Introduction to publishing title management software

If you don’t currently have access to a publishing title management system, it seems almost impossible to find out what one does. What does it look like? How do publishers use it? Why do they use it?

We realised that we could open the door a little and show some of how publishing works. When we offered to host a virtual Introduction to publishing title management software on Zoom, we sold out 100 tickets plus a waiting list that same day.

It’s clear that this information is something people are hungry for, but they don’t know where to get it. So, we’re going to provide it!

First, we’d like to give a shout out to our blog and our system documentation for more in depth information on everything we cover here. It’s all publicly accessible, so you can dive into any area that interests you. Even if you aren’t lucky enough to end up using Consonance, the principles of how these systems work are the same, so spend a little time getting familiar with it. We’ve organised some of the basic documentation in Consonance 101 and if you want to challenge yourself, move on to Consonance Expert.

We’d like to highlight these particular articles for insight:

Here is the video of the webinar we ran, with Consonance CEO Emma Barnes talking through some of the top level ideas behind title management software, with insights into bibliographic data management, ONIX, contracts, rights and royalties, and workflow management.

It’s all about What good publishers want:

Links to some of the resources we mentioned:

Resources that some top book publishers point their new and aspiring employees to:

Publishers Association careers page
An excellent round up of industry resources from @AinChiara
@R_Nash’s What is the Business of Literature? with sentences like, … the book is a technology so pervasive … that it reaches the status of Nature
@kevin2kelly’s Better than Free with points such as: Trust cannot be copied… It cannot be downloaded..
@JaneFriedman for the business of publishing
For editors: Harts Rules and Judith Butcher’s Copyediting

Communities to check in on:

We highly recommend BookMachine for training, resources and support
Join a newly launched Facebook group for publishing hopefuls
Hashtags: #BookJobTransparency #WorkInPublishing and #JobsInBooks for employers/roles/salaries/people to follow
Interested in production? There’s a Twitter account for that @_prod_squad

And we’d love to add other resources to this blog post, or enhance the ones we’ve got. If you’ve got something to add or to ask or that needs clarifying, please contact us! @consonance_app, @has_many_books or @saramoohead on Twitter.

Overwhelmed with spreadsheets? Drowning in thousands of tasks? Worried about not being ready to face the next round of publishing challenges? If you enjoyed this article, and you want to grow your publishing but you're not sure where to start, contact us. We help publishers of all shapes, ages, complexity and sizes to organise, automate and grow. Yes: your legacy data is in a pickle, but we promise it'll not be the worst we've seen. We can sort it out and transform your publishing process quicker, and more cheaply, than you'd think.

We're always happy to have a chat and let you know what we've seen other publishers do in your situation to good effect, and we're happy to arrange a tailored demo just for your team of Consonance: the sure-fire way to improve your publishing and lay the groundwork for growth.