Book publisher Gail Rebuck: Businesswoman of the Year
By Rowena Mason in The Telegraph, 28 Apr 2009
Gail Rebuck,(pic left), the Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year.
"I wonder if they'd have made men stand around holding yellow umbrellas to have their picture taken," she muses good-naturedly. The new winner of the Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year is at once disarmingly charming and clearly not a woman to be bossed about. Having ignored a direction to avoid wearing black, she is suited in a charcoal dress, brightened up by a floral jacket.
Ms Rebuck was last nominated for the prestigious award just after she took over at the helm of the UK's largest book publisher during the peak of the downturn in 1991. So how have things changed since then? "This time books are absolutely at the sharp end of the recession," she says. "In the old days, we were last in and last out."
Books are not dependent on advertising and have always been a cheap form of stay-at-home entertainment, she explains. The failure of Woolworths, which owned the UK's main book distributor, was the first thing to threaten the resilience of the industry.
Ms Rebuck was last nominated for the prestigious award just after she took over at the helm of the UK's largest book publisher during the peak of the downturn in 1991. So how have things changed since then? "This time books are absolutely at the sharp end of the recession," she says. "In the old days, we were last in and last out."
Books are not dependent on advertising and have always been a cheap form of stay-at-home entertainment, she explains. The failure of Woolworths, which owned the UK's main book distributor, was the first thing to threaten the resilience of the industry.
"All our books were stuck in warehouses just before Christmas and those on the shelves we hadn't actually been paid for," she says. "That was a wake-up call. Even now credit insurance is being withdrawn. It's a shock to the industry but there are ways of dealing with it."
She will not put an exact cost of the disaster, admitting only that it was "extremely expensive" for the company, especially as sales are down 2-3pc this quarter. But Ms Rebuck hopes that a strong list of autumn releases, including Dan Brown's new title, will pull the company owned by German media giant Bertelsmann back into growth in the second half.
The publisher of Alistair Campbell and Tony Blair's memoirs is impeccably connected – married to Labour pollster Lord Gould, a guest at Elisabeth Murdoch's 40th birthday and the mother of 22-year-old Georgia Gould, who become embattled in a bitter battle for the safe Labour seat of Erith and Thamesmead in south east London.
Ms Rebuck does not want to talk about this controversy, but does speak out about the importance of the Veuve Clicquot Award in encouraging women to achieve more highly at a time when just 19pc of politicians and 11pc of company directors are female.
After 17 years leading Random House, with no sign of retirement over the horizon, Ms Rebuck is one of the longest-standing executives in the media sector. But the past few years have brought mixed fortunes. Last year, its authors won all three UK major awards from the Booker to the Orange. But the global publishing giant saw profits drop 21pc to €137m (£122m) last year and announced plans to let go 5pc of its staff.
Ms Rebuck believes that the publishing industry is about to be transformed by "a new curve – the emergence of our digital future".
"Look at my Sony Reader," she enthuses, leaping up to extract the device, bookmarked on a new novel that has "transfixed" her on a flight back from Barcelona. Digital books have now become so integral her world that she reads all manuscripts on her reader.
Read the full report at The Telegraph online.
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