The Invisible Mentor

The Invisible Mentor Interviews Jenny Pickles

July 29th, 2010 |

Today I present the first part of the interview with Jenny Pickles who has worked in the publishing industry for 15 years. As usual, look for the nuggets of brilliance, and be open to the bits that you can apply to your unique situation.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I have worked in the publishing industry since 1995, firstly at Emerald Group Publishing Ltd initially in the Editorial department. Here I was responsible for organizing the annual best paper awards for excellence and managing a suite of real estate and environmental scholarly journals. In 2000 I transferred to the Business Development department and took on responsibility for digital licensing, reprints and permissions. Two years ago I was lucky enough to be offered the role of Associate Director of Global Rights at John Wiley & Sons in the UK. This involves responsibility for all secondary licensing of the many thousands of books and journals published by Wiley including translation rights, permissions and digital licensing.

What’s a typical day like for you?

Dealing with the many emails from external and internal customers, working with my staff who are based in both Oxford and Chichester and with our Global Rights colleagues who are based around the world.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Working every day with talented, enthusiastic and committed staff always motivates me to try harder myself, lead by example, and fully support my team. I like to encourage their ideas for improving the business, our business processes, our service levels and our productivity. Additionally in a digital age the way in which knowledge is created and disseminated is constantly changing and developing, the consequent demands and expectations of our customers grows exponentially and this constantly challenges us to find ways to meet those demands and expectations. The job is never boring.

If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

I would probably have got into the publishing industry much sooner than I did. I took the job initially because it was available at a time that a grant funded role at Bradford University came to an end, not because I had a burning desire to get into publishing. However, I quickly found that I loved the job, the constant challenges and the dynamics of publishing. I feel that I would know much more now if I had been aware of this when I was much younger.

What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

That partnering with respected organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Centre to develop an automated online permissions clearance service for our journals can not only vastly improve the service that we offer our customers and authors, but also cut down significantly on the time consuming manual elements of the job thus enhancing the Permissions team’s daily tasks and enabling them to spend more quality time evaluating the more complex and challenging requests we receive daily.

What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Definitely the opportunities afforded to increase readership of our authors’ work through both developing e-books and other digital, audio and mobile products in-house and at the same time partnering with external specialists in these formats to license our titles for inclusion in these services.

What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

I would say the continued campaign for open access in the absence of viable alternative funding models, thus threatening the very industry which has provided refereed scholarship for centuries – we are trying to handle this issue by offering authors the option to pay an online open fee to make their final published refereed article’s openly accessible on our site. We are also planning to launch new entirely open access journals next year each of which will continue to receive the same rigorous review process to maintain quality, accuracy and high standards; the proliferation of piracy and online file sharing sites for which we are working with the Publishers Association, other industry groups and legal colleagues to tackle and thirdly, the proliferation of unauthorized, outdated and inaccurate information that the aforementioned can result in and which should not be relied on through casual searches on the internet.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Rights management and content licensing is not unique but it is important. We publish a wide range of books and journals in the English language which are sold throughout the English speaking world. However many students and professionals around the world would not be able to benefit unless local publishers were able to translate and sell the books in their local markets. The wide range of licenses and permissions requests to reuse published works negotiated daily, based on the rights granted to us by our authors, mean that the authors’ work get much more widely read and that they benefit from additional royalties from sales of their work in for example Russian or Spanish translation as well as primary sales in English. We are also able to negotiate special arrangements for developing countries to ensure that access is truly global.

What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

Can’t really comment

Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.

We have been working on updating an internal IT system and this has involved selecting the most high priority issues and project managing these with IT and business colleagues over the last year or so.

What lessons did you learn in the process?

Patience, patience, and more patience – and accepting that not everything can or maybe even should be automated.

Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

The owner of Emerald Group Publishing Ltd who agreed to allow be to participate in an in-house MBA program which was funded by the company. It was he who supported me and encouraged me to take as my dissertation the copyright implications of digital publishing – this in no small part contributed to the job I have now.

What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

In accepting the job I have now I had to relocate away from my family and friends – I love and appreciate the job but I do miss not seeing my family as much as I would like to.

What are three events that helped to shape your life?

My family and having my children, I have one daughter and four sons who are the greatest joy in life; the support and encouragement I received from my late husband who pushed me into going back to university as a mature student to study for my Masters degree in history and politics and taking up the challenge of the in house MBA which was done alongside my daily job – the hardest and most challenging thing I have ever done but which taught me most about opportunities to grow and progress in the workplace.

What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Raising my family.

How did mentors influence your life?

By encouraging me to look at life and achievements differently.

What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Set your goals and be prepared to pay the price in advance – this is a mantra that I have always followed. The mentor was one of the directors and co-owners of Emerald at the time, Barrie Pettman, a self made millionaire and I always thought the statement made a lot of sense. The price you pay may be financial in terms of the fees for a particular course of study or training you need to undertake, it might be the time you have to be prepared to invest in learning new skills or gaining the required qualifications to get where you want to be, it might be what you have to personally forego in other areas of your life in order to spend that time, or it might be the effort of identifying who you need to seek out who may be willing to offer you further help and guidance. Whatever the price, you need to research what it is first and decide if you are prepared to pay that price, then just do it.

As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

I would pass on the advise that was given to me,(above) to have confidence in yourself – if you truly want to achieve something in your life, find out what you need to do in order to achieve it and if you are prepared to expend that effort in planning and working hard at it you can achieve your goal. Conversely, there is no shame in admitting defeat if, having evaluated the possibilities and challenges of a particular objective you decide that it is not for you after all.

What are to takeaways from the interview? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right side) by email or RSS Feed.