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Beatnik Publishing’s Sally Greer. Photo credit Laura Forest

The PANZ Mentorship programme, funded by Copyright Licensing New Zealand, allows for business owners or heads of publishing houses to access a skilled mentor over a period of six months. The most recent pair up to make the most of this scheme are Beatnik’s Sally Greer, mentored by former HarperCollins NZ MD Tony Fisk.

The imprint produces beautifully designed books on an eclectic range of subjects from food to cafe culture, fashion to poetry.

Sally, a designer, photographer and illustrator, began Beatnik Books more than eight years ago, as a development of her design studio. She applied for the mentorship via a mention of the scheme in PANZ News. “I’ve been aware that I jumped into publishing with minimal managerial experience,” she says. “I needed access to a higher level of skill. It was a case of ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’

“Tony’s input gave me a great lift of confidence in running my business.

“His help was not with any particular books but in general business management, breaking things down into parts and finding out what we can do. As a result, we now have a structure and do a lot more planning and forecasting. We bounce decisions around, but make them on more information and there is more organisation.”

Tony Fisk says he and Sally met in person once a month, or by Skype in one instance. “The process was to do a SWOT analysis on the Beatnik business, and this alone threw up some opportunities. I helped Sally develop goals both personally and professionally, and then we planned to achieve those goals, making improvements and developing action plans,” says Tony, who also volunteers in Whangarei for Business Mentors NZ.

“The whole point of mentoring is that you don’t actually do the process for the business or person you are mentoring. You just guide, and the person being mentored has to make decisions and act on them.”

“Beatnik is producing lovely books,” says Tony. The market agrees and Beatnik has received many awards for its books, including the Scholastic New Zealand Award for Best Children’s Book at the PANZ Book Design Awards 2015 for I am Doodle Cat by Lauren Marriott and Kat Patrick. Lining up for their share of the Christmas market are WHOLE: Recipes for Simple Wholefood Eating by Bronwyn Kan, The Game Chef by Angelo Georgalli, and The Caker by Jordan Rondel.

The raw food phenomenon will be Beatnik’s sure success for next Mother’s Day with Olivia Scott’s The Raw Kitchen bringing over 100 amazing recipes to nourish from breakfast to dinner, entertaining to drinks. In the meantime they will be publishing Golden Month by Jenny Allison in February, an invaluable guide for mothers in the crucial weeks after giving birth. For March we can look forward to Three Words: An Anthology of Aotearoa / NZ Women’s Comics.

Peter Dowling, PANZ Councillor for International and MD Oratia Media Reports

Reputedly the world’s second largest book fair after Frankfurt, the Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL) takes place from late November in sunny Guadalajara, Mexico’s second city. With a population approximately that of New Zealand, Guadalajara is a busy yet not overwhelming hub, and the fair’s location in the Expo Guadalajara complex is handily located and easy to navigate.

Visitors come to the fair from all over Mexico

This year’s instalment ran from 28 November to 6 December, with times dedicated for professionals on Monday to Wednesday. For the 20,000 or so representatives of almost 2000 publishing houses and agencies, these ‘closed to the public’ times are a welcome breather – nearly 800,000 visitors came to the FIL this year.

Lots of libros (books)

The Expo centre sets out a large international hall for exhibitors, an even larger one for Mexican publishers, and a lovely hall for children with an array of book activities and play areas. For professionals there is a meeting area and the Rights Centre where I was one of 120 publishers, agents, translators and national publishing organisations to take a table.

Talking the talk at the Rights Centre

My four days at the FIL, helped by PANZ’s International Career Development Fund, afforded exchanges with a pantheon of book people from around the globe. Among these there was a strong presence of colleagues from the United Kingdom, this year’s Guest of Honour, well eclipsing the surprising light US presence.

Best of British in Guadalajara

FIL is without doubt the place to understand Latin American book markets. I enjoyed valuable meetings with publishers from the principal markets of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, along with the likes of Chile, Guatemala and (still here despite the country’s deep woes) Venezuela.

