Something new for Manning
My thinking was driven by the incredible, precipitous drop in the computer book market...
At rates reaching 25 to 30 per cent a year (according to Bookscan), starting with the bursting of the Internet bubble, the market has kept shrinking to the point where it is now less than half its original size. I was hearing that one company's professional book publishing had gone from $40M per year to $17M. Large players like Pearson had merged and reduced their various lines. Others were in their nth staff layoffs. Wrox was gone, and of course, already long ago, so was Coriolis.
For a small publisher like us it's hard to "see" the shrinkage in our own sales numbers-each year we publish different books and different numbers of them so it's hard to compare one year to another. If you publish lots of books the fluctuations average out. A large publisher's sales in a stable market will be stable. But our sales have fluctuated a lot in all markets, so we really weren't sure what part of the poor results of 2000 and 2001 and 2002 were due to the ever shrinking market.
In spite of that you do start to ask yourself some basic questions. I am a deep believer in business success ultimately deriving from market growth not business acumen. That may be because of my own lacking acumen. I assume every businessman is basically like me-- muddling along, totally unable to control the events in the outside world. It is interesting to me that almost all great companies identified by Jim Collins in Good to Great have since his study underperformed. Seriously underperformed.]
So I started wondering whether I should hedge our computer book publishing with another line; I quickly focused on business books which were nice because I could read and enjoy them myself. So I called Kurt Mathews of Independent Publishers Group to see whether he had any opinions. Kurt told me there was only one market segment doing worse than computer books and that was business books. But, he said, if Manning is going to do a business book why not do one that answered the question, "What the hell happened to the computer business?"
Sometimes things happen as if planned. It seems to me now that it was not long after my conversation with Kurt that someone called me from Gartner pitching a book and I had to tell her no. I then asked her whether she knew anyone who could write a good answer to Kurt's question, and out of that appeared Erik Keller. Erik had conveniently left Gartner a few years before and was now free to speak candidly about Gartner, the entire industry, and himself. I have been pleased that he was willing to do so. The book is no whitewash.
At rates reaching 25 to 30 per cent a year (according to Bookscan), starting with the bursting of the Internet bubble, the market has kept shrinking to the point where it is now less than half its original size. I was hearing that one company's professional book publishing had gone from $40M per year to $17M. Large players like Pearson had merged and reduced their various lines. Others were in their nth staff layoffs. Wrox was gone, and of course, already long ago, so was Coriolis.
For a small publisher like us it's hard to "see" the shrinkage in our own sales numbers-each year we publish different books and different numbers of them so it's hard to compare one year to another. If you publish lots of books the fluctuations average out. A large publisher's sales in a stable market will be stable. But our sales have fluctuated a lot in all markets, so we really weren't sure what part of the poor results of 2000 and 2001 and 2002 were due to the ever shrinking market.
In spite of that you do start to ask yourself some basic questions. I am a deep believer in business success ultimately deriving from market growth not business acumen. That may be because of my own lacking acumen. I assume every businessman is basically like me-- muddling along, totally unable to control the events in the outside world. It is interesting to me that almost all great companies identified by Jim Collins in Good to Great have since his study underperformed. Seriously underperformed.]
So I started wondering whether I should hedge our computer book publishing with another line; I quickly focused on business books which were nice because I could read and enjoy them myself. So I called Kurt Mathews of Independent Publishers Group to see whether he had any opinions. Kurt told me there was only one market segment doing worse than computer books and that was business books. But, he said, if Manning is going to do a business book why not do one that answered the question, "What the hell happened to the computer business?"
Sometimes things happen as if planned. It seems to me now that it was not long after my conversation with Kurt that someone called me from Gartner pitching a book and I had to tell her no. I then asked her whether she knew anyone who could write a good answer to Kurt's question, and out of that appeared Erik Keller. Erik had conveniently left Gartner a few years before and was now free to speak candidly about Gartner, the entire industry, and himself. I have been pleased that he was willing to do so. The book is no whitewash.
Scott Walters wrote: