We have recently added a Frequently Asked Questions page to our website and below are a few of the answers to common questions you can find there.
I’ve sent in my book proposal. When will I hear back from you?
You should receive an acknowledgement (and perhaps some initial feedback) from a commissioning editor within days. The length of time it takes to make a final decision on a proposal depends on lots of factors, but 6-8 weeks is about average.
How long does the editorial process take?
We’re able to allow a good deal of flexibility, as we recognise that our authors have other commitments besides writing. Most people take between 18 months and 2 years to deliver a manuscript ready for peer review. The peer review process takes 3-4 months, and then authors have time to make the revisions suggested by the reviewers: generally this takes 2-3 months.
Will my manuscript be copy-edited and proofread?
Yes, we ensure that every manuscript we publish is copy-edited. We will ask authors to proofread their typeset proofs but Sarah and Stanzi will also be checking them throughout the production process.
Do I need to adhere to a specific style/layout in my manuscript?
We provide guidelines for authors on our website but we are flexible in terms of manuscript layout and font. We can provide a stylesheet for book editors to send to their chapter authors. If you would like to have more guidance, we do have further specifications that we can give you, but usually this level of work is done by our typesetters. For further queries please contact Sarah Williams (sarah@channelviewpublications.com).
I am going to/speaking at a conference, please can I have a flyer for my book?
Yes of course. We are very happy to supply flyers for your book for you to take to an event. Please give us as much notice as possible as it can sometimes take a while for flyers to be sent if the event is overseas.
Can I add my chapter (from an edited collection) to my institution’s repository?
We are happy for you to upload your chapter to your repository providing that:
– Your pre-press version is used (e.g. your word document, not our PDF proofs)
– That it is accompanied by a full bibliographic reference to our publication in which the chapter appears
– That it is accompanied by a link to the book’s listing on our website
– That you wait until after publication before posting it
You can see the full list of FAQs on our website. If you have any questions that aren’t answered on our website, you can email us at info@channelviewpublications.com and one of us will get back to you as soon as possible.
In this post Tommi explains our collaboration with DeGruyter and their Publisher Partner Program.
Independence
Anyone who knows Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters will know how fiercely proud we are of our independence. We are not owned by a corporation, neither are we controlled by a university. We do not even owe significant sums of money to banks or financial institutions. This gives us the freedom to publish the books we believe in, and to pursue projects and ideas that we think are good and bring value to the community.
So why, when you search for our books on Google, do you often see books published by us on our rival publisher DeGruyter’s website?
Don’t worry – we have not been bought or taken over by DeGruyter! We remain the same, proudly independent business that we have always been, with total control over our publishing and our finances.
Publisher Partner Program
The DeGruyter Publisher Partner Program started in 2012 with Harvard University Press, and has since expanded to include 34 presses of various sizes, some of which are independent, others are university presses.
At Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters we have been including our books in the Publisher Partner Program since 2018, and it has allowed us to reach institutional markets that we would never be able to reach on our own. The team at DeGruyter have good contacts with libraries and library consortia worldwide, and act on our behalf to promote relevant titles and collections of titles to these groups. When combining with other quality presses, we are able to put together strong collections of monographs in key subject areas, which are large enough to draw the attention of library collection development teams – and yet retain the highest editorial qualities and diverse publishing lists typical of strong independent publishers and the university presses alike.
We have seen very strong take up of our titles through the DeGruyter program, and we have worked closely together with DeGruyter, with librarians and with authors to raise awareness of our linguistics collection and of our tourism studies books, increasing accessibility of our materials in a number of campuses worldwide. Watch this space for details of future webinars to further promote these collections!
Open Access
As well as working with us to sell books, the DeGruyter partner program allows us to publish our Open Access materials – whether these are full titles or just single chapters within edited titles on their platform – helping to further the availability of these titles along with our traditionally published volumes.
Competition?
But are we not worried about DeGruyter as a competitor? One of our fears when joining the partner program was that we would lose quality manuscripts and proposals to DeGruyter. We are now four years into our partnership and we have yet to see any evidence that this would be the case. Many of our authors have also published books with DeGruyter, and we have the greatest respect for their editorial team – if they did not have a strong linguistics list it would not have made sense for us to partner with them. But our individual lists are different as we have strengths in slightly different areas. We see that many authors will choose the appropriate publisher depending on the focus of their project, just as they always have done.
We look forward to a continued strong working relationship with DeGruyter in years to come, as much as we look forward to many more years of proud independence!
Tommi recently attended a publishing conference where he reflected on the changes in the business over the past few years as a result of the pandemic. In this post, he summarises our experiences and what the future holds.
It is now two years since I wrote the post What The Pandemic Has Meant For Us, which was an early look at the events of 2020, and so this seems the ideal time for an update!
Changes in 2021
With 2020 behind us, 2021 started with a new strict lockdown in the UK. It soon became clear that our usual spring conferences would not happen in person and that they would instead be online. Our experience of online conferences was definitely a mixed bag. It was great to be able to attend a conference and not have to worry that you’d picked the wrong concurrent session and with no travel required, the conferences were more accessible to attendees from all over the world. On the other hand, online exhibiting was clearly a suboptimal experience for delegate and exhibitor alike. I spent an entire weekend exhibiting at the AAAL conference, only to meet my fellow exhibitors and the occasional friend who popped by just to say hello. I was aware of the occasional delegate coming into my exhibit space and then leaving without saying a word – I can only imagine that they were put off by finding a middle-aged man reading a book and stroking his cat staring back at them! We nevertheless felt that supporting our community was important and so we continued to sponsor the major events as we normally would.
Online events
A Multilingual Matters live online event with authors
Our marketing department quickly reacted to this experience by setting up our own online forums – whether this was to promote new books and book series, or to conduct editorial outreach to early career researchers – we felt that it was important to find a way of fulfilling the functions that an in-person conference exhibit would provide. These were met with a good deal of success and this may be something that we wish to repeat in the future, once the current levels of fatigue around online events have subsided.
As the year went on, we saw that we were not alone in our fatigue – many of our authors were busy adapting courses for hybrid learning, thinking about a return to campus, or just burnt out and exhausted. Finding appropriate reviewers for manuscripts was harder and our supply of manuscripts ready for publication slowed up. But our income was steady and costs were still low.
Christmas 2021
Some of the team managed to get together for Christmas 2021
By the end of 2021 we had all been vaccinated and were even able to socialise together more often. We planned to have a return of the company Christmas meal and we were all very much looking forward to celebrating together. We had not counted on Omicron. Just as we entered the Christmas season, a new variant of COVID started to spread and it was not clear whether vaccines would be affected. With very different levels of nervousness around the new variant, we decided to hold our Christmas meal, but with several people not comfortable with the risk of being together indoors we pared down the celebrations and agreed that we would have a second Christmas later in 2022.
Back to the office
2022 has for us been a year of returns – in so many ways! We’ve slowly started returning to the office – although most of us still work from home for part of the week, many of us go into the office at least once a week. We are actively looking at ways in which we can approach this new hybrid working pattern without losing the sense of camaraderie that we had when we were all working at home. This is particularly important as we have some members of staff who work remotely and will not be able to commute to the office on a weekly basis.
Conferences and bookfairs
Sarah at the ATLAS conference in Cork
We have started to return to in-person bookfairs and conferences and have attended both the London and Frankfurt bookfairs, as well as Sociolinguistics Symposium in Ghent, EuroSLA in Switzerland and ATLAS in Cork this year. We’ve had to learn new ways of working at conferences as Brexit has meant it’s much more expensive for us to send large exhibits to the EU, and with uncertain numbers of attendees and an increased focus on our carbon footprint, we’ve taken the decision that conferences would be for displaying key titles and making new contacts, while we offer an extended discount to delegates for online ordering of our books.
Returns
On a more difficult note, we’ve also seen very high numbers of returns of unsold books. During the worst years of the pandemic some larger internet bookstores ordered suspiciously high quantities of our books – and we are now seeing some of these returned to us for credit. It’s a peculiarity of the books business that a retailer can return stock to us several years after they have bought it, and expect a full credit against that sale. This has meant that it isn’t easy for us to completely understand what sales of our titles have been like. We suspect that this has probably been worse this year as staff shortages throughout the book trade have meant that warehouses have focused on selling new stock and are only now getting to processing the returns backlog that has built up.
What next?
So where do we see the future? What opportunities and challenges lie over the horizon? And how do we learn from the unique experience that these years have presented?
A large proportion of our institutional sales have switched to ebooks over the past few years. This has been positive for our financial situation, but we’ve always held the view that we want our customers to buy the version of our books that works for them. If we settle to a level somewhere around 50/50 print/ebooks, then we’ll be happy.
Potential difficulties
Increased inflation and higher prices will definitely cause some headaches. It is likely that printed books will have to increase in price and we are very aware that library budgets may come under pressure in the coming years. It will be important that we get pricing right so we do not cause difficulties for our library partners.
We hope that in-person conferences will continue – it’s been so wonderful to see each other and be together, but it’s important that we remember that online conferences did have their own positives. With an increased focus both on global inclusion and on travelling less we would like to encourage our friends in large associations not to abandon online conferences altogether. Some associations have suggested an alternate year model – we would certainly strongly support such initiatives.
Open Access
We’ve noticed that there is an increased interest in publishing Open Access titles with us and this is definitely something that we will encourage. We will be looking at how we support OA publishing in the future and how we might better support authors who wish to publish OA but for one reason or another do not have ready access to funding for Book Processing Charges.
A positive future
Overall, I think the most important lesson from all of this is that none of us can work alone in a vacuum. The partnerships and mutual support that have sustained us through the pandemic are perhaps things that we took for granted or did not recognise in 2019. Working together we have managed to overcome the problems that have confronted us and it’s by continuing to work together that we’ll be able to build a positive future for all of us.
Nowadays, when publishing is easier than ever, why do you need a publisher? Why not just put your manuscript online, especially if it is Open Access (OA)? In this blog post, our Managing Director Tommi Grover shares the views of an independent international publisher. He brings out how diverse the professional expertise – from editorial, administrative and production to marketing and sales – required to publish a book are. He also looks at the costs of publishing in both open access and traditional publishing.
Publishing has never been easier and more accessible to all. There is very little to stop you from taking your own manuscript, putting it through a simple desktop publishing program, and publishing it online. Many platforms will even walk you through the process of producing a printed version that you can make available for sale.
So why do publishing companies still exist and thrive? How is it fair that we charge universities to buy books that come from publicly funded research?
What you are paying for is a range of professional expertise
Editorial expertise
L-R: Sarah, Tommi, Elinor, Laura, Anna, Flo and Rose
Initially, you are getting the expertise of our editorial staff. Whether it’s Anna, Laura, Sarah or Rosie that you are dealing with, they will spend several years working with first your ideas, then your book proposal, and eventually your draft and final manuscripts. They will commission reviews from your academic colleagues – we are the first to acknowledge that these review payments are little more than a token of appreciation rather than a full remuneration for the time spent. They will discuss and approve the final manuscript with academic series editors – we pay for their expertise too. Anna, Laura, Sarah and Rosie will not allow your manuscript to go into production until they are satisfied that it is as good as it can be. We do not get paid more when a manuscript is delayed, but a scrupulous academic publisher would never rush a book through in order to get paid. Future readers of your book know that your book has been carefully reviewed and edited, and that our imprint can be trusted for quality publications in your field of knowledge.
Administrative expertise
Throughout this process and further, Rose will be keeping everything on track. She makes sure that your project is where it should be, with the appropriate documentation, permissions, manuscript and graphics files, author questionnaires and contracts. She makes sure that an ISBN is registered for each version of the book – without which sales will be difficult.
Production expertise
Sarah then takes over to see the book through its production processes. She will engage the services of freelance copyeditors and typesetters like Ralph or Mythili, and will personally look over every page of your manuscript looking for errors and corrections that need to be made. Sarah will liaise with the appropriate printer for the type of book, whether that is a digital printer or an offset printer, Sarah will know what is appropriate for each project.
Sarah will work with Flo in our marketing department who will choose an appropriate cover image and cover design created by our freelance partners Latte, Dave or Julie. You might ask why a cover design is still important in an ebook or open access world? If you want your work to be noticed and read, you cannot rely on citations alone – a cover that will get your book noticed, whether it is on a webpage, blog post, conference stand or bookshop shelf, is one of the first steps to being seen. If the cover looks shoddy, what does that say about the likely content?
Marketing expertise
Well before the beautiful book has been realised, Elinor will already be working on the marketing plan to ensure that the title information is fed out to all of our distribution and sales partners, and that metadata is kept accurate and complete. Elinor and Flo will produce PDF catalogues and keep our website running so that the books can be found in all the venues you might expect to find them. Elinor and Flo will negotiate with organisations who might ask for sponsorship funds to help them deliver a world class conference, and to arrange opportunities for your work to be seen by delegates. During COVID when there were no conference opportunities, they immediately started working on organising our own seminars, webinars, and online discussion forums so that authors would not lose out on opportunities to promote their work. They will work on social media campaigns for your book, and they will aim to promote your research in general, regardless of whether this might directly lead to a sale.
Sales expertise
Laura will oversee the distribution of your book, and ensure that there are always copies in the warehouse ready for sale, and that our sales reps and booksellers, whether they are in London, Tokyo, Cape Town, Islamabad, New York or Sydney are aware of our books and know how to get hold of them. Over the years we have developed a wide network of contacts who all work together to get your book to end users around the world. We’ll work with our library ebook partners DeGruyter, ProQuest and EBSCO among others, and with Zenodo and DeGruyter to deliver our open access publications.
Rights and permissions
Laura will also work with many international publishers who might express an interest in publishing your work in a language other than English. She’ll ensure that the translation rights are paid for and that you receive a copy of the book in every language that it’s published in. With open access materials it is important to know the implications of what license you are publishing the work under. We can help you with questions about what you allow other people to do with your work. It is your work, and you should always have a say in what can be done with it.
Backroom infrastructure
And behind all of these actions there is an infrastructure that needs paying for: an office building that needs heat, light and communications; authors’ and series editors’ royalties to be paid; and systems to be maintained so that we know what stage any project is at.
What are the real costs?
Plant costs
The typesetting, printing, cover design and direct costs relating to a book are easy to quantify. Typesetting is dependent on page extent and complexity, but most of our books can be professionally typeset for somewhere between about £800 and £3000. Cover designs often cost between £125 and £250 for a reasonably simple design, but can be more if the design needs to be unique. If you search online picture libraries you’ll be able to see that the cost of images varies dramatically by image, especially if you want the exclusive rights to it to ensure that two competing books don’t get the same book cover!
Print costs
Print costs used to be complicated but with digital printing even very short runs of books are now viable so whilst the printed product is the most tangible evidence of a process that costs money, those costs are nowadays negligible when compared with the staff time involved.
Distribution costs
Distribution costs are paid by way of percentage discounts and fees – whether print or library format ebooks, we pay a percentage of our income to the intermediaries.
Open access vs traditional costs
Open access publications do not need to pay the same distribution or print costs, but do require the same investment in typesetting and design, and a responsible open access publisher will spend at least as much on the editorial process – we do not distinguish between OA and traditional model in our editorial process.
Authors and editors payments
With the traditional model of publishing we pay our authors a royalty. This usually starts at 4% for the early copies of an academic monograph, doubling to 8% when the book will have broken even. If we know that an author has a track record of very strong sales, we’ll pay a higher royalty, and for textbooks we usually pay 12%. Authors are paid 50% of any income for subsidiary rights such as translations. We pay our series editors 4–5% of all sales income for their expertise. For an open access book we would pay the series editor a fee.
Editorial costs
All of our staff are based in the UK, and we pay them a fair salary. We’ve always believed that treating our staff well means that we recruit and retain great employees, so if you’ve published with us in the past 15-20 years, it’s likely that you’ll have dealt with the same people for all of that time. Allocating these costs to an individual title fairly is difficult. You could allocate by time, complexity, average cost, share of income for example. There isn’t a single “right” method!
Profit!
