Friday, November 15, 2013

Auckland University Press launch of CHANGING TIMES and year end celebration

The Bookman attended this event last evening and was so taken by Publisher Sam Elworthy's
address in which he looked at the AUP year as well as the NZ publishing industry in general that I decided I should post his remarks in full. Here they are:
(Photo - Gil Hanly)

I would like to welcome you all here tonight for the Press’s end of year celebration and the launch of our second to last book of the year—Jenny Carlyon and Diana Morrow’s CHANGING TIMES: NEW ZEALAND SINCE 1945.

60 years ago a British journalist visited New Zealand to cover the royal tour and found a remarkably stable, prosperous, dull little paradise:
“And if the result is a little unexciting and complacent,” he wrote, “permeated by a sort of pleasant tedium, that is the unvarying characteristic of earthly paradise.”

Well, as Diana and Jenny make clear in their book, times changed in New Zealand. And I can report in 2013 that times have really changed in publishing. Gone the pleasant tedium, gone the stable prosperity, gone the dull little paradise: in 2013 we have witnessed extraordinary changes in our business. 
New Zealand bookstore sales are down 15%; Hachette, Pearson  and Learning Media—three of our biggest publishing companies—have closed their doors; we’ve won a Booker prize; we have experienced one of the the fastest growing ebook markets in the world, and much much more.

So before launching CHANGING TIMES into the world, I want to talk for a few minutes about how things went for Auckland University Press this year and how we are planning to wrestle with the changing times of the publishing business.

First, this year has—remarkably—been a great year for Auckland University Press. A really really great year. We are on track to achieve the highest sales in the Press’s history, with our sales through bookstores up 31% over last year. We have enjoyed a heap of success in book awards—more finalists than any other publisher in the New Zealand Post Book Awards, winning the People’s Choice Award with Jarrod Gilbert’s PATCHED and poetry with Anne Kennedy’s THE DARLING NORTH, taking out the best cover and best non-illustrated categories in the PANZ Book Design Awards with THE AUP ANTHOLOGY OF NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE, and we got to see our authors pick up huge awards too--Martin Edmond and Michele Leggott won two out of three Prime Minister’s Awards, Fiona Farrell won the Creative NZ Michael King Fellowship, the richest award in NZ literature, Albert Wendt joined the Order of New Zealand, our country’s highest honour. It was a great year I think.

So how did we buck industry trends and succeed in sales and awards in 2013? Partly it was dumb luck but partly it was because we actually had a plan. Back in 2007 when I came to Auckland University Press we sat down as a team and came up with a strategic plan. I will not read you that plan. It is full of militarist exhortations and slippery language. But deep in all that blah blah blah, the plan gave us four clear things to do. I’ll tell you what they were by showing you four books that we published this year.

1.       Go out and commission books. Back in 2008, I visited Christchurch and had a coffee with Jarrod Gilbert. Jarrod was working on his PhD on the history of gangs, I told him he should turn it into a book, but he was noncommittal and talked to other publishers. Five years and many coffees and pestering emails later, we got the manuscript and this year turned PATCHED into the Press’s biggest bestseller for many years. Commissioning—telling authors to write books and making sure they do it for you rather than another publisher—has been critical to our success.

2.      Second part of the plan. Diversify publishing into science, business, and medicine. This book is Shaun Hendy and Paul Callaghan’s GET OFF THE GRASS: KICK STARTING NEW ZEALAND’S INNOVATION ECONOMY and in it two great New Zealand scientists bring physics and economics together to explain why New Zealand’s economic growth has fallen behind most of the developed world and what we might do about it. It’s intellectually ambitious, it provoked reactions from the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition, and it helped Shaun Hendy get hired up here at the University of Auckland in a job split between the physics department and the business school. Publishing science, business and medicine books like GET OFF THE GRASS has found us new readers and new relevance in the University and around the country.

3.      Third part of the plan, collaborate internationally to reach a global market. This year, we took on the most complex book we have ever published—BIRDS OF NEW ZEALAND: A PHOTOGRAPHIC GUIDE: 1000 photographs, hundreds of maps, Maori and Greek, glossaries and tables.  We could be this ambitious and we could do our biggest print run ever, 10,000 copies, because we sold 5000 copies to Yale University Press, who could reach the birders of the Northern Hemisphere much better than us. Every year, we are selling more rights to more of our books at the Frankfurt Book Fair and by collaborating internationally with publishers like Yale we can publish with more ambition and reach more readers around the world.

4.      Final element in the plan, engage with stakeholders, yes those slippery words. This year we published a superb book on the potter and wild man Barry Brickell by working closely with the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt—raising funds, doing new photography, finding authors, publishing a book, opening a travelling exhibition. The exhibition was hugely popular; the book was a Book Award finalist and a great seller. Collaborating with like-minded institutions enables us both to work bigger and better than we could ever do alone.
So, back in 2007 we had a plan. We were going to commission books, to start publishing in science, medicine and business; to work with with overseas publishers; and to engage with stakeholders. Doing all that I think led us to buck trends in 2013—to sell more books and win more prizes than most other publishers in New Zealand.

That was 2013. But the future is different. 2007 when we made our plans seems a long long time ago now. So the Auckland University Press team is getting together on Monday a few doors down from here to work out what challenges we face now and where the Press goes next. 
I spent some time this year visiting other university presses in the US and Australia, doing a course at Yale to try to look into that future. But it turns out that many of the challenges we are going to face are in fact identified right here in Jenny and Diana’s book CHANGING TIMES. I think that we will face three challenges in particular.

1.       The end of big government. CHANGING TIMES begins with the American scholar Leslie Lipson’s discovery that in 1940s New Zealand the state did everything—it paid your medical costs and looked after your dairy prices, it planted trees and built railways, it told you what songs to sing and what shoes to buy. Fortunately or unfortunately, since the 1980s, big government has not been a growth industry. 

     Now Auckland University Press is a nonprofit. We cover about 2/3rds of our costs by selling books, but for the rest we rely on the goodwill of funders and a good portion of those funders’ dollars come directoy or indirectly from government—through the University of Auckland, or Creative New Zealand, or the Ministry for Culture and Heritage or others. Well that funding has not and realistically will not grow significantly. For us to enable great New Zealand writing to flourish over the next five years, we are going to look increasingly to philanthropy—to those great New Zealand individuals and institutions who are focused on getting our people reading and writing, on the power of poetry and art to change lives, on the importance of books about New Zealand architecture or archaeology. Some of those individuals are here tonight. We’ve learnt from some of the great fundraising by public university presses in the US, we’ve got some big ideas about how we can turn your generosity into creativity, and we are keen to get talking.

2.      Technological transformation.
      Changing Times shows how TVs and toll calls, dishwashers and dams, altered the experience of New Zealanders. Well New Zealand readers right now are in the middle of an amazingly rapid technological transformation. A year ago, ebook sales in New Zealand were close to zero. Now, they are over 20% of book sales for many publishers. That shift has presented huge challenges for all of us—suddenly booksellers have lost 15 or 20% of their sales, our own backlist sales in 2013 are down a huge 22%. 

     Technology disrupts. So we’ve been working hard to transform ourselves alongside our readers. Finally this week, we are able to offer our New Zealand readers almost every book we have in print as well as many classic backlist titles as ebooks—240 titles in total in epub or mobi or pdf. For $10 or $20 you can now go buy yourself a copy of Keith Sinclair’s ORIGINS OF THE MAORI WARS or Ian Wedde’s SPELLS FOR COMING OUT , Marti Friedlander’s SELF-PORTRAIT or Selina Tusitala Marsh’s DARK SPARRING. 
     You can buy them on your phone while I’m talking, you can read them on you kindle or your ipad or any device you have handy, and we think you’ll like it. Technology is transforming publishing and we are fully on board.

3.      Third challenge--globalisation. When the first jet plane landed in Mangere in 1966, the great wandering peoples of Aotearoa connected to the globe in new ways. It’s no longer as surprising as it once was that two people we know from Devonport end up at a pie shop in Brooklyn, NYC, talking about being number 1 on the Billboard charts and winning the Booker Prize. In publishing, global forces led multinational publishers to establish operations in New Zealand during the 1970s and then some different global drivers led some to shut up shop in 2013. That change is a challenge for us. We rely on big publishers for distribution, for a sales force, for providing a backbone to our little industry. But it is also an opportunity for Auckland University Press. 

     New Zealanders continue to want to read their own stories. 50% of the nonfiction we buy is locally grown here. For stage 1 sociology students or year 1 kids learning to read, local content is crucial. There are more opportunities now than there were a year ago for Auckland University Press to publish those stories. And, as global publishers retreat from this country, there are more opportunities I think for us to take our stories to the world. Working with Yale University Press on BIRDS OF NEW ZEALAND is the sort of international publishing that we can do a lot more of.

That’s Auckland University Press—our year, our challenges, our future. We’re very lucky to do what we do. We’ve got a marvelous team in Katrina Duncan, Anna Hodge, Christine O’Brien, Annie Irving, Marian Hector and Shelley Jacobson; we’ve got a supportive board and University led by board chair Professor Tom Bishop and my boss the Deputy Vice Chancellor John Morrow; we’ve got a lively and lovely bunch or authors; and we work with a great team of booksellers and designers; reviewers and distributors; proofers and postmen who help us make books and find readers. Thanks to all of you and we look forward to working with in 2014.



Now Jenny Carlyon and Diana Morrow’s CHANGING TIMES: NEW ZEALAND SINCE 1945. The history of postwar New Zealand usually appears in a concluding chapter of our general histories and Jenny and Diana determined to go deeper. It’s been almost 70 years since the war was over, almost 40 years since Norman Kirk died and thirty years since the Rainbow Warrior was sunk. Surely now we can treat the recent past as past and tell its story. And Jenny and Diana do a great job of that here in this book—leading us through Springbok Tours and suburban sprawl, Polynesian migration and feminist rebellion, to understand the big forces I have been talking about—globalisation, technological change, the end of big government.

But I see in Diana and Jenny’s work my own story too. My mother pregnant at 19 in the early 1960s; my aunt heading off to a new suburban home in Lower Hutt; another aunt separating from her husband in the 1970s and taking her kids with her to Centrepoint commune in Albany with its drugs and free love; me going to the the 1981 Springboks game as a 15 year old rugby enthusiast and to the 1984 protests as a radical student hater of all things rugby. 
This book I think you’ll find to be a very personal and very powerful history of your time, of your friends, of your family, of all of our changing times. Great history leads us into story as much as it provides us with ways we can make sense of those stories. Jenny and Diana do both in CHANGING TIMES. 

Congratulations to them on a great book and thanks to all of you for coming here tonight to celebrate their achievement.

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