Charlie Redmayne looks at the many skills, traditional and new, that contemporary publishing demands.
In an age where retailers, tech companies, authors and now even agents are becoming publishers, we have to ask ourselves: what does it mean to be a publisher in the 21st century? How can we add most value in a marketplace where the value chain is changing so fast?
There is one thing that all of us agree on. We are nothing without the content. So content is king; the author is king. So the question we really need to be asking ourselves is: how can we best serve our authors? What do we need to do to ensure that they don't want to be published by anyone else? How do we continue to add value? If the only value we bring is in the size of the advance, then ultimately we lose.
What this doesn't mean is throwing out all the tried and tested practices. We need to do all the things we have always done - only better - and complement them with new skill sets and expertise. And we need to do it bigger, better and faster.