So what happens to the profit? When we make a profit on an individual title, most of this money is put back into publishing future books. The company is owned by my family, and my colleagues, and we all believe in the books we are publishing. We are not running a charity, so when we are able to, we distribute small amounts of this profit to our shareholders. But neither do we have the backing of a large university so each profitable book secures future publications that little bit more. To give you a sense of scale, I can say that we pay approximately £90,000 each year in royalties to authors, whereas in the past decade we have only paid £5000 to shareholders in dividends. This is as it should be – we earn a fair salary for the work we do, and profits are only paid out when really do have surplus.
In summary
We treat each book project individually. Whether you publish with us the traditional way where we pay for everything up front, and recoup the costs from book sales, or whether it’s an open access publication where we require payment for our services on publication of the title, we will make sure that we price your book fairly, based on the size and complexity of the work. When we receive OA funding for a chapter in a book, we’ll reduce the selling price of both the library ebook version and the printed book to reflect that some of the material is available open access. For example our title Pedagogical Translanguaging edited by Päivi Juvonen and Marie Källkvist had four out of 12 chapters published open access – and so we reduced the selling price of all the editions substantially. We have to continue to be viable, so we are evolving these policies as we get more experienced – but we are committed to always being fair.
Whether open access or traditional model publishing is better for the end reader is really a matter for someone else to decide. There are obvious advantages of online accessibility for anyone with a suitable internet connection. Open access has many advantages for a small independent publisher in that it removes our financial risk. But it still costs money to do everything to a high standard, in a friendly and professional manner. And in fields with very little funding for research projects, let alone to pay for a publication, the traditional model allows authors with no funding at all to publish their work.
So what do you get when you work with a publisher? Quite a lot, in my humble opinion!
We recently held an online event with series editors and authors from our Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching series about publishing their books, with an opportunity for audience questions at the end. Here’s a taster of one of the questions that was discussed, answered by Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Peter D. MacIntyre.
How do you decide whether to submit an article to an academic journal or mould it into a chapter?
Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Peter D. MacIntyre
One consideration is preferences in your discipline or university for one format or the other, for purposes of landing a position, then getting promotion and tenure. In the humanities, for example, monographs (books) may be considered more valued than articles, and the reverse may be true in the social sciences. That is not always the case, but each researcher might ask senior colleagues about the relative value placed on different formats.
A second consideration is content-related. The peer review process for articles can be quite strict as a journal has a limited number of pages per issue and a continuous stream of submitted papers. In some cases journals have very high rejection rates (80-90%) so the review process may decline good papers because they don’t fit exactly within the scope of the journal or its preferences (e.g. journals often have preferred methodologies). A chapter, which is often invited by an editor as part of a collection of papers, is more likely to offer the writer a little more freedom to explore ideas. Manuscripts that are theoretical in nature may not be as welcome at a journal that focuses on research papers as they would be in an edited collection. Another consideration is of course the reach of a paper and who you think the most suitable audience is.
You can watch the recording of the event and find out the answers to the rest of the audience questions here:
In this post Tommi reflects on the unprecedented events of 2020 and how they have affected us as a business and as a team.
Well, what a strange year this has been! As England starts its new month-long series of restrictions, it’s a good time to look back on how this year has been for Multilingual Matters and Channel View Publications.
At the beginning of 2020, Multilingual Matters and Channel View Publications were looking at a good year of publications and a very healthy production pipeline of new materials. Following on from a year where sales had been quite depressed, we were seeing really good financial figures and the business was looking very healthy. We had two members of staff away on parental leave, but we were looking forward to welcoming them back in the summer and to really forging bravely into the future. Brexit loomed as a potential difficulty, and we were thinking about what steps we could take to make the business more environmentally friendly.
During a February vacation taking some friends to visit my home in Finland we had started to see an increased number of reports of coronavirus spreading, and the seemingly drastic measures taken in Wuhan to contain the virus as much as possible. It seemed like a sad situation, but such a long way away from us. I returned to my desk in early March and discussed with Anna Roderick whether we should start to consider our work-related travel to conferences, not really so much from a health perspective, but more because we felt it might just not be worth flying to the conferences if few people would attend. Then slowly the conference cancellations started coming in, and before long there was talk of what would happen if the UK government announced a lockdown. Every day brought different announcements, and it was getting very difficult to believe that anyone had any sensible plan at all. I found it almost impossible to concentrate on actual work, and we all speculated on when we might be told to work from home.
One evening while giving blood at my local blood donor centre, I sat and watched the news on the TV. Since our national government clearly wasn’t going to make a decision anytime soon, I typed a message out with one hand to my colleagues saying that “from tomorrow, we’ll work from home”. We all took our laptops home, and that was it. I expected it to be six weeks, or maybe two months. I did not expect that in November, eight months later, I would still be working from home and that I would have only seen my colleagues face-to-face a handful of times during that period. Had I known it would last this long, I would probably have suggested that we work in the office one last day, all have lunch together, and then go home, but at the time it seemed more sensible to break as many chains of contact as quickly as possible.
Fortunately, over the years our systems have been designed to allow homeworking and remote working while travelling, so the switch to working from home was technically not too difficult, and our team was pretty quickly coming up with strategies to make home working seem less lonely, including a shared 2.30pm break to listen to the same song, with each member of staff choosing the song on rotating days. We definitely have an eclectic taste in music across the whole team! Some of us had been working from home for a long time already, and so Sarah Williams and Anna Roderick were able to give us “newcomers” some tips and advice on how to organise ourselves, and enjoyed a more social atmosphere than before, now that us office workers began to understand the importance of regular contact!
The CVP/MM team working from home
About 10 days after we had decided to work from home, the government made a national announcement that we should all work from home and not leave our houses unless shopping for food, or for essential exercise once per day. All non-essential shops were to close, as were all workplaces that could not operate in a COVID-safe manner. Amazon stopped ordering books to focus on other product lines, and our two biggest wholesale customers closed their doors for an indefinite period. It was clear that this was not going to be a short, sharp shock and then back to business as usual. Together with the senior management team at Multilingual Matters and Channel View Publications, we took the decision that the two most important things that we could do were to focus on staff wellbeing, and to conserve as much cash as possible. We immediately stopped all longer print runs and switched to digital printing, and decided that we would delay sending the usual complimentary copies of the books. We also wrote to all of our authors asking for patience with our annual royalties payments. We asked that authors who were either self-employed, in precarious employment or otherwise in a financial situation where the money would make a difference to their daily lives identify themselves to us so that we could prioritise payments to them, and that otherwise we would delay payments to a time when cashflow would allow. Our authors and editors responded with such warm and supportive messages. Many people wrote to offer words of encouragement and support, to insist that others were prioritised, and a good number even offered to donate their royalties to us this year. To all of you, I would like to extend a very heartfelt thank you from the whole Multilingual Matters and Channel View Publications team. The financial breathing room that this gave us was vital. But even more vital was the psychological boost that we got from feeling that we were genuinely valued as part of the community.
As the weeks went by, the news was mixed. One of our biggest wholesale customers declared bankruptcy, leaving us with a considerable bad debt. Fortunately, around that time the other wholesale customer started to re-open their warehouse, and orders began to come in, albeit at a much reduced volume. At the same time we started to see the sales of ebooks to libraries increase, which gave us some confidence that we weren’t going to be facing a complete halt in income. We were able to start sending out complimentary copies again, and we started to pay royalties. By the end of July we had caught up and paid all outstanding royalties where we knew we had payment preferences recorded. We also saw an increase in the number of manuscript submissions and so we felt that the decision to keep working rather than to go on furlough was definitely the right one. We have been innovative, arranging webinars and events on Zoom to promote the books from authors who have not been able to show off their work at conferences. Expect to see more of this over the coming months as we plan to introduce more of our publications in this manner.
Our “summer” pub lunch together
We arranged a few social events, including the ubiquitous Zoom “pub quiz” that has been a lockdown experience for most Brits, afternoon drinks, and even a shared Devon cream tea, which Sarah Williams organised for us one week. In the summer we managed to meet face-to-face on one occasion, with seven of us sitting around a large pub table at a time when social restrictions had been lifted temporarily. I still hold onto that lunch as one of my favourite lunches of the year! Although I certainly miss seeing my colleagues every day in the office, I think we have managed as well as is possible to keep a sense of togetherness going, which will prove vital as we now head towards a more difficult winter lockdown.
