NIAS Press: Riding the Digital Storm - Transcript

Opening jingle [00:00:03]

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

Julia Heinle [00:00:10]

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Julia Heinle, I'm the publishing assistant at NIAS Press and a master’s student of political science at the University of Copenhagen. We are recording a very special episode today where my boss and editor-in-chief of NIAS Press, Gerald Jackson, is here with us. Gerald has celebrated his 30th publishing anniversary in January this year and is joining us today to talk on a range of experiences, insights, do's and don'ts in the publishing field. I'm very excited for our conversation lying ahead, and first, I want to welcome you, Gerald. It's very nice to have you with us today.

Gerald Jackson [00:00:56]

Thank you.

Julia Heinle [00:00:57]

Gerald, you first came to NIAS in January of 1993 on a six-month contract to establish a professional publishing program at the institute. The contract was renewed again and again. Now, 30 years later, NIAS Press is well known for its books on Asia, and it is the only surviving scholarly press in Europe, specializing in the field of Asian studies. Since 1993, NIAS has published the books of maybe a thousand scholars working in this field, all of them closely working with you. Can you walk us through what has happened since you started at NIAS back then in 1993?

Gerald Jackson [00:01:37]

Well, yeah. When I arrived, the publishing had been going since 1969, so it was a long, a long history of it, but had been a part time operation run by one researcher, and he was mainly doing his research. But on the side he was doing a little bit of publishing. So, as you say, what was aimed was to professionalize and to expand the publishing operation, especially because the point was to promote Nordic Asia research into the wider world. This was a big learning curve for all of us. We began, for about a decade we were working with a small British company that had in fact been working with NIAS right from the early 70s. But in this period in the 90s, it had been taken over by another person and it expanded rapidly and with a lot of support from NIAS, it became in fact the biggest Asian studies publisher in the world. We were a crucial part of that whole transformation. In 2001, though, everything crashed.

Julia Heinle [00:02:52]

Why was that?

Gerald Jackson [00:02:54]

That's basically where a company expands too fast and then suddenly it's like running on air. It's run out of money. It's still going, and then suddenly it crashes. And this sort of is what happened. So we had to rapidly do something about it. And the course we took was to set up a fully fledged publishing house at the institute. So instead of working with this British company who did all the printing and all the marketing and a whole lot of stuff like this, we took on all of that stuff. So we expanded our activities a lot. At the same time, we were actually still producing a lot of books. And doing other stuff, like doing a magazine four times a year. Yeah, it's been a huge adventure. It only happened because we develop a family, if you like, of international partners, mainly of publishers or distribution companies, and that, so that we develop a global marketing and sales network. In fact, don't think there is a Danish publisher that has as extensive a network as we do. The Nordic thing - it came to be that probably only 40% of our authors continued to be Nordic as we became more and more global. But the whole point of it still was that we were giving those Nordic authors international prominence. But yes, we became a global publisher, not simply some small operation in Copenhagen. That in a sense is the trajectory of where we went.

Julia Heinle [00:04:42]

Very interesting. So as part of your own job, which aspect do you like the most as editor-in-chief? You already named that NIAS Press has taken on all the activities in the publishing after this transition in 2001. So for you as a person, which aspect do you like the most?

Gerald Jackson [00:05:04]

The long grind of producing a book which has got maybe 100 something steps. You don't say that that is my favorite thing. The job requires that things happen and they happen when they should happen and all that sort of stuff. That's not my favorite. I'd say a few things. One, the buzz I get when somebody comes with a new idea. So you wake up in the morning, you think you're going to be doing this. An email drops into your inbox with some book proposal and you sort of go, Wow, I've never thought of looking at the world in this way, and something like that happens. Or somebody says, Can you urgently do such and such for… you know, and you that sort of thing. Another is that, for instance, at conferences being a hustler. So although I'm actually quite a shy person in some ways and at sort of a conference situation where you have, say, quarter an hour coffee break and you've got all these scholars standing around talking, but you've got three of them wanting to talk to you at the same time. And you know, you've got to talk to each of them for five minutes. You've got to work out what they're actually proposing. Does it work for you or should in fact, they be talking to somebody else? Because part of our thing also is not just to think about what's good for us. But we have to think on what's good for the author. So that hassle is really good. But in the general thing, there's two things I enjoy and they're just silly things. I enjoy drawing maps. Sometimes I will draw maps for authors and that sort of and usually do it in my own time and it's a source of relaxation. Also, sometimes I take on a layout job laying out one of our books and that is almost a karma type thing that you have to lay out a book - it can be very tedious - but at the same time it's very, very relaxing. In some ways you can switch off and focus on the form of the thing that it works, that the design works and so on and so forth. Those are the things. Yeah. I'm sure there's others - working with you Julia is always a pleasure, but that's beside the point.

Julia Heinle [00:07:24]

Well, this also applies for me. What can I say? But coming back to sort of the process of publishing, you mentioned already now that you enjoy when authors send a proposal to you or when they want to talk to you and approach you on conferences. And you also talked about layouting and 100 steps in the publishing process. But what are sort of the main big thresholds that one goes through until a book is actually being published?

Gerald Jackson [00:07:52]

The different steps you mean?

Julia Heinle [00:07:55]

Yeah, like the big steps that one go from the idea of a book until the actual hard copy that one gets to hold in the hand or the book that can see.

Gerald Jackson [00:08:05]

I mean, the whole beginning of a research project of actually conceptualizing a book often happens long before we ever talked to an author. But that's incredibly important. But then the steps usually are, you know, very briefly, something is assessed, so something can come in and be assessed and rejected in ten minutes, or it could be going through a whole lengthy peer review process and that sort of thing. But there's an assessment and after that the whole production process, which I break down into, you know, first the whole editing of the manuscript. And often that involves rewriting and doing all sorts of stuff. But when we have a final text, final images and so on and so forth, the actual producing the form of the book and its different formats and then actually getting it out there. But at the same time, as you know, Julia in your own job there is that other side where authors think that all they've got to do is write a book and hand it over and the job is done., when in fact the job is only starting because the child has to come out into the world and be heard. So authors play an incredibly important role there, as, if you like, mothers of their book to actually have the world hear that piece of research. So promotion is incredibly important and there are, of course, in there is not just, you know, things like; which journals are you sending it to is going to be book launches. But the cover matters. You know, there's a whole lot of different things that matter there.

Julia Heinle [00:09:53]

Very nicely said with that metaphor on the mother and child. Do you think this is sort of a particularity for the field of East and Southeast Asian studies specifically, or would you say this is more of a universal rule regardless of whether this concerns academic publishing or non-academic publishing?

Gerald Jackson [00:10:14]

In many ways it would be universal, but area studies is different than disciplinary studies. In fact, if I could be controversial, I would say that a lot of disciplinary studies people might look down upon area studies. So I guess what I would say is, in a way, it's a different way of looking at things. And that does affect, I think, how things are published. So a country, if you think of a country like, should we say Thailand, a country to understand it and, if you like, even to love it, requires using your senses in many different ways, using a wide palette of intellectual approaches. So a country may be a history, it may be a music, it may be culture, its politics, religion, social values, a whole lot of stuff. Whereas, for instance, if you're dealing with say mathematical theory, there are also nuances but, I think, in a different way. So in that way I would argue that the area studies publishing that I've been involved in has the potential to call on a whole lot of different approaches. And  I might be a bit… but I'm certain that there will be, people, say, working in political science publishing who would say this isn't true at all. But that is my perspective anyway, that although it doesn't have that same academic kudos, area studies, in my opinion, it has a lot to offer in many different ways and we've been proud to work in that field.

Julia Heinle [00:11:56]

You can most certainly draw on a range of experience there. You spent over 30 years in the field of academic publishing in area studies. Looking forward, or sort of turning to the future and looking back at the same time, what were sort of major developments or what would you say how has the field of academic publishing in area studies changed over the last 30 years?

