Meet the Summer Faculty

As we get ready for the start of summer classes, the NYU MS in Publishing: Digital & Print Media program is pleased to welcome three new media experts joining our faculty of leading industry practitioners. Yes, the new members know their subjects, but they also have some pretty cool interests outside school! Read on to learn about some new faces in the classroom this summer… and their passion for sushi, saxophones, and more.

Digital Book World 2013: Change and Cooperation

NYU M.S. in Publishing students David Stuzin, Nicole Estrin, Michelle Cashman, Pam Majumdar, and Lorna Field volunteer at Digital Book World.

During a Digital Book World 2013 panel discussion so crowded that some attendees sat on the floor, Matt MacInnis, Founder and CEO of the interactive book company Inkling, made a particularly perceptive comment: “It’s a miracle that the book was a thing the whole world agreed on.” That is, up until recently, it is fair to say that “the book” as we know it has retained the same static, linear structure across various nations and fields of study since the invention of the printing press 500 years ago. Going forward, MacInnis continued, “It’s not gonna be one monolithic thing serving the med. school book and serving the novel.”

Random House CEO Markus Dohle: “Focusing on What We Do Best”

Random House Chairman and CEO Markus Dohle and NYU-SPI students

Star struck. That’s how the 116 Summer Publishing Institute (SPI) students felt. The man standing in front of us was the embodiment of all that we hoped to achieve in our careers. He strode into the room confidently, smiling, easing our nerves at meeting one of the most influential people in the publishing industry—and someone most of us desperately hoped to work for: Markus Dohle, Chairman and CEO of Random House, was ready to guide us through the changes facing book publishing currently and in the future.

Digital Book World 2012: Changes and Challenges Ahead

A gathering of NYU Publishing student volunteers: Amy Goppert, Amelia Spriggs, Joana Costa Knufinke and Jaime Bode at Digital Book World

This year, M.S. in Publishing: Digital & Print Media students at the NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies were once again provided with the fantastic opportunity to volunteer at the annual Digital Book World conference. Between making sure that everyone entering the conference rooms was wearing a badge and helping to direct the 600 attendees to different breakout rooms, we volunteers were able to listen to the informative discussions about the deep changes that our industry is undergoing. On Tuesday morning, Mike Shatzkin, the respected blogger of The Shatzkin Files and DBW co-organizer (along with Publishers Marketplace founder Michael Cader) summarized the general goals for publishers this year, followed by a panel of CEOs from Hyperion, Yale University Press, Ingram Content Group, and Sourcebooks. Ellen Archer, President and Publisher of Hyperion (a Disney Company) and an NYU Center for Publishing Advisory Board member, stressed that publishers need to be open-minded to apply new strategies: “Books are elastic and dynamic,” she said. “Books can live in so many ways.” She mentioned Hyperion’s strategy of releasing mystery books based on the ABC TV show Castle in digital format. The third tie-in, Heat Rises, shot to #1. “Be really open-minded to doing things differently, and it can pay off,” she advised.

A major discussion that morning focused on the new quantitative industry research that proves once again the growing importance of the eBook industry. According to James McQuivey of Forrester Research, 25 million people now own an eReader and 61 million are projected to have one by the end of this year. The ongoing study by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) on Consumer Attitudes Toward eBook Reading reported that an estimated 17% of book buyers purchased an eBook in December 2011. The number was 9% in December 2010 and 3% in January of the same year. This growing trend has also taken place among teens, who “report tripling their reading rate of eBooks.” The genres more likely to be bought electronically are mystery (22.9% of the market share) and romance (20.9%). Apple is, for young people and adults, the favorite reading device manufacturer. According to other research carried out by VERSO, the adoption curve of reading devices is now reaching “late majority.” However, 50% of the reading population is still very reluctant to purchase any type of reading device.

The morning sessions ended with a panel on the digital evolution of romance publishing. What was particularly interesting in this discussion was the talk about DRM (digital rights management) and the fact that romance publishers frequently omit it from their books. According to a survey of more than 6,000 users, carried out by All Romance eBooks (a specialized romance eBook retailer), 96% of the romance books sold through their platform do not have DRM, even if 91% of the total books on sale are protected by DRM.

In the afternoon, attendees could choose between four different panels that tackled issues such as marketing, design and/or social media strategies, among other topics. The second day included a presentation by Caroline Marks, CEO of Bookish, who explained more of the plans of this online digital platform for readers backed by Penguin, Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster, launching next fall. Marks noted that Bookish will focus on ways to have “books find you, instead of you find books.” Overall at the conference, the push to increase discoverability was a very hot topic. Other key ideas that speakers emphasized throughout the two days were the role of Amazon as a “frenemy” of traditional publishers (who are now competing with their biggest retail customer); the difficult pricing strategies of eBooks and the impact of the agency model; the best cloud-based publishing infrastructures; the growing importance of self-publishing (now a real trend); the imperative that publishers need to know their audiences better to serve them targeted products; and the possibilities for international expansion of English eBook catalogues (either in English or in its translated versions).

In the exhibit hall, where tea and coffee were served twice a day, many publishing vendors presented their services to publishers. Miral Sattar, a graduate of the M.S. in Publishing program, presented her start-up company BiblioCrunch, a digital community where writers can write, read, and distribute their digital books into any format to any eReader. “One thing I learned,” said Miral, “was that being able to demonstrate your product live, one-on-one is very powerful.”

All in all, Digital Book World 2012 was proof of this very challenging and changing moment in the billion-dollar (and growing) U.S. eBook industry. I think DBW is an appointment no one will want to miss next year!

by Joana Costa Knufinke

“Webby, Wiki, and Sticky:” Video for 2012

Duff and Cohen speak to NYU Publishing students

“What experience do we want to cultivate for readers?” was a question on everyone’s minds during the latest NYU-SCPS M.S. in Publishing alumni event, a discussion entitled “Visions in Video” recently held by the NYU-SCPS Office of Alumni Relations, the Publishing Alumni Association, and the Publishing Student Association. Speakers Craig Duff and Samantha Cohen each talked about challenges for the magazine and book industries presented by new technology, including video and multimedia.

Craig Duff, Director of Multimedia and Chief Video Journalist at Time, Inc., told the group that, ideally, online content should be “webby, wiki, and sticky”—meaning content (especially in terms of long-form journalism) should be current, have a collaborative/educational value, and make a reader want to stick with a story until the end. Digital and online audiences face more distractions than print readers, and thus have a tendency to hit-and-run read, which can hinder a story’s impact.

Books, Blogs, and Literary Mags, Oh My!

Students in the M.S. in Publishing program not only spend a great deal of time on media websites and reading blogs, but they also create them! We recently asked our students to tell us about their publishing-related online hobbies and businesses. Below, we have selected three examples to spotlight:

Abrams Books: Making Publishing an Art

M.S. in Publishing students in the ABRAMS conference room

The entryway of ABRAMS was adorned with framed copies of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. A table in the conference room was filled with eye-catching covers including everything from the stunning photography book Earth from Above by Yann Arthus-Betrand to the first book in a new children’s series, The Strange Case of the Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger. The NYU-SCPS M.S. in Publishing students arriving for an industry visit were eager to learn more about the art and business of making beautiful, heavily illustrated books.

Gathered around the table were the company’s senior executives, assembled for the NYU visit by Senior Editor Andrea Danese. First up was Michael Jacobs, President and CEO of ABRAMS, who said that despite the industry-wide downturn in physical book sales, the company (founded in 1949), remains strong because it focuses on design. “These are books, but they’re also gifts, objects that people want to own,” Jacobs said. “Part of our ethos here is we want to make books that deserve to be physical objects. Everything we do is artful.”

The students were all excited to be in a publishing house where print books still make up so much of the culture and the bottom line. So far, ABRAMS’ e-book business has been mostly in children’s books, with titles that are more text-heavy. But Jacobs said that as e-reading technology improves, he expects more ABRAMS books to be made into e-books. “Because we’re small, it’s easier to adapt to change,” he explained.

Next up was Charles Kochman, Editorial Director of the company’s ComicArts division, who spoke to the students about starting the comic book imprint for ABRAMS after working at DC Comics. Kochman was the editor who bought the rights to Diary of a Wimpy Kid  after talking to author Jeff Kinney at New York Comic Con in 2006. “It [Wimpy Kid] didn’t feel like an adult writing like a kid,” Kochman said. “When you read certain picture books or kids’ books, you can see the hand of adults. This felt like it really could be the diary of an eight-year-old.”

The book, of course, became a mega-hit series and now ABRAMS is printing six million copies of the latest Wimpy book Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever, which, according to Kochman, is the largest print run of any physical book this year. The launch plans this month include a six-city bus tour replete with a snow-making machine. The series is not yet available as an e-book, but the executives mentioned an e-book in the near future.

