E-Book Revolution Upends a Publishing Course
FOR decades, even after it was renamed and relocated from its original
home at Radcliffe, the Columbia Publishing Course seemed
unchanging, a genteel summer tradition in the book business, a white-glove
six-week course in which ambitious college graduates were educated in the
time-honored basics of book editing, sales, cover design and publicity. Not
this summer.
With the e-book revolution upending the publishing business, Madeline
McIntosh, the president of sales, operations and digital for Random House,
stood at the lectern on the opening day in June, projecting a slide depicting
the industry as a roller coaster, its occupants frozen in motion at the top of
a steep loop.
“You might be wondering if this is the moment where we’re at,” Ms.
McIntosh, a tall figure in a slim navy dress, said with a smile, as dozens of
students with plastic name tags hanging around their necks watched raptly.
So the summer session began with a focus on “The Digital Future.”
Students were schooled in “Reinventing the Reading Experience: From Print to
Digital” by Nicholas Callaway, the chairman of a company that produces book
apps for children. Managers from Penguin Group USA explained how to master
“e-marketing,” and a panel of digital experts talked about short-form
electronic publishing — not quite a magazine article, not quite a book — which
is so new, the genre doesn’t really have a name.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” Carolyn Pittis, the senior vice
president of global author
services at HarperCollins, told a
packed room of students several days into the course. “So it’s very exciting
for those of us who spent many years when a lot of things didn’t happen.”
As the students scribbled in notebooks and clicked on laptops, Ms.
Pittis recounted some of the biggest developments in the industry so far in
2011. The proliferation of e-readers and the growing digital market share of
Barnes & Noble. Amanda
Hocking, a formerly self-published
author, making a book deal with a traditional publisher. J. K. Rowling’s
selling her own “Harry Potter” e-books online. Even
the surprise success of “Go the — to
Sleep,” a hilariously vulgar
children’s book parody that rose to the top of best-seller lists after being
widely pirated via e-mail for months.
In the past year, e-books have skyrocketed in popularity, especially in
genre fiction like romance and thrillers. For some new releases, the first week
has brought more sales of electronic copies than of print copies.
All of which were ripe topics for discussion for students in the course
this year, even as they deciphered messages that could be simultaneously weary
and optimistic.
“A lot of what we hear is, ‘Is the Internet going to eat book
publishing?’ ” said Selby McRae, a petite 22-year-old from Jackson, Miss.,
who entered the course after graduating from Hamilton College and completing an
internship at the University Press of Mississippi. “And then they say, ‘But
everything’s better than ever!’ ”
After appearing on a panel with other literary agents, Douglas Stewart
of Sterling Lord Literistic said he had simply tried to explain the unfamiliar
aspects of his job. “It is a really scary time to go into the business, and I’m
sure they’re hearing that,” he said. “We’re all thinking that as we look out at
the sea of eager faces — I wonder if they should be doing this right now?”
The course, which begins every year in June, bills itself as the
“shortest graduate school in the country,” where students can learn in six
weeks what it would take them a year to learn in the real world. (The second
half of the course is devoted to magazine publishing.)
Legions of high-placed publishing executives have been through the
course, like Morgan Entrekin (Radcliffe Publishing Course ’77), the publisher
and president of Grove/Atlantic; Arthur Levine (R.P.C. ’84), who has his own
children’s imprint at Scholastic; and Molly Stern (R.P.C. ’94), the senior vice
president and publisher of Crown Publishers and Broadway Books.
This year’s 101 students were chosen from more than 475 applicants, the
highest number in years, showing that they were not deterred by the $6,990 fee
for tuition and room and board on the Columbia campus — or by the limitations
of entry-level positions that pay around $30,000 a year .
The chosen candidates tend to emerge from college with impressive
résumés: some have journalism degrees, successful climbs of Mount Kilimanjaro
or stints working in independent bookstores or for literary magazines.
“It was pretty magical for me,” said Scott Moyers, the publisher of the
Penguin Press, who attended in the summer of 1991. “I went to a small public
liberal arts school in Virginia; I didn’t know anybody in New York. I didn’t
know anybody in publishing. I’d actually never been north of the Mason-Dixon
line. For me, it was quite heady. It was a very cosmopolitan mix of kids.”
The course was established in 1947 at Radcliffe College and was held for
more than 50 years in Cambridge, Mass. In 2001, after Radcliffe and Harvard
University merged, there wasn’t much room for a publishing course at the newly
renamed Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, so with the blessing of Drew G.
Faust, the dean of the institute, the course was moved to Columbia, where it
was housed in the School of Journalism building.
Since it moved to Manhattan, students have been able to plug directly
into the industry and mingle with editors at book parties in the evening, a far
cry from the cozy isolation of Cambridge. It is not unheard of for a student to
get a job in publishing and drop out of the course before it is over.
Lindy Hess, the director of the course for 24 years, said she designed
it to evolve with the business. “The industry has changed,” Ms. Hess said. “My
philosophy is for the course to reflect the industry as it is, so students
graduate and they know exactly what’s happening. Students have to learn all the
old stuff and get a grasp on the digital world.”
After two weeks of lectures and panels explaining the basics of book
publishing, students are divided into groups to form their own fictional publishing
houses, designing covers, developing marketing plans and selling the finished
products only days later to industry professionals like Sessalee Hensley, the
fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble.
First they must appraise their own work. During one staff meeting, the
group that called itself Wensel & Roe fine-tuned its catalog offerings,
which included a cookbook with recipes inspired by romance novels, a nonfiction
book examining how parenthood changes the brain and a biography of the fashion
designer Alexander McQueen.
Last Wednesday, the real-life publishing executives took their turn.
Sarah Crichton, the publisher of her own imprint at
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, sat at the head of a conference table with a copy
of the group’s professionally bound booklet of catalog copy, publicity
materials and sales projections as the students nervously awaited her comments.
“This is extremely impressive,” Ms. Crichton said, peering around the
table. “You’re grappling with a lot of the same things we’re grappling with,
which is the impact of e-books. You’re taking it into account and thinking
about it, and that’s very impressive and difficult. It’s something that we
wrestle with on an hourly basis.”
This
article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 24, 2011
An
article last Sunday about the e-book revolution’s effect on a publishing course
taught at Columbia University misstated the position that Drew G. Faust held in
2001, when the course was moved from the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study
to Columbia University. She was dean of the institute when she gave her
blessing to the move; she was not president of Harvard, her current post.
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