If you do things right, you become more efficient. This means costs go down, quality goes up, you have happier, more productive teams and you improve your chances of success right across the board.
Conversely, if you do things in a sub-optimal manner, everything takes more time than it should, you make more errors, you spend more time fire-fighting and less time on profitable publishing activities.
So, it’s worth putting in the effort to do things right, to follow best practice – good stuff will flow from it.
A willingness to follow best practice is usually determined by the outlook of senior publishing management.
Publishers where leadership does the following are well placed:
- Clearly articulates their business’s mission;
- Are audience focused, constantly putting audience needs front and centre of all decision-making;
- Insists on quality, doing things right, across all areas of the business;
- Instils a culture of continuous improvement;
- Empowers and listens to their workforce;
- Leans into new technological advances, not shies away from them;
- Takes an expansive view of “publishing”, willing to expand into non-traditional activities to better satisfy audience needs;
- Invests in staff training and development.
If your leadership ticks most of those boxes, then you should be open to the ideas and thinking contained here.
The purpose of 'Best Practice in Publishing', a new offering from InPublishing which was sponsored by paper merchant Denmaur, is to provide guidance for publishers who are looking to optimise their systems and processes.
In ‘Best Practice in Publishing’, you will read the views of a leading publisher in each of the publishing sectors (news media, consumer media, B2B media, customer media and academic media) about what best practice looks like from their perspective.
You will also read the insights of 21 leading publishing partners who drill down into key disciplines and processes, describing what best practice looks like now, how it’s likely to evolve and giving three top tips for you to follow.
I hope you find the articles helpful. If you want help improving the way you do things, then I’m sure our publishing partners would be happy to help. Please contact them.
The best practice articles:- Academic media, by Niels Peter Thomas, chief executive officer of BMJ Publishing
- Ad operations, by Mike Hoy, CEO of Papermule
- B2B media, by Amanda Barnes, chief executive of Faversham House
- Consumer media, by Tamar Riley, portfolio managing director at Immediate
- Customer media, by Jackie Scully, managing director at Think
- Customer service, by Claire Ruzicka, head of customer experience at Air Business Subscriptions
- Data transformation, by Will Bailey, head of partnerships at 67 Bricks
- Digital editions, by Paul DeHart, co-owner and executive leader at BlueToad
- Email marketing, by Ewan Sinclair, senior sales director at Adestra
- Event logistics, by Lenka Booker, global event logistics & transformation director at Air Business
- Event organisation, by Steve Russell, director at Fusion Events
- Magazine printing, by Kirk Galloway, CEO of Buxton Press
- Mailing, by Neil Carter, sales & commercial director at Posthub
- Mergers & acquisitions, by Piers Russell-Cobb, managing director at MediaFund
- Multichannel workflows, by Craig Llewelyn-Williams, SVP customer strategy at WoodWing
- News media, by Chris Sherrard, editor-in-chief of The Irish News
- Newstrade distribution, by Siobhan McNab, commercial development manager at Marketforce
- Paper selection, by Julian Townsend, publishing paper sales director at Denmaur
- Payment processing, by Thomas Darling, finance & payment product manager at CDS Global
- Paywalls, by John Sheehy, executive director, product & market strategy at AdvantageCS
- Picture editing / enhancement, by Derek Milne, commercial pixometrist at Pixometry
- Print automation, by Atex’s James Hirsz, business analyst, and Sara Forni, product manager
- Print sustainability, by Steven Renders, general manager of Roularta Printing
- Specialist distribution, by Chris Horn, managing director of Gold Key Media
- Subscriber management, by Louise McHale, managing director of ESco
- Subscriber marketing, by Mike Halstead, managing director of HH&S