Gerald Jackson [00:12:23]

The Internet. When I first started in this business, there was no Internet that we knew of. There were no emails. We were sending faxes. You know, our books, there were printers, but our books, we produced them laid out onto A4 sheets of paper, and they were sent to England. And these women had scissors and they cut them up onto these huge sheets of paper, 16 sheets to one of these things. And they were then filmed and a whole lot - all that's gone. So everything is digital. A whole lot of people who worked in publishing, don't work there anymore. So a lot of the people who did editing, who did layout, who did proofreading, there's a whole lot of different schools that was inside publishing has gone. Most. And what we have instead, in a sense, is a gig economy, where you have a lot of people who are either contracted or at least the work is outsourced from somewhere around the world. You have the growth of a lot of big beast companies and publishing. At the same time you have, because of the Internet, a lot more possibility for what I would call insurgent publishers, small operations to actually start up to focus in a small area and to actually thrive there. So it's very different. It's a bit scary at times. We also see in our area that libraries are buying less books. Library budgets are being swallowed by IT-costs, so they are cutting the number of journals they hold or they are only buying digital and they're definitely slashing the number of books. So the number of copies of a book, where before when I started in the business, you might expect 2000 copies. And it was always talked about when I was beginning, Oh, yes, hardbacks You would sell 2000 hardbacks. Nowadays you might sell, if you are lucky, 50 hardbacks.

Julia Heinle [00:14:42]

Yeah.

Gerald Jackson [00:14:43]

Okay. So all of that has changed. You also have content is no longer just paper. It is in fact, you know, the book has become, in a sense to many people, an artifact. Instead, they are consuming content. Also, as I said, that those huge sheets of paper have disappeared. And what you have instead is what we call print on demand. In other words, instead of you having several hundred books in a warehouse, you might have one copy and an order comes in and that goes out and another is printed. This sort of thing. I think those are the things… There’s other things I could talk about, but I may be getting ahead of myself. One of the challenges, I could say, of the future, looking at that, is where in the past you might concern yourself about plagiarism. The more I hear about it and I've just come back from the London Book Fair and some of the stuff I was listening to there. The whole thing with artificial intelligence is quite freaky. For instance, I was reading this morning before I came to work this week's Economist is actually got a whole thing on AI and they were mentioning that a PhD thesis from memory had been generated by AI and got a 90% pass rate. So, you know, this has a lot of implications not just for publishing, but also for scholarship.

Julia Heinle [00:16:14]

Yeah, they were referring to AI in terms of Chat GPT or just general AI?

Gerald Jackson [00:16:20]

They were referring to AI across the broad spectrum of things. But they were mentioning this where a scholarly work was generated by AI. This is a very different world than it was 30 years ago. Definitely.

Julia Heinle [00:16:36]

Yeah. So speaking about challenges, what would you recommend in these times of digitalisation, artificial intelligence, print on demand books, to prospective authors, on how to go about their ambitions to publish their research? Because I'm sure there are some that listen here or that are listening to our interview that are curious.

Gerald Jackson [00:16:59]

So I guess there are a few things that occurred to me. One of them is that when I look all over the place, I can see that the university world is under a lot of stress and I don't think the academic life is anywhere as fulfilling in some ways as it was 30 years ago. I may be wrong, but the stress that I can see - it's definitely a harder life. So one of the things I would just say is; be strategic, especially when you're thinking about getting published. Be strategic. It's a balance, I know. But in some ways to focus on something that you think will work for you, something you want to do, obviously, but something that will work for you, that will help your career and so on and so forth. Don't think about it in terms of just producing this article or this book or something, but think of your research. How could it be communicated across a range of forms that helps you but also gets your research out there? But at the same time, it's a balance because you can't be banging on about the same thing and they say, Oh, that's just Julia on and on and on about the same old thing that she always is. So you have to be careful there too. But that's one thing. The other is that I'd say that I have this thing I talk about K1. The old days I talked about that there was this K50 rule that if within 50 pages you hadn't got a reader to get hooked by your book, they wouldn't finish it. And I argue that today, thanks to Steve Jobs and the iPhone, that our attention span is down to the first page. If you cannot grab the reader on the first page, there is a great danger that you will - your book will not be - or your article or whatever it is, that the reader will not finish it. So there's so many demands on our attention, all of us. Can we afford to spend so many hours or days reading something that's just going on and on and on, so grab them by the throat on the first page.

Julia Heinle [00:19:21]

Okay. Grab them by the throat on the K1 rule so to say. Gerald, you've also written a book yourself on actually how to get published. That book was published in 2011. Is your K1 rule included in that as well, or is this a recent update?

Gerald Jackson [00:19:40]

I think that's more recent. I don't think social media was hadn't had such an impact back then. So no, the whole thing, the shift of content to being something that is independent of form that is even more extreme than it was. So that's why I'm saying that you should not focus just on getting published in that journal or in that book or something. Think of it that you're communicating information and different ways over different formats, and that is more that is more new from that period, Definitely. Yeah.

Julia Heinle [00:20:22]

So when you speak of different formats, does this also include formats beyond text, so to say?

Gerald Jackson [00:20:30]

I would argue so. I could be frivolous and say you could break into poetry or song, but don't think that would necessarily help your credibility as a scholar. So part of the issue there is that the world or the authorities that assess scholars has not moved with the times. So there are a lot of ways that scholars may communicate, that will not get countered when that research is evaluated. So that is a problem. So you get these research assessment exercises where they say so many points for an article from a list, a journal, and so many points for a book from a list B publisher or whatever. And you have all this thing and you get this score, but they don't count that maybe this has been also downloaded 10,000 times on that B platform that may not be counted. So there's a whole sea change and how that scholarship is being viewed or listened to or whatever. Yeah.

Julia Heinle [00:21:46]

Looking at these developments, Gerald, there is talk about you retiring this year. Are you welcoming this change in your life or how do you stand towards this era that might be coming to an end?

Gerald Jackson [00:22:00]

Yeah. When I was in London at the book fair and was walking around, I realised quite a lot that was going on. You know, these people are all energetically pitching deals to each other or whatever and I thought, you know what? Think I've had enough of this. So I thought, yeah, I'm happy to continue being involved with NIAS Press into the future, some sort of casual way or some sort of part time way. But I can see that I've got better things to do. I have research and writing I wish to do. And I want to also get forward doing things like that and working with other people in other areas of life. So, yes, there will be still continuing with some of this academic publishing and the wider world of, you know, I enjoy going to a conference and mingling with people. But there's other things I want to do too.

Julia Heinle [00:22:56]

Yeah. So looking at the clock, we are almost close to the end of our interview now. So I want to ask if I may, if you want to share, what other projects will you personally have in mind that you pursue after you've left big NIAS Press one could say.

Gerald Jackson [00:23:15]

I'm into more lower class interests, perhaps to some people. But as I sort of briefly mentioned, I've been doing writing. I've essentially finished a 428 page book and, everyone is, I think, up to about page 300 or something. But they are local social history, family focus, and it's involved a lot of research, a lot of working with people, doing a lot of the things that in fact the authors I have worked with over the years have been doing, but doing something that I want to do. And the next step is I'm looking to also take a lot of my publishing experiences over the years and those skills and also apply them in this new area, offering other people who are not academics but who are wanting to communicate their research and wanting to provide services to those people. And yeah, so that's the next couple of projects I'm working on.

Julia Heinle [00:24:21]

Nice. Well, how can we make sure to be able to follow you in that regard? Will you keep the Twitter account or shall people just contact you over your email address? What would your suggestion be?

Gerald Jackson [00:24:36]

Hm. I don't know. I have a private website, but I have not, if I'm honest, part of publishing that I have been less good at and less interested in has been that promotional side. And that is why having people like you doing your magic has been important. So I'm not good at doing that sort of stuff for my own things. So things like Facebook and all that, I sort of, urgh. So I have to learn to do more of this. I know. So that will be another challenge for the future too. But as of this moment, I am not going to give away any contact details.

Julia Heinle [00:25:17]

Very good. Well, then maybe we can say to our listeners that we will teach each other. So before you go, I'll make sure that we'll provide some news on the website or so on. Yeah, yeah. Whether maybe you want to revive your blog or something like that, but they will definitely be a way to follow you. Okay. That being said, Gerald, I want to thank you for this very joyful interview. It was super interesting to listen to your insightful insights and experiences and a pleasure to have you here.

Gerald Jackson [00:25:52]

Thank you.

Julia Heinle [00:25:53]

Thank you for listening to the Nordic Asia podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia. I'm Julia Heinle and I've been talking to Gerald Jackson, editor-in-chief of NIAS Press.

Closing jingle [00:26:08]

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