By Ingrid Goldstein
During the past few years there has been much talk about the changes in publishing. There is now no doubt that publishers – especially specialist publishers – are being seen as, and seeing themselves as, content providers. In addition to traditional print books, publishers are increasingly offering digital products, either online, as e-books, or as apps; B2B operations are also becoming a larger part of their business.
Ingrid Goldstein
These shifts put them in direct competition, not only with other publishers, but also with large technology companies such as Apple, Google, and Amazon. The boundaries are becoming blurry, with publishers offering high technology products, and technology providers acting as publishers. But technology providers also sell music, household goods, and act as travel agents and auction houses; there are no limits to their imagination of products, customer requirements, or access possibilities. Their business focus is the user experience (UX): individualised, personalised, and customised for the access device at hand this very moment.
In publishing this is still different. Even though the product portfolio of publishers has expanded to the digital world, the business model – revolving around products – is still strongly rooted in tradition. The book, in print or electronic form, is ONE product for everyone. ONE UX for all. But customers increasingly expect a UX tailored to their individual needs and even to be able to tailor the content and their interaction with it themselves. Against this background, this singular approach to what constitutes a book becomes redundant. Rather it can be seen as a network of content modules that reach users in many different forms and formats and through different distribution channels.
The traditional linear publishing process becomes instead a network of modularised processes that enable dynamic, personalised content creation. Publishers as content providers do not create more and more products, but design and maintain a content centre, from which they are able to feed into the growing diversity of business opportunities. These paradigm shifts require an extensive rethinking for publishers – and make a content strategy essential. They entail having a content strategy which recognises that books are not just information or data.
The concept of a content strategy is closely linked to the development of the Internet and its associated web content. Its origins lie in the 1990s, when the field of user experience developed. Content strategy is now increasingly used in the business environment and refers to the cross-media planning, development and management of information about products. This aspect is also valid for the publishing industry, and is relevant to all of the information publishers produce about their products. But it is more important to transfer the concept of content strategy to the actual product of publishers – the content itself.
Such a Content Strategy for Publishing (CSP) is a methodical and clearly documented procedure, ensuring the longevity of the entire content of a publishing house. It is an integral part of the overall strategy. An effective CSP aims for:
- A consistent and high quality content basis
- Media-independence
- Semantic richness
- Compatibility with diverse uses of the content, today and in the future
These qualities enable the automation of workflows and processes and efficient content management and maintenance. The main advantages are reduced “time to market” for new products and services, and a drastic reduction in the creation, maintenance and production costs of the content.
A CSP is divided into five main phases that can be considered a road map:
The Audit documents the expectations and goals of the CS for the publisher and initiates an inventory, where the current state of content-types – e.g. their sizes, locations, lifespans, and lifecycles as well as their associated workflows and processes – are recorded and described.
This inventory forms the basis for the Analysis, an evaluation of the content with regard to its improvement and its potential for dynamic use. Target groups and their customer profiles, market potential, and changing natures are considered. This relies on an understanding of the changing situation of the industry in response to the overall trends in culture and society. The analysis also looks at the potential of current processes and technologies, including the skills of the personnel. The different options and their foreseeable impacts are shown and described. The analysis phase gives a comprehensive picture of the market potential as well as the costs for the necessary transformation steps.
A successful implementation, usage, and maintenance of the content requires Strategies. On the data side, strategies for structuring the content have to be developed. This results in standards-based structure and linking models – like XML or RDF – and comprehensive metadata concepts that are semantically aligned and aim towards intelligent content. The resulting changes in processes and workflows are identified, described and rescheduled. Special attention is given to possibilities for automation and in this context also to methods and approaches of language technology. These strategic considerations result in the modification and creation of new job roles and profiles for the employees. As part of the strategy development, new business and revenue models are planned and potential new service providers and software products are identified. This step often initiates major changes in a publishing company, requiring the implementation of a comprehensive change management strategy.
For the Implementation of the different strategies specific work plans will be created and executed. On the content level, for instance, the new data structures and metadata concepts are tested, evaluated and, where necessary, improved. The planned business models are implemented and tested specifically for market suitability. The strategies also have an impact on the Management of the long-lived content.
These five phases build on each other, but their results also can be used independently. Each of these phases is a completed module, whose results are documented as deliverables. The results of each phase represent a process of clarification for the publisher in terms of future media and technology development. The deliverables document this process of clarification and may in whole or in part be passed on to a third party, such as a service provider.
The main advantage of CSP is its clearly documented and methodical approach that is focused on repeatability and aimed at the longevity of the content. It provides clarity and consistency to all lines of action at different levels:
- when describing the approach
- when deciding the implementation steps o when planning the tasks ahead
- when assigning responsibilities
- when measuring the achievable results
- when mediating the associated changes
This clarity and consistency is essential for a transparent and comprehensible approach that can be clearly communicated to all employees, and for sending a positive signal which creates confidence in the change. Thus, a content strategy is an essential support for a publishing house when becoming a sustainable content provider.
Ingrid Goldstein is Head of Language Technology–Dictionaries, Global Academic Business, Oxford University Press. She will be presenting “A Content Strategy for Publishing,” along with Anna von Veh, Say Books, New Zealand as part of the Publishers’ Forum, April 23-24, in Berlin and hosted by Klopotek.
SURVEY: How Sophisticated is Your Publishing Content Strategy?
8 Comments
Mrs. Goldstein is resuming the challenge and the highest appropriate survival strategy of the publishers in a brilliant manner.
Publisher should know about the importance of having a modern CSP ensuring the longevity and functionality of their content. Never the less most publisher don’t like the word strategy. Because strategies are rather acadamic at the moment they are developed. It’s a long and often very expensive procedure to convert them into practice. Most publisher need a lot of external help to create a strategy and even more to derive proper processes, technical support and mentioned changes in organisational infrastructure and last but not least in gaining the right attitude and thinking according to the future data management, concepts and neccessities.
There is no fast revenue, no quick win.
According this, a lot of the publishers can’t effort the invest needed. They focus on other topic instead not recognizing the fatal mistake occuring by acting in this way.
There has to be an unmentioned important question answered to give an hand to those publishers hesitating to adopt their CSP and practical implementation.
Preparing the own already existing content in a media-independent manner by restructuring, tagging, linking and so on can be really expensiv. It is high effort not causing any revenue at the first glance.
There has to be a sensitive approach to the data preaparation part of the implementation phase of the CSP-introduction project.
To choose appropriate data guaranteeing quick revenues ist essential. To choose the right amount of content to be adopted first is also crucial.
Most publisher won’t do anything according to CSP unless the mentioned steps and some quick profits compensating economical efforts on a short time scale are visible.
To be clear: I agree Mrs. Goldstein’s words. There is no alternative way to change according to the users needs.
But most of the time it needs tricky arguments to get them convinced about CSP and how to start living this.
sincerely yours,
Dr. Markus Regnet
Oh, if only these gurus could speak and write in English….
As priests of all fake myths, the first thing they do is inventing another “language” to set themselves far from the People. Now they speak their own “language” so that the 99% cannot understand them nor can be “players”….
What is funny is that publishers are less and less important in the world of books. Their ‘monopoly’ is going away and freedom seems to be nearer and nearer. The day will come when these gurus will no longer control the market. Then American writers will stop avoiding ‘forbidden’ topics and write about the world as it is, not as the plutocracy wants to see it.
What Ms. Goldstein describes as the CSP here is the idealization of a process that many publishers have gone through over the past decade, but in a fumbling, semi-blind, experimental, incremental way. If we had all had this kind of roadmap at the start, we would have avoided a lot of waste of both financial and human resources along the way. But that, of course, is the wisdom of hindsight. Ms. Goldstein does an excellent job of capturing what we have all learned, with some pain and suffering, as the optimal way to conduct our business today.
Thanks for a great article, Ingrid.
I totally agree about publishers needing a modern CSP and feel that backlists are an unexplored minefield for them
However, to operate in the future they need to work with non-publishing visionaries who are not bound by literary tradition. These people will put an entirely differentand crucial skill-set on the table.
Ms. Goldstein, thanks for providing some insight into new trends in publishing. Your article is timely. I welcome knowing more about how a publisher of electronic and print books can use digital products as apps.
The Goldstein article is wonderful and at the same time alarming, especially for small independent publishers who tend to lack the resources and expertise to tackle the challenging and inevitable developments in the publishing sector.
I had to read this twice and still am stumbling over all these terms and trying to figure out exactly what it all means. I’m sure it makes sense and the diagram is one of those really cool ones lots of people in consulting use to impress clients. I’m reminded of Marty Kahn in House of Lies. Throw a lot of terms around and everyone goes “wow” but no one really knows what it means. But pretending to understand what it means makes you seem smarter than the schmuck next to you who, like Tom Hanks in Big, goes: “I don’t get it.”
Frankly this is a very generic template that can be applied to selling ice to Eskimos. I’m not denigrating it. I’m just saying it’s a lot of the stuff being bandied about in NY while, meanwhile, lots of people in the trenches are actually doing concrete things to change. NY is touting Tor’s decision to drop DRM– like, wow, I’ve never had DRM on my books. I took titles NY tossed on the trash bin and went from zero to over a million dollars earned in 18 months. And I’m just one author. So while NY throws around terms and spends millions to try to figure out what they’re doing, there are people who are already doing it and doing it well. I agree with the comment that publishing is looking at its own navel to try to find solutions that they can’t clearly see because they are so used to doing it the old way.
Apps? Useful in very limited modes right now. For most, it’s the wrong direction and a waste of resources.
I have a business approach, from my Special Forces background, one that can also be applied to almost any situation (and I have from the CIA, to SWAT teams to Fortune 500, to start-ups) but I made it very specific to authors and publishing with Write It Forward.
And I like to say it in very simple and specific terms: For strategic goal= Stated in one sentence, with one action verb, an external visible outcome and a time lock.
Watch the bloodbath that goes on when you walk into a business and ask everyone to write down what they think their company’s strategic goal is and what their own personal goal inside the business is. In one sentence each.
It’s a start. But why don’t we just say what we mean, simply and to the point?
Simply and to the point: Content Strategy is a very-high level approach that publishers should constantly be working towards. At its most basic, I could sum up this article by saying, “The books you publish should fit into your company’s business plan.” …but then it might be foolish to assume that publishers (large and small), authors or collectives *have* a business plan in mind when they choose what books to put out into the world.
(and “make tons of money” does not apply, in this scenario…)
I think applying content strategy is such a big leap from where we are now – too much change, too quickly (especially when you consider that this season’s list has been written, acquired, edited months (and sometimes years) ago).
If you gear your strategic thinking towards the marketing of those books — content strategy (i.e. deciding what to publish and how to publish it to best reach your intended audience) will come naturally afterwards.