A Day In the Life Of...invites people involved in book selling and the publishing industry in Asia to describe a working day.
Based
in Hong Kong, but selling into all the major English language markets, Blacksmith Books publishes China-related non-fiction: biography;
business; culture; current affairs; photography; travel. Founder Pete Spurrier is the company's publisher.
One of the best things about working for
yourself is that you can set your own schedule. I started Blacksmith Books 10
years ago, and two years ago I moved apartments from Sai Ying Pun, an old
district in the city centre of Hong Kong, to a rural village in the New
Territories. The office remains in Central though, so after getting up,
checking messages and dealing with anything urgent, I walk down the hill from
the village and catch an express bus into town, avoiding rush hour. The journey
takes 40 minutes and ends by taking a raised highway around the edges of
Victoria Harbour, a good start to the day.
The Blacksmith office is on the top floor
of an old walk-up building on Hollywood Road in Central, which is a great
location, very convenient for meeting people. As an older building it has large
windows, high ceilings and more natural light than newer ones. We do have
decent tea and coffee but if people would rather not walk up the five flights
of stairs (it is hot and humid Hong Kong after all) I’ll go and meet them in a
nearby coffee shop.
New authors in particular often want to
come up and see our office, which is a good idea from their point of view, and
our printer will sometimes drop in with blueprints or proofs for checking.
We publish about 12 books a year, at any given time each book is at a different stage of
editing, design, production, launch, distribution or promotion, so there is
always a lot to do. During the course of the day I’ll be talking to authors,
editors, translators and designers on one side of the publishing process, and
bookshops, shipping companies, distributors and journalists on the other.
Emails come in at a frightening rate,
including manuscripts which I move to a separate folder for reading later and
then completely forget about.
If I have time, I’ll write a blog post or
put something on the Facebook page, but I still find that traditional media
usually works best for promoting books. Sometimes I’ll accompany a writer to a
radio interview, or go on air myself, and I’ll come back to the office to find
that orders have come in just because of that.
One of our new titles is the Yunnan
Cookbook, and this was a particular challenge to bring to completion, as it
involved two authors, two sets of photographers, an illustrator, a designer and
an editor – and because production went on for so long, everyone involved was
living or travelling in a different country by the final stages. Of course
email helps, but at the point when we were choosing photos and finalising
layout, one of the authors was incommunicado in the mountains of Yunnan, buying
cattle in an ethnic minority village. Then, when she came back to the nearest
town with internet access, she found that her email provider had been blocked
in China. We got it all sorted in the end.
Our niche subject is Asia but it’s been
good to find that readers around the world are interested in it. As our
distribution has widened – we have just started selling into Australia this
year, for instance – I find I’m spending more time co-ordinating shipments of
books overseas. Once or twice a week I’ll go to our warehouse, on the western
side of Hong Kong Island, to organise boxes of books to be collected by a
freight forwarder or sent to the Kwai Chung container port. If the quantities
are larger, pallets will be sent to the port directly from the printer.
Our biggest overseas market is the US, and
books take five weeks to sail across the Pacific from Hong Kong, through the
Panama Canal and up to New York. Our American distributor needs all details of
new books eight months before their launch, which is often quite difficult to
supply. I have to work backwards, taking shipping and printing time into account,
and always keeping this production schedule in mind. I also have to keep track
of how quickly books in print are selling, and order reprints at the right
time, while watching cash flow to make sure it’s not too early to do so.
Another equation I have to juggle is
deciding how many books to print each time: trying to balance the number of
pre-orders from bookshops in each market with how many books I can keep in
store in the warehouse, while still getting a decent unit price for printing a
high enough volume. The printer helps out by keeping some in the factory until
they can be shipped elsewhere, but not for too long. I am envious of other
cities where space is cheaper to rent.
Before leaving the warehouse I’ll also fill
a bag with books to be posted out later to mail-order customers. Because it’s
so hard to sell books in mainland China, we don’t charge postage to anyone who
lives there, so a steady stream of mail orders come in.
Back in the office, if it’s Friday, I’ll
try to devote a couple of hours to getting the accounts up to date. Long ago,
before Blacksmith started, I was a partner in a previous publishing business
that went bust, and that was an expensive but valuable lesson. Now I try to
make sure that I’m always up to speed with which clients are paying on time,
which aren’t paying at all, which books are making money and so on. I used to
think accounts must be boring, but when it’s your own venture, they become
strangely engrossing.
When all the columns add up, I punch the
air in victory – everyone else will have gone home by then. And then I lock up
the office and go out for drinks.
