Interview with Steve Piersanti and Johanna Vondeling of Berrett-Koehler Publishers
We are happy to bring to you this interview with Steve Piersanti and Johanna Vondeling of Berrett-Koehler Publishers in San Francisco. Since we started the Literary Innovators Interviews nearly a year ago, our focus has been on finding and highlighting individuals who are doing unique and innovative work in the literary world. Steve and Johanna represent a unique publishing enterprise that stands out among its peers for it innovative approach towards community development. Talking to them we couldn’t help wonder if more publishers will soon start employing some of these ideas. Tell us what you think.
I have been invited to join Steve and Johanna for BK 2020 Future Search, a two day conference, that brings together nearly 70 participants representing a microcosm of a publishing company’s world. It promises to unleash new ideas and new relationships. I will give you an update on the conference soon.
Enjoy! - Praveen
Can you tell us a little about your individual backgrounds.
Johanna: I started in publishing, working as an editorial assistant for Norton in New York while in college. Then while I was getting my Ph.D. in English Literature I worked as Assistant Editor for Holt, Rinehart & Winston in Austin, Texas. After I came to the Bay Area I worked for Jossey-Bass for six years and then for the last three years I have been with Berrett-Koehler. My background is sort of traditional - starting as an English graduate, love of books, began at the bottom of the ladder and have just really enjoyed working with authors – it’s been a real pleasure.
Steve: My first taste of publishing was in college when I started a student scholarly journal. It ended up being virtually a full time job. There was far more involved than anything I had imagined. In hindsight, we should have published it quarterly and we were doing it monthly. The project involved the Art department and the English department, it was multi-disciplinary and very ambitious. It ended being so much work that I had to drop all my classes just to do it and I lost my scholarship. I was on a full tuition and fees scholarship. But I was having so much fun, was learning more than I was learning in any of my classes, so I said to myself “Well I should go into publishing.”
In the end I did get some credit for it and did graduate from college. After college, I started as a promotional copywriter in advertising with Jossey-Bass in 1977, then became the marketing director, then became an editor, and then editorial director. Later I went into general management – and eventually became President of the company. I founded Berrett-Koehler in 1992.
What are your roles at Berrett-Koehler?
Johanna: Steve wears many hats – he is the President and Publisher and he also signs half of the books we do. I am the Editorial Director. I sign the other half of the books and also keep the editorial department generally functioning. We are doing a lot of different things every single day, for example, outreach to find different authors, preparing different materials to get a book into distribution, some reading manuscripts. Actually reading manuscripts is such a small percentage of the work I do. Working with marketing to position the book, talk to design about the cover, we might be strategizing at a larger organizational level about where our risk is, discussing what new agendas and communities we should be investigating. Every day is different. I have to balance of lot of things because it’s not only focusