These are dark days, my friend. The rumour last week was that Oxford University Press had just gone through a fresh round of layoffs, dismissing 100 people globally. That is only what we heard – we can’t confirm, but reviews of OUP USA on Glassdoor have comments such as these:
Lifetime of work down the drain.
Pros: After the latest round of layoffs, there isn’t much good happening right now. Trying to think of one thing — oh, I still have my job at least until the next round later in the year.
Cons: We have the Brainless ones,the Cowardly one, and the Heartless one all running the show with their overmatched collective talents. Add in the Wicked Witch who flies around the building wreaking havoc and you have an accurate picture of the business. Morale is at an all-time low.
Advice to Management: Waste of time suggesting anything. They haven’t listened for years to anything so what’s the point? Read all the reviews – they are incredibly accurate.
We have also been told that Cambridge University Press has just restructured again for the third time in the past 18 months. For those who didn’t notice, CUP restructured global operations about 6 months ago, which included a catastrophic move to SAP; the mess has yet to be cleaned up. As we reported earlier, Pearson laid off 10% of its staff globally at the end of January. Bear in mind that this is not just ELT, but all divisions of the publishers being mentioned. The ELT departments are part of the carnage, though.
So what is to be concluded from this? Is there no future for publishing? At English Central, fortunately, most of the publishers we distribute are medium to small sized and they are very much still publishing and not running around shrill. Macmillan Education, our largest publisher, after being focused on going digital in the past few years, seems to have recommited to print publishing. Furthermore, our sales keep increasing, so we will cautiously say there is a sustainable future.
We were talking with ELT author Lindsay Clandfield last week about this issue and he commented that things in the publishing world are not as bad as the music industry, which completely fell apart. Global sales for OUP, CUP and Pearson fell last year. Obviously, this is a problem that needs addressing, but the solutions that are being pursued strike us as reactive, ill-considered and the result of short-term thinking. We have long watched as publishers made what were clearly poor decisions and came to the conclusion that this happened because the publishing industry does not attract the stars of the business world.
Possible solutions?
1. Stop raising book prices to increase revenues. The price jumps at the major publishers this year, for ELT at least, were shocking. The wisdom seems to be that they will not increase their sales, so the only solution is to charge existing customers more for what they purchase. That is ridiculous. What they have succeeded in doing is angering their customers, making them more willing to switch to publishers that have more reasonably-priced titles.
2. Recommit to actually publishing relevant and useful materials. None of the large publishers are actually publishing anything new or innovative. They are simply putting out a new edition of something that has sold well (hello “Q” and “Northstar”!) in the past.
3. Reconnect with the customer. Pearson decided several years ago that the future was digital and went to such an extreme that they failed to notice that they completely lost touch with their customers. Pearson showed up at the large teachers’ conferences without any books – just computers and tablets on which teachers could look at PDFs of books if they provided their email addresses. Teachers were furious and rightly so; not only was it a thinly veiled plot to gather consumer information, but it was also slow and counterintuitive (why would you line up to look at workbook on a computer when it is so much faster to just flip through the book?).
4. Restructure your practices, not your middle management. As a distributor, we have always had to qualify our desk copies. We were shocked when we started going to smaller, regional US conferences and watched as Pearson just handed books off their table to teachers who indicated the slightest interest… not only were no sales made, but no qualifying was done either. How does this make any sense? Books cost money, so just giving them away costs money. If there is a good chance the giveaway will lead to future ongoing sales, fine, but giving them away to anyone who walks by is tomfoolery. Of course, there is the added (and considerable) cost of mailing out desk copies when we are out of the conference context. Stop giving your books away! More importantly, getting into bidding wars to do custom publications for large schools is your downfall; the publishers run down the prices of these custom pubs to the point where they are making almost no profit selling to the few accounts out there that actually made this business profitable. The publishers have ruined their own market with these custom publications and special deals for large accounts. We could go on….
5. Stop hiring arrogant young people with no industry experience to top management positions (this only applies to one of the publishers – you know who you are). It is insane. They come in with fresh ideas which inspires hope until they actually implement changes that completely undermine the company. In general, you need to move away from the top-heavy structure and let the middle managers run more of the show. They know the industry, they know the customers and they know if something will work or not.
Lord knows what will happen to the big guys over the next couple of years. We suspect they are going to die out, but far from gracefully. They are going to be mean and petty until they lose their life force. However, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon: smaller, independent publishers with innovative ideas and operations that are far from bloated are stepping up and filling the void. Publishers like Garnet Education, Helbling Languages, Abax and Express Publishing to name just a few…. and we will bring them to you.