Just as UK and US multinationals have long dominated New Zealand’s book world, so the Spanish manage Latin America’s big houses. Planeta, Santillana, SM and Océano rank alongside the non-Hispanic leader, PenguinRandomHouse, in holding most market share. It was heartening to see how local independents, particularly in children’s books, have carved out their points of difference.

At the translation support programme seminar on 30 November

Although the most common response to meeting a publisher from New Zealand was ‘Muy lejos’ (How far away!), the positive view of what we represent and a readiness to explore cooperation were universal. I hope that the well-received seminar I delivered on New Zealand’s Publishing Market, and my participation in a lively presentation of national translation support programmes, help to raise our profile another notch or two.

A mariachi band bringing local sounds to the national hall

Kevin Chapman, Director Upstart Press reports

I was lucky enough to be invited to attend, as a speaker, the Independent Publishing Conference in Melbourne 19 – 21 November. The conference is run by the Small Press Network, an independent group that exists to support small presses in Australia. The event was held at The Wheeler Centre, which is located within beautiful building that is the State Library of Victoria.

The conference was organised into three distinctly themed days.  Day one, Thursday 19 November, was titled “Industry Research Day”. Essentially it was filled with papers and discussion from academics who study the book industry, and I wish that had arranged to arrive for this day. But apparently wishing doesn’t make it so. Friday was the “Trade Day”, and this was what I had been invited for. The topic I was given was the difference between running a multinational company from an independent company. After that Shaun Symonds from Nielsen talked about the trends of 2015 and forecasts for 2016. There was a session on the new legal deposit legislation in Australia, and then the rest of the day was broken down so that you got a choice of sessions to go to.  I attended sessions on diversity, offering services to other publishers, indigenous publishing, and case-studies in international sales. There were sessions on consumer reactions to covers, getting to the major booksellers, special sales and more. All of these sessions were at a slightly higher than basic level. That level was the theme for Saturday, which was “Fundamentals of Publishing” day.

Saturday started with an overview from SPN Chair and Aus publishing wise-man, Michael Webster. He talked about key issues and trends. Then it was back to two streams with essentially training sessions on editing, epub, design, marketing, costing, funding, publicity, POD etc. The best session I attended this day was called Publishing Law`101, by a Brisbane-based agent, Alex Adsett. Her fast but comprehensive explanation of copyright was the best I have ever seen. She went on to talk about things like contracts.

This was a very good conference. Well run, and well attended. I think starting publishers or very small publishers (fewer than 10 titles in print) would get a lot out of it. If NZ publishers wanted to meet Aus publishers it would be a great place to go. Staff from publishers as large as Text and Scribe attend.

Recipient of the W.E and M.L Forde  Scholarship to Yale, Emma Radcliffe, Managing Director, Potton & Burton

The competition was fierce with 14 of New Zealand’s top publishing executives in the running for a coveted place at the Yale Publishing course next July.  The scholarship of NZ$13,000, to cover course costs, flights and accommodation is thanks to the generosity of the late Margaret Forde.

The selection panel had a tough decision to make; made all the more difficult by the sheer calibre of the applicants, and the discussion was challenging and robust.

PANZ is delighted to announce that the candidate who stood out both with her experience and for her application and the recipient of the W.E and M.L Forde Scholarship is Emma Radcliffe, Managing Director of Potton & Burton.  Emma comes from a varied and diverse background in sales and marketing overseas and is responsible for Potton & Burton’s day-to-day operations and the on-going relationship management for distribution partners.  She has been with the company for more than 7 years and works in conjunction with the company’s owners, Craig Potton and Robbie Burton, to develop the strategic direction of the company.

Emma says “I am absolutely delighted to have been chosen as the recipient of the W.E & M.L Forde Publishing Scholarship for 2016. My attendance will really enhance my own career progression, as this kind of training is obviously difficult to find in New Zealand and Yale provides the perfect opportunity to immerse myself in a programme designed to encourage new strategies and ways of thinking about publishing. It will also allow me to benchmark Potton & Burton against other international publishers and enables me to bring their best practices back to New Zealand.”

