Keep the Creativity in Publishing

Seems like a funny thing for a technology guy to be saying, but it is one of the most profound enlightenments I have come to over the past couple of years. For many years, us technology wonks at Quality Solutions have been talking about high quality title information, efficient work flows, encouraging publishers to take control of their own destiny - and of course we have solutions to back up these mantras. But last year, while performing a study for a well known trade publisher, it became apparent to me how repressed the creativity had become amongst the staff - and we have statistics to back it up. Upon reflection, I had seen the symptoms time and again at other publishers. After all, publishing is a creative business, yet publishing staff members - from editorial to production to marketing and sales were wasting time and, more importantly creative energy, chasing after accurate title information.

Creativity and technology are not adversarial. In fact, in book publishing as in other medias, they are a critical part of what we do. How many avid Mac users are out there designing books, jackets, catalogs, and other media using extraordinary technology? In the case of digital content, ebooks and online resources, technology will, hopefully, unleash an era of unbounded creativity as clever people figure out how to put the tools together to do extraordinary things - like producing a book that is immediately available in those formats in a device-consistent way.

In the case of our solutions, such as Title Management and our Eloquence Onix services, I strongly believe that it is the purpose of this technology to assist the creativity, not hinder it - and the best way to do that is to allow publishers to record title information, make decisions, and disseminate that information...then the technology should get out of the way. There is no better way give each staff member the chance to be creative.

We often have a tricky time demonstrating an ROI for our solutions - you can't come out and say 'your sales will increase 20% as a result of Title Management and Eloquence' even if you strongly believe it. But publishers are an intuitive bunch and they can extrapolate when it is made clear that the right technology will allow editors to acquire high quality books, unleash photo researchers to dig deeper and find the absolute best photo, free up publicists to book the best possible author events and enable sales reps to stop creating spreadsheets and get out to shake some hands.