Historically, publishers maintained their own staff of reviewers, editors, graphics designers and cover designers and fulfillment department. They have owned their own printing presses. In 1990’s, digital pre-press came of age, with Quark, Photoshop and other desktop publishing suites emerging to enable publishers to focus on their relationships with authors, readers and distribution channels.
Global Solutions
Today, publishing tracks the same trends as other services. Offshore captives for production support onshore design, editing and sales management. Offshore outsourcers offer to do labor-intensive work with their own printing presses. Onshore distributed publishing centers such as Kinko’s was acquired by Federal Express, providing design services, publication in multiple formats and fulfillment.
Low-Hanging Fruit?
Outsourcing of publication services is especially suited to low-budget organizations that struggle with capital investment. Non-profit organizations that publish academic and scholarly journals compete with commercial publishers such as Thomson and Reed-Elsevier that aggregate demand, scale in delivery and offer full end-to-end publishing processes. In turn, the number of publishers with large size is shrinking.
Choices
Solutions for publishing outsourcing include:
- traditional fee-for-service outsourcing;
- group publishing organizations, including non-profit captives of non-profit educational, scholarly or membership organizations;
- customer relationship and fulfillment services, offered as a “call center” service supported by back-end data base administration and mailing services.
Conversion to an Outsourcing Model
Transitioning from in-house publishing to some form of outsourced publishing can be facilitated with financial incentives from the service provider. As with other outsourcing deal structures, such incentives “come home to roost” as latent problems in case the editor wants to change providers of the publication services.