For more details on the W.E and M.L Forde Publishing Scholarship click here.

PANZ President to attend Yale Course

We are also pleased to announce that joining Emma at the Yale Publishing Course will be PANZ President and Allen & Unwin New Zealand, Director Melanie Laville-Moore who is attending in both her PANZ and Allen & Unwin capacities with a contribution from the CLNZ training fund.

We wish both Emma and Mel well on the course and look forward to reporting back to members about their experiences in due course.

After such an astounding response to the Yale Scholarship we would like to remind PANZ members that the CLNZ funded International Career Development Fund of up to $3000 is also available to publishers to attend international courses, internships, conferences and fellowships such as the Yale Publishing Course, Oxford Brookes International Publishing Summer School or the International Publishing Fellowship, Scotland. Check out our website for more ideas and details.

A call for applications and decision will be made in February but publishers are invited to apply at any time.

From left to right: Whitireia graduates Sarah Yankelowitz, Petra Westropp and Holly Hunter.

The Creative New Zealand National Publishing Internships Initiative, managed by PANZ, provides internship opportunities each year for three new graduates of the Whitireia New Zealand publishing course to enter the industry.

Sarah Yankelowitz will intern with Penguin Random House NZ; Petra Westropp with Gecko Press and Holly Hunter with Victoria University Press.

All interns are paired with their chosen roles and the publishers involved are happy with the placements.

Odessa Owens, who is Acting Programme Leader, Publishing at Whitireia New Zealand, says “These internships reward the very best new graduates with invaluable work experience, after a year of intense practical and theoretical study.

“The calibre of this year’s applications was extremely high, and we’re thrilled with the results,” Odessa says.

Publishers who have participated in the Intern Programme praise the initiative. Julia Marshall at Gecko Press says course graduates are the first place of call when she wants to hire. “They are well trained and have all-round knowledge of the basic skills.”

Petra will be Gecko’s fourth intern, and Julia also praises the ability of course tutors to match interns with publishers. “It is fantastic. Since we started hiring from the course, the interns have been better right from the start.”

Petra, Sarah and Holly will start their internships in February.

CLNZ CEO, Paula Browning pictured with Teacher’s Choice winner Mark Sayes of ESA Publications at Thursday night’s awards ceremony.

It’s hard to believe that a year has gone by since we were last here celebrating the best in New Zealand education resources. However if I look back at what the last year has involved at CLNZ, in the New Zealand creative industries and in the copyright world, it’s all been pretty full on!

In November 2014, CLNZ was still involved in a copyright tribunal reference with our universities over the licence fee paid for the use of copyright materials. A month later we were out of the Tribunal and had a new, world-leading, licence agreement in place. The world-leading aspect of this is no overstatement. No other collective management organisation with university agreements has a licensing framework in place to equal the one CLNZ has with Universities New Zealand. What’s so special about this agreement? It involves each institution implementing software that enables the electronic reporting of their use of materials under the licence every year. The outcome of this for authors and publishers is that every use of your work will be paid for, not only the uses that were picked up during the surveys that took place historically in the universities. These systems will come online progressively over the next year and we’ll keep you up to date with where we’re up to with them. I’d like to acknowledge Melanie Johnson, Copyright Officer at University of Auckland, who is with us tonight, for her advocacy and support of this significant change within the universities.

And so 2015 kicked off with 2 years of litigation left behind us and the prospect of being able to get on with business. We started with a survey of teachers to find out what content they are using in their classrooms and what would make their role of educating the next generation easier. The results of this survey have been shared with PANZ members and offered some valuable insights – the overall picture of which is that there’s no silver bullet in terms of content or format when it comes to trying to deliver quality education outcomes. However there was one theme that came through very strongly. And while I’m sure no one in this room will be surprised to hear it, it was great to see. New Zealand teachers like, prefer and want New Zealand resources. Unlike a Google search, New Zealand created resources can be trusted and they align with the New Zealand curriculum. In order to give teacher’s a chance to have a further say about the resources they like, we’ve added a Teacher’s Choice award to the primary, secondary and Te Reo Maori categories of tonight’s awards. Only the teacher’s votes counted here, so those of you who win these awards will know just how much those in the classroom value what you’re doing.

Another major piece of work this year involved the collation of the second edition of the Price Waterhouse Coopers economic valuation of publishing in New Zealand. We had some challenges with this in 2014 and we were sure 2015 was going to be so much better. But alas, no. So just like Steve Hansen does at half time in an All Blacks game when the first 40 minutes didn’t deliver the desired results – here’s my – let’s call it “encouragement” – for 2016. We cannot lobby the government and demonstrate the value of publishing in New Zealand unless we can quantify what the industry is worth. It would be ideal if we could do this using only publically available statistics. But the world is not ideal and in order to value our industry properly we need your co-operation. To those of you who did help by providing your financial data to PwC – my sincere thanks. To those of you who didn’t – for whatever reason – please rethink. The future of the government’s support for the industry – whether that’s in grants, support from Education New Zealand and New Zealand Trade & Enterprise or through our copyright law – requires that we demonstrate our contribution to the economy.

This is never going to be more important than it will be in 2016. During next year, the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment will complete their qualitative study of the creative sector prior to reviewing the Copyright Act. There is no government money being put towards quantitative valuation of the sector so each creative industry will, yet again, have to fund its own. Copyright Act reviews don’t come along every day. Our current Act is 21 years old  – and while the majority of what we currently have works in practice – our chances of keeping it intact (if you look at what’s happened elsewhere in the world) are under threat. This is why we need the economic valuations and also why CLNZ, along with the Society of Authors and the Publishers Association, are members of WeCreate – the New Zealand creative sector alliance. And now I’d like to share with you a short story on why our creative industries, including publishing, are so important to New Zealand. http://wecreate.org.nz/about-us/2015-video-presentation/#1

Report by Alex Hedley, Publisher, General Non-fiction, Penguin Random House New Zealand

Asian Publishers Fellowship

At the start of October I attended a fully-funded fellowship with a group of editors from the Asian region, at the invitation of the Korean Publishers Association. ‘The Asian Publishers Fellowship Program’, as it was called, ran alongside Editor’s Week in Seoul. There were two editors from China, three from Korea, and one from each of Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia. It was the first time an editor from the Pacific was invited to take part.

Paju Book City

We spent much of our time at Paju Book City. The Koreans are proud of Paju and rightly so. Paju is home to 250 publishing companies and 10,000 book industry professionals (and counting). It’s also flush with cafes, bookstores and leafy streets – a place for literary-minded Koreans and writers to gather on weekends. Last year over 40,000 titles were published in South Korea, a mind-boggling number even with a population of 50 million. Having come from being one of the world’s poorest nations in the 1960s to the land of corporate giants like Samsung, LG and Hyundai, South Korea is an incredible story of industrial success. Not surprisingly, one of the dominant publishing trends is business books, but children’s is still the biggest market for locally published titles, followed by literature and poetry, and a good showing of ‘self-empowerment’ titles.

The theme of our fellowship itself was the ‘era of the proteur’ (a proteur being mixture of an amateur and professional), and how this is affecting the place and role of the traditional book editor. Much of the talk was around authors who aren’t writers, and the rise of amateur publishers. The group concluded that the professional editor’s role is still as important as it ever was – perhaps even more so. Our ability to discover new authors in new markets and innovate with new technology is an important competitive edge, but maintaining our traditional standards of editorial excellence is critical to the success and credibility of books in the modern age.

The interim ban on Into the River has ended with the majority of the Film and Literature Board of Review classifying the book as ‘unrestricted’. The majority of the Board stated that the book dealt with the subject matter in a way that was essential to the story and was not gratuitous.

The board consists of three lawyers, chair Dr Don Mathieson, Andrew Caisley and Michael Stephens, and Professor of Film and Television Studies at Auckland University Lawrence Simmons and consultant Sandy Gill.

