Command publishing and the need for creative awakening

The publishing industry is primarily a business industry and command publishing is the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs. [iStockphoto]

If there is one thing that working as an editor teaches you, it is the treacherous nature of the creative process.

Whether in journalism or book publishing, you find yourself doing a delicate dance of balancing between deadlines and quality.

One of my former bosses at The Standard summed it up as the war between “deadlines and headlines”.

In the newsroom, the hours before the deadline are marked by nerves and pressure. For while a newspaper subeditor would prefer to rack his or her head for a better headline, the production editor is waiting to send the files to the printing teams, and the vans are revving to take the paper to Mombasa, Busia and other far-off places, which means your better headline would be of little or no meaning in the wider scheme of things.

For while quality sells for both broadcast and print journalism – two worlds that have now merged in the digital-first, converged newsroom business model – it still makes sense to beat the competition to the market.

In the book publishing world, this has spawned terms such as “command publishing”, where projects are dictated not by market research but by a central authority. In our case, for instance, book publishers have of late found themselves under pressure to deliver scripts to support Competency-Based Education needs.

This means they have to work within certain timeframes within which they must commission authors, do writing workshops, edit and lay out scripts and commission illustrators and photographers.

The project editors also need to contract the quality-check specialists – who the young editors now define as “proofreaders”, even in cases where the job goes beyond weeding out typos to include arresting bloopers that would lead to automatic rejection of the script at the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development.

This has seen especially experienced editors increasingly running away from quality assessment work, as its depiction as simply “proofreading” does not just make it seem like a job that any intern can do; the pay is also a bit low, in many places paid per page.

This has saddled publishing firms with politics of the kind you find in the newsroom, where all manner of titles exist for roles between which it is hard to draw a line – subeditor, revise editor, quality control editor, production editor and so on – of course depending on organisational structure and payroll politics.

I first heard the term command publishing in a meeting chaired by Dr Henry Chakava (GBHS). That was in the first years of the free universal basic education rollout. Earlier, publishing was a totally different ballgame.

Publishing editors went to the market, talked to teachers and other stakeholders, or relied on feedback from published products to decide what new books to put into the market. This must have been a blissful world for those who understand the creative process.

For while all publishing projects must have clear schedules, back then it was the needs of the project itself that dictated the timelines. This meant that it was possible to create some legroom for the creative folk, who, I have come to realise, often struggle with stiff deadlines. Under pressure, many creative writers find it difficult to attack the blank page.

They find their creativity hampered by that old nemesis of creativity – the muse block – and some helplessly walk away from the workstation, many often pining for a stiff drink. Until one time they are strolling quietly on a village path, or just lounging on a settee and voila, the urge to write comes flowing back like a roaring river.

In such wondrous moments, the words flow like a fountain, one sentence leading to another, and then another, and they surprise themselves with a kind of literary sublimity they never knew they could achieve.

It is widely recorded, through acceptance speeches and top authors’ memoirs, that the most impactful works of literature come naturally. The urge to pen them grips the writer in the same way the clouds gather like an ominous dark-grey blanket across the skies when the rains are nigh.

Command publishing must therefore be, at least to the creative process, like the rainmakers doing their thing at a time when the rains are not expected in the cyclical flow of the seasons. I could be wrong, but I suspect that is why the creative community, they who are the true guardians of the sleeping beauty of language, find themselves at sea when dealing with cut-throat deadlines, sometimes drowning in the drink in between forcing out chapters of their works.

Of course, command publishing is here to stay. The publishing industry is primarily a business industry and command publishing is the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs. But business is also about innovation and strategy. Now that command publishing has everyone in the industry pushing the same product or service, isn’t it time to research and experiment with differentiated content of the kind that none of your competitors has tried before?

This, I think, presents us with the best challenge of our times; to go out there, listen, think, talk to the different publics we serve and even those we currently don’t serve. What is it that they would like to see that they cannot find in what any publisher in the market is offering? From that inquiry, a pattern develops that concretises into a product or a tweaking of the existing product(s).

For, basic logic dictates that you cannot go wrong with providing your readers what they would want to see more of. You just need to know what that is and infuse its production in your systems. Of course, most publishers and media houses do a lot of that through their marketing and market-intelligence channels.

But in my world, nothing beats sending editors out to the real world for an unpretentious engagement with readers. For even with the peripatetic schedules and the mad rush occasioned by command publishing and productivity using increasingly scarce resources, it is imperative to create time for a forum that ensures that as you work harder and faster, you are doing the right things.

And that you are listening actively to those you serve. Besides, it is to products and services born of market research and innovative ideas that we fall back on when those who hold the purse-strings that run the command economy leave at short notice.