Ringing in the Changes

The bells may echo on Wall Street, but there's another tune to dance to

I’m going to introduce this piece with some old-fashioned misery. I guess all of you know that the publishing business I work for has had some tricky times – I mean all businesses have had tough times, and I’m not even starting on the emergence of deglobalisation. By the end of the Covid restrictions, my little publishing company had shrunk in size by 65.5%.

I’d be lying if I said I thought it could recover from that; it felt very much like the end of something. When things come to an end, it’s amazing how complex operational decisions become: how to stop, whether to stop, when to stop, how to afford the actual stopping. It’s full of financial ramifications – I shan’t attempt to list them all here, but it’s a mix of money and people and, in no small measure, very real hopes and dreams.

My entire business life has been spent building things: teams, services, products, companies. I absolutely hate dismantling stuff – yet stay long enough in business and you learn that one skill you absolutely must acquire is the skill around ending things. Ending the things that cannot recover.

There’s a whole separate article I could write on fashion, fluidity and fickleness in publishing, and how this affects the world of writers, providing the boundaries of what it is possible to sell – the actual occurrence of art within its readership – something that happens in time and with economic constraints. But this is another story for another time. Let’s just say that all things come to an end. But here comes the big However.

Despite these draining concerns, even worse was to come. Following the Covid collapse, the next three years showed zero growth. By the end of 2023, it felt like nothing we were publishing was finding a readership – we were treading water, covering the bills, but unable to pay ourselves. When faced with something that isn’tworking, it’s amazing how long it takes to understand that doing the same things repeatedly will not bring a change to your circumstances. After all, a business model is also about belief and faith as much as it is about balance sheets and commercial strategy. The figures tell the truth, but the heart is a stubborn muscle.

Change. Tenacity. Clearing a path. There’s a quote from Isaiah that I find especially useful in business –

¹⁸ “Remember not the former things,
nor consider the things of old.
¹⁹ Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.

I wish I had that printed on a card, pinned to my wall. Those forty words carry a lot of weight. To use a popular phrase, I leaned into my business, and took a good look around. Then I began commissioning and set about rebuilding things. Ther were some glimmers, but it became clear that what was needed was ‘a new thing’ I joined the IPG’s mentoring scheme and they provided two potential mentors for me, meetings came swiftly and while both offered quite brilliant visions of a new strategy, one mentor simply felt like a better fit for what we were going through. Looking back on this it was an emotional projection, as much as intellectual engagement with resources and capabilities. It was about vision, feeling and practical change.

I’ve come to the point of this text, for what has happened is two years of growth, the first year brought growth of 13.7% and this year has closed 11.1% up. If you’ve done the maths, you’ll know that we have a long way to go to recover from that 65.5% drop. Yet we can begin to see that changing what we publish (diversifying) and how we publish (developing) is beginning to pave the way. Somewhere in here is a reconnection with our readerships, and the discovery of new readers as others are tempted elsewhere. Is it sustainable? Well, we don’t know and the jury is out on 2025–2026 – but we have some astonishing books coming – novels that are bold, immersive, extravagant and hopeful. I think that feels like the right way to travel as we move through what is rapidly becoming a new wilderness, in the wake of extraordinary global economic change.