The majority viewed the book as dealing with matters “about the potentially negative consequences that can follow from involvement in casual sex, under age drinking, drug taking, crime, violence and bullying” in a way that was likely to educate, rather than promote. The majority therefore reached the conclusion that Into the River was not “objectionable” as defined by section 3(1) of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993. The sole dissenting voice was that of Dr Mathieson.

The Film and Literature Board also removed its earlier age restriction on Into the River and the book now carries no age restriction.  The majority decision can be viewed here. The dissenting decision can be viewed here.

Debra Millar, Publishing Director at Penguin Random House NZ, says they have sold North American rights for Into the River and Thunder Road to an independent US publisher Polis Books, as well as ANZ and UK audio rights for Into the River to Audible. But there have been no other confirmed rights sales at this point, she says.

However, the company’s Australian based rights manager is still following up on interest from other countries and discussions held at Frankfurt.

“We have seen strong orders for Into the River from New Zealand booksellers since the ban was lifted, and to date we have reprinted 1000 copies to meet demand, Debra notes. “There has also been unprecedented eBook sales globally since the review board decision to impose an interim restriction on sales in New Zealand.”

Report from Peter Dowling Managing Director of Oratia Media (www.oratiamedia.com) and publisher of its books division Libro International (www.librointernational.com), and international councillor of the Publishers Association of New Zealand.

Smaller and better: that’s my feeling after four days at the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair, the major event on the world publishing calendar.

The Frankfurter Buchmesse organisers condensed the layout of the fair this year, bringing English-language publishers from the distant and cavernous Hall 8 to reside across three levels in Hall 6. With the New Zealand stand well positioned on the ground floor, it was a lot easier to connect for meetings in the other halls and to feel part of this great global village of books.

Compliments again to Anne de Lautour (pictured below with Peter) and the Publishers Association of New Zealand for the very cool and visible design of the collective stand on which Oratia Media took its place alongside 14 other Kiwi publishers – and to our stand staff Christiane Arheilger and Heike Reifgens. There’s a supportive spirit of collegiality and fun all week (rated as the week’s best by many fair regulars). 

Meetings here are conducted at half-hour intervals, which on the busiest days this year meant over 15 official encounters with publishers, agents, distributors and service providers at our stands and theirs – before dinners and gatherings into the night. Along with reviewing current business relationships, presenting new books, seeking rights deals and pitching new series and book ideas, I started communicating our soon-to-be-public rebranding and development plans.

At the New Zealand party: Michael Duckworth (University of Hawaii Press) and Scott Beatty (Trajectory)

Smaller and better also describes how the book industry is looking now. Sure, bookstores have closed, publishers have pulled out of some markets and tightened their lists, and ebooks have generally not delivered on their promise. But a leaner publishing industry has got smarter and is seeing a consumer move back to print, and for independents there’s market share to be grabbed and easier international connections to be made.

For our authors, exposure to the international publishing community will hopefully lead to seeing their books overseas and in translation. With our Chinese agent Fanny Yu of CA-Link I toasted the sale of mainland Chinese rights to Dawn McMillan and Ross Kinnaird’s I Need a New Bum!, and I got a good response to their new book Mister Spears and his Hairy Ears. Our new international picture book series Indigenous Voices, which includes a great new story from Tim Tipene, is exciting a lot of interest also. And the September release of Hirini Moko Mead’s classic Te Toi Whakairo: The Art of Maori Carving is also promising good sales offshore.

With Fanny Yu of our Chinese agency CA-Link

I was also delighted to present some fine NZ books from outside our own programme, including Neil Coleman’s hard-hitting YA novel Roskill, David Bell’s YA fantasy novel The Dog Hunters (first in a very promising series), David Lupton and Leonel Alvarado’s beautiful The Divine Remains, and the sumptuousCoast, Country, Neighbourhood, City, which profiles the work of design studio Isthmus.

Our section of the NZ stand

So much of world publishing is dominated by big US, UK, French and German corporations. Alongside good meetings with colleagues from all those markets, this year Frankfurt brought me great exchanges with publishers from publishers as far flung as Belarus, Chile, El Salvador, Ireland … Big is beautiful but so is small.

Read more from Peter on http://librointernational.blogspot.co.nz/