What will the coming months bring? I think February 2020 shows that we cannot take anything for granted, but equally so does March, April and May. It has been a much tougher year so far than I could ever have imagined when it started, but it has not been as bleak as we thought it would be at some times during April and May. We still expect that Brexit will cause some headaches for us as trade regulations and rules around exporting change. We do not yet know how bad the winter spread of coronavirus will be, or when we might be able to have more normal interactions with each other. Conference travel and bookfair travel seem a very long way away still. We can only imagine that with the levels of financial intervention that many countries have had to take over the past year, budgets of all publicly funded institutions will be strained, and this will no doubt have an impact on us in the future. But we are financially much more stable today than we were in February, and I believe that we are also more resilient as a team.
I could not be prouder of how my colleagues have responded to the difficulties and challenges this year has produced, and how we have still managed to find positives and celebrate successes. I strongly believe that this year has shown that we can overcome some really difficult situations when we, both in-house and as a wider community, work together to make sure that we look after each other’s interests.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is one of our most important events each year to promote our publications, meet with our bookselling and distribution contacts, learn about the future trends in publishing, and generally take the pulse of the industry for the next year. It is always an exhausting week, with back-to-back meetings set every 30 minutes for three days, and socialising and networking opportunities in the evenings.
With such a punishing schedule at the fair, we have always felt that we should make the travel as pleasant and as relaxing as possible, and so in recent years we have taken a scenic drive with an overnight ferry trip and lunch stops in the beautiful Rhine valley to enjoy. Following a car accident that left my car unusable just weeks before the fair this year, we were left with a decision to make. Should we fly to the fair? In the 22 years that I’ve been visiting the fair, I have only flown twice, and the memory of Frankfurt airport full of tens of thousands of book trade contacts trying to leave the city after the fair is firmly etched on my memory, so we decided to return to travelling by train. In the five years since I last travelled by train, connections and frequency of trains along the route have improved, and as such we were easily able to leave Bristol in the early morning, and with just one cross-London underground trip and a change of trains in Brussels, we arrived in Frankfurt by the mid-afternoon to set up our stand. During this time we were able to sit back and relax, eat at our seats in the train, and spread our work out and prepare for our meetings in a very civilised manner. We were even lucky enough to have our own compartment on the Brussels-Frankfurt leg of the journey, which felt very like a step back to the age of Agatha Christie. Thankfully though there were no mysteries to be solved!
Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof
After three days of successful meetings at the fair, we again boarded the train at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, and were able to write up all of our post-book fair reports during the first leg of the journey, before a quick lunch at Brussels Midi. The train connections worked seamlessly, and we were back in Bristol in time for dinner on the Saturday evening.
We may have saved a few hours had we travelled by air, but by taking the train we saved ourselves the trouble of first travelling to the airport, then the hassle of check-in, security, and then waiting in departures, before a cramped flight and another wait for bags. Coupled with the environmental benefit of travelling by train, it really wasn’t a difficult choice and it’s one that we will most likely choose to make again in the future!
Tommi
Ever wondered what the Frankfurt Book Fair is like? In 2017 Laura and Tommi filmed every aisle of every hall! You can watch the video here.
Last month we welcomed Alice back to the MM/CVP team after more than a year away! In this blog post we find out how she’s spent the last 12 months…
What have you been up to for the past year?
Alice and her friend with Fuego, an active volcano in Guatemala, in the background. It erupted a week later!
So, I left the office last February and flew to Colombia in March. I then spent the next few months travelling through Central America up to Mexico, enjoying the people, wildlife and different cultures along the way. From there I took a long flight to Vietnam, where I stayed for a month before visiting Cambodia, the Philippines and Malaysia, and then unwillingly flying back to the UK in August.
Wow! Which was your favourite place you visited and why?
The wax palms in Colombia’s Cocora Valley
Colombia! I think the people made it special, who were all really welcoming and keen for conversation. But also the amazing jungles and wildlife, beaches and cities, they seem to have it all. We also managed to do a lot of trekking, which I really enjoyed.
What have you been doing since you got back?
Since then I’ve started studying for a part-time Masters in Animal Welfare Science, Ethics and Law, which I really love! I’ve just completed my first year, so I have a couple of months to settle back into life at Channel View and enjoy the sun, before I start again in September.
Alice back at her desk
How have you found it coming back to Channel View? Has anything changed?
It’s been strange trying to dig things up from my memory that I’d let slip, but it’s generally really great to be back! The office is largely the same but there have been a few tweaks here and there, and small improvements to how we do things. Otherwise, I’ve been working with Rose and Ellie for the first time, which is really lovely!
It’s great to have you back! One last question – what are you reading at the moment?
I’ve just finished reading Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – loved it. Now I’m looking for something new to start!
On the 29th September 2016, exactly 18 months before the UK was due to leave the European Union, I wrote in a blog post entitled Brexit and its Implications for Channel View Publications & Multilingual Matters: Since the UK referendum result to leave the European Union, I have often been asked what effect this will have on our business. These questions have come from authors, colleagues, interested friends and my mother. The honest answer to all has been “I really do not know”.
We are now only five and a half weeks away from the “Brexit date” of 29th March, and I am afraid to say that my answer has not changed very much. I have had more sleepless nights than normal and lost countless hours of productive work time in the past three months as I’ve tried to gain some understanding of what sort of impact the various different versions of Brexit will have. Many different options are still being talked about and have gained traction, lost popularity, been proposed, negotiated and discarded, but what will actually happen, we still do not know.
Immediately after the Brexit vote in June 2016, I was relatively confident that Brexit would not happen as there was just a very slim chance of the various different factions agreeing what kind of Brexit they wanted. Unfortunately I had not predicted that our government would launch down the road of negotiating a Brexit deal with the European Union before knowing what kind of a deal the UK parliament would accept. The past few months of political intrigue and inaction at Westminster have been entertaining, dispiriting and terrifying in equal measures.
Given that we are now facing a potentially very disruptive no-deal Brexit, we at Channel View Publications have had to take steps to plan for the future. We are actively talking to our European trade customers suggesting that we will support them with a small extra discount and longer payment terms should they feel able to stock up on our titles before the 29th March. We are looking to work with printers outside the UK in order to print directly in our major markets like the USA and Japan. We are talking to our printers and distributors to make sure that we understand the likelihood and scale of any serious delays at the EU/UK customs border, and whether this will have a knock-on effect at our airports. We are making sure that our UK distributor has all of the agreements and IT systems in place to provide efficient information to Customs should they need to. We are tightening our belts and building up an emergency fund so that in the event of a drop in sales, or an increase in production costs, or most likely both, we are able to work through this. Whatever happens, we will do our utmost to ensure that our authors and customers continue to receive the same level of support from us as always.
Our hoped-for outcome at the moment is that the government will come to their senses, realise the very real damage that is being done to our economy, and withdraw Article 50 until such a time as those planning for Brexit can achieve a majority for what sort of a future we want with the EU. If that is agreed, and if Brexit is still what the country wants in the full knowledge of how difficult it might be, then resubmit the letter and negotiate properly with the full backing of parliament. This, I suspect, is rather like hoping for Christmas in March…
As January draws to a close we’re looking forward to the upcoming spring conference season, which is always the busiest time of year for both Channel View and Multilingual Matters.
It all kicks off for Channel View in February with Sarah’s annual trip to the other side of the world for CAUTHE, being held this year in Cairns, Australia. Then March brings the usual flurry of US conferences for the Multilingual Matters contingent – between them Laura, Tommi and Anna will be attending NABE in Florida and AAAL and TESOL in Atlanta, all in the space of a week! As April comes around we’ll be staying a bit closer to home, with Laura heading off again, this time to IATEFL in Liverpool, while Sarah makes her way down south to Bournemouth University for the TTRA Europe conference.
If you’re planning to be at any of these conferences, do make sure you pop by the stand to say hello to us. We love catching up with our authors, having the opportunity to put faces to names and are always very happy to discuss potential projects with you. We’ll also have plenty of interesting titles for you to browse, including a whole host of brand new ones, and they’ll all be on sale at a special conference discount, so you’re bound to find a bargain!
You can keep up with our whereabouts this conference season by following us on social media.
I’ve sent in my book proposal. When will I hear back from you?
Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters 