What You Can Learn at Yale This Summer

The Yale Publishing Course, two intensely information-packed weeks of lectures and learning, one for book publishing and one for magazine publishing, is running this summer as usual. Dates are July 14-19 for “Leadership Strategies in Magazine and Digital Publishing,” and July 21-26 for “Leadership Strategies in Book Publishing.” Today is the deadline to apply.

Book Business & Publishing Executive had the opportunity to sit in on the course last summer, and found it to be a great mix of classroom style learning with talks by top publishers and industry leaders, as well as networking activities with a chance to meet the members of the “student body,” no slackers themselves in terms of corporate achievement. Plus the food is really yummy and the setting on the Yale campus is lovely.

We spoke this week to several of this summer’s presenters, asking them: What is one very important thing you hope to convey to your students at Yale? Here are their replies.

From Carolyn Pittis, Managing Director, Welman Digital LLC:

“Digital transformation is well underway for most publishers. But the technologies involved continue to change much faster than most humans can adapt. How are you measuring to insure that what your employees do day-to-day links explicitly with your business goals - and delivers the results you want? Skills and capabilities in operational execution are essential for turning good ideas into good business. One method for transitioning from print to digital - and deploying best practices from other industries - is to enable peer networks to self-manage and optimize against explicit public goals. Connecting employees' motivated skills with a company's strategy in a measurable model can gamify the workplace in ways that increase transparency and focus in a peer managed model that scales and empowers vs. a now outdated top down management model.”

From Kevin McKean, Principal, McKeanMedia and former VP/Editorial Director of Consumer Reports:

“Some media pundits are still saying people won't pay for content online, but experience shows that isn't true. Smart publishers have learned to monetize their content directly by charging for digital access, either on a pay-per-view basis or via subscription, whether its delivered over the Web or on tablet and mobile. I'll be talking about how to make paid content a success without hurting other revenue streams like ad sales and lead generation. This is critically important since, to succeed, digital publishers need to exploit every possible source of income.”

From Liisa McCloy-Kelley, VP, Director eBook Development and Innovation, Random House, Inc.:

I'm hoping that my students at Yale will get a better understanding of how they can use islands of technology to better convey and give an interactive element to the stories in the books they are working on. We have always "flattened" content to make it work in bound pages and I hope to inspire people to think beyond that a bit. For example, in a print book explaining measure conversions for cooking needed to be a grid and decisions had to be made about how many measures fit and which ones were most important. But in an interactive eBook, this can be something that a user can manipulate and change on the fly.