBook!

ISTCs will also be crucial in identifying all manifestations of the text that appears under a different title – think ‘Q & A’ and ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, or ‘The Cat’s Pyjamas’ and ‘Nga Kahumoe o te Ngeru’(Maori translation of The Cat’s Pyjamas), or books published with quite different titles for their UK and US editions, as illustrated by Clive Cussler’s ‘Mayday’ morphing into ‘The Mediterranean Caper’.

Even more potentially confusing, there are plenty of completely different books that have the same title, and this can lead to expensive mistakes for all concerned.

The key here is that in the near future one click of the mouse will present whoever is searching for one of your books with a professional-looking variety of choices, and perhaps encourage them to spend more money…. and the key to achieving this is the ISTC. This is going to become especially relevant with the proliferation of eBooks.

It is also going to make tracking sales for a particular author much simpler, and I am sure you as publishers will immediately see how beneficial this will be.

Intrigued? Well, you are going to see a lot more information on ISTCs coming out over the next few months, and here are a few points to remember for now:

–       ISBN is still the industry standard identifier for individual editions.

–       ISTCs will identify the content of a book, no matter the format. ISBNs identify the edition/format.

–       ISTCs are intended for use on computers and they will need their own field on databases, inventory systems, bookshop management systems and library catalogues.

–       Publishers can start applying for ISTCs for their publications provided they can record this data element on their systems

–       ISTCs will be allocated by local Registration Agencies.  ISTCs are allocated free of charge for new publications.

The process from a publisher’s point of view will be as follows:

–       As soon as you decide to go ahead with a new publication, including eBooks, you should contact us to obtain an ISTC.

–       We will allocate an ISTC to the textual content of this new publication and register it on the International ISTC database.

–       We will send you the ISTC for inclusion in your own database/system.

–       The ISTC becomes part of this particular title record. It must be included in the information you send on your data feed to Nielsen BookData for inclusion on our range of bibliographic services.

If you would like more information you are welcome to contact me, Ph: 06 856 6501 or 021 477 534, martine.poiree@nielsenbookdata.co.nz or

you could have a look at the International ISTC Agency web site at www.istc-international.org

Meantime, ‘keep calm and carry on’, and we will make sure you are kept informed!