While the Wimpy Kid series may dominate the ABRAMS children’s list, Susan Van Metre, publisher of Abrams Books for Young Readers and ComicArts, said ABRAMS allows her to take risks that bigger publishers might not allow. As an example, she showed students Lauren Myracle’s bestseller ttyl, a book written for tweens that uses Internet slang and is printed in two colors to look like an IM conversation.

In the adult division, ABRAMS recently published George Harrison: Living in the Material World, a visual biography by his widow, Olivia Harrison, priced at $40. ABRAMS is about to publish the official legacy book of The Oprah Winfrey Show with a $50 price point.

Deborah Aaronson, Associate Publisher of ABRAMS, explained that although the higher price point on some of the heavily illustrated books may deter some buyers, the publisher needs to sell fewer books at $40 or $50 to make a profit. Generally, though, ABRAMS customers seem to regard their purchases as art objects and therefore have little problem with the price point.

Students also got a peek into the collaborative cover-design process. Art Director Michelle Ishay showed iterations of various covers, including some compelling designs that were ultimately rejected. A cover of JFK with a cigar in his mouth for a book entitled Portrait of Camelot: A Thousand Days in the Kennedy White House was replaced with a more conventional candid shot of Jack and Jackie.

“Nobody today wanted to see JFK smoking,” she said. Ishay explained the challenge of designing a cover, which serves so many purposes: “It needs to be beautiful, it needs to be functional, and now, it needs to work as a thumbnail on Amazon,” she said.

At the end of their visit, the NYU publishing students toured ABRAMS’ art-filled offices and received signed copies of a new book in the legendary Babar the Elephant children’s series, Babar’s Celesteville Games by Laurent de Brunhoff, son of the original creators. Like the Wimpy Kid series, the Babar books are another example of how ABRAMS nurtures classics and grows talent.

by Kristin Vorce

Tips and Thrills: Just a Day in Publishing

Macmillan CEO John Sargent with students

“You guys are the future of publishing.” The NYU-SCPS Summer Publishing Institute students heard those words recently from John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan Publishing. As classmates headed off to book industry visits at Penguin Group USA, Simon & Schuster, Open Road Integrated Media, and Workman Publishing, my colleagues and I had the opportunity to visit Macmillan’s headquarters in the historic Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue.

In his office with a balcony overlooking Madison Square Park, Sargent began his talk to the students as if composing a choose-your-own-adventure novel. He offered to address current issues in publishing, describe the history of the company or volunteer career advice. “You choose!” he said. The CEO didn’t seem at all surprised when the students wanted to hear his tips on a career in publishing.

Digital Book World Day Two: Catering to Kids

Blogger Stephanie Pitts

As a lover of children’s books, I was pleased to find that there were three panels on day two of Digital Book World devoted to this segment of the marketplace. So, once my volunteering duties at the coat check were over, I made a beeline for the first kids’ book panel of the day. (As my fellow NYU Publishing student Thea James noted in her post about day one, hanging up wet and snowy coats wasn’t a bad trade off for the chance to sit in on a conference where registration costs upwards of one thousand dollars!)

Kristen McLean of the Association of Booksellers for Children moderated a presentation of findings from the 2010 ABC/Bowker Pubtrack Consumer Study: Understanding the Children’s Book Consumer in the Digital Age. The study provided many insights into the children’s market and debunked two prevailing myths surrounding teenagers. The first myth is that teenagers are universal adopters of technology and a ready-made market for ebooks. In fact, the study demonstrated that no segment in the teen market shows significant ebook sales (5-6% average adoption compared to about 30% in adult trade). The panelists attributed this to the fact that teenagers tend to adopt technologies that are sharing in nature like texting and social networking. Ebooks with limited sharing capabilities are actually less social than print books, which are readily passed around friendship circles or classrooms. Furthermore, many teens still don’t have access to e-readers, and because not all have credit cards, they rarely shop online for books.

Spotlight on M.S. Publishing Alumni

Three notable graduates of the NYU M.S. in  Publishing program recently spoke with current student Seth Harris, a digital business development analyst at Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., about their newest roles within the publishing industry. They also discussed how they are applying aspects of the program to their current jobs, and advice for new and current students.

Till Wirth was recently promoted at Random House.

Till Wirth recently was promoted to manager of digital content and product development at Random House Children’s Books. He began working at Random House as an intern while a graduate student in publishing at NYU, where he received the program’ s Oscar Dystel Fellowship and  2008 Excellence in Achievement Award in Book Publishing. Before coming to New York, Wirth managed his family’s book publishing house in Germany.