Valentina Joulebina
PublisherWho are you and what do you do?
My name is Valentina and I’m the publisher and founder of Artnik, Beyond Black and A-jot, imprints of the same publishing house. We publish popular culture titles, pop music series, biography series, film series, true crime, limited edition coffee table books and recently fiction. We will also be publishing a quarterly magazine FAULT from the end of 2008.
Can you tell us about what your role involves?
I put together the publishing list – I decide what we publish from one year to the next. I do a lot of admin and I promote the titles. I find the people who produce the books, so I commission authors, designers or, as the case is at the moment, I commission a lot of researchers. I have to meet newspaper editors and talk to distributors to decide what we publish and who writes, designs and prints the books.
Can you tell us a bit about the structure of the company?
Publishing consists of the transfer of digital files so at any one time I’d say there are probably about 35 people working together but not necessarily as a team. There is somebody who oversees the design and he does some of the editing, we commission freelance writers and there are a few who work for us full-time. We have a number of designers, trainees and I have a work-experience designer right now. In addition to that I have people who do admin, proof reading, and for the new imprint, which is Beyond Black, I have a small flying squad who do promotion.
How did you start your company?
In an extremely foolhardy way. I’d never done anything at all, I had three children and I married a man who was a writer and a published author. He was doing a book for another publisher and there were many editorial disputes so I suggested that we should start our own publishing house, just as a joke, then I thought ‘why not?’. I didn’t know anything about publishing so it was a very steep learning curve.
The major mistake we made was to try and publish books that we wanted to read ourselves, and you can’t do that when you run a business; you have to publish books that other people want to read – books that are going to sell. This is the issue that I have with designers – some designers want to tell me what a book should look like, while I want to tell them what will sell because I know now, after six years of communicating constantly with buyers at a national level, that if I send a spread of a book, a rock music book, for example to the buyer at HMV and she says it’s no good then the designer has to change it.
So, a lot of mistakes were made along the way but now well established in terms of rock music especially, and illustrated books in particular - it’s a lot of hard work but once people get to know you - and I don’t mean just consumers I mean buyers, the trade - then it’s fun and gratifying…you just have to stay the course.
What skills would you say one needs to run a business?
Selling skills –quite simply. It doesn’t matter how fantastic a book is, if you can’t sell it at different levels - I don’t mean selling it to the consumer, as a publisher you have to be able to put it on the shelves first - and if you can’t do that, nobody knows about it and it’s catastrophic for both writer and publisher. I suppose administration skills, accounting skills and attention to detail are all important but above all being able to to publish a book that would sell and keep on selling. A good book withstands the test of time, not just as classic, but also on the shelves of book shops. Identifying skilled people is paramount.
What’s it like working in the publishing industry?
When we first started we employed a PR agency. They told me something that I’ve never forgotten – publishing is like a closed club. There are a lot of gatekeepers in publishing as everywhere else, and these are not necessarily the people at the top, but everybody likes to keep it that way. It doesn’t matter how high brow a literary agent or an established and venerable publisher may be, there is a yardstick by which the publishing industry measures success and that is selling a lot of copies. The world of auction houses and art dealers is somewhat similar in this respect.
Would you recommend the publishing industry to graduates?
Depends who the graduates are, of course. If it’s somebody who went to acquire these particular skills then yes. Illustrated books are the books of the future, people tend to look at pictures more and read less because they are assailed with information every day, illustrated books are increasingly dominating the market. There are a lot of jobs for good designers, provided they’re skilled in a commercial sense, not just artistic. Most certainly I’d recommend it. If somebody was qualified in another capacity and was just attracted to publishing because it sounds glamorous, definitely not, there are other glamorous things one could do that would pay more.
What advice would you give to current students studying in this area?
They should master the basic skill, I interview a lot of people who are artistic and they’ve done very well at school but the basic skills aren’t there. For example, I have people who are skilled in Indesign, but not in Quark the problem is that as a lot of publishers’ old files created before Indesign came onto the market are in Quark. Therefore, if you wanted to reprint the book, they can’t cope with Quark and that’s a basic skill. They have to master a range of software packages, not just the latest one, they have to be able to create a simple page without difficulty, they have to be able to create a book plan. Above all, students who come out onto the market have to realise that it is very competitive. They have to be fast, they can’t take forever to produce a book and they have to have absolute commercial skills. Forget about your ego, it doesn’t matter what you personally like, it’s what the market requires you to do. Every book comes with a budget, and a designer as well as a writer has to be able to work within it.
When I interview people, I ask them why they want to be in the publishing industry and one of the answers I get is “because I like reading”…well, if you like reading become a librarian. When you go into publishing the main occupation of all of us is research, if you are a designer you do picture research if you are an editor or researcher you do research, you research your book - that’s where you start. A lot of people who come into publishing don’t really have a very clear idea of what publishing is about. They just think they will be required to read a lot of manuscripts or communicate with authors. The world is not like that, publishing has to be profitable, we have to produce something that the market wants. It’s always a fine line between trying to retain a modicum of integrity and being able to stay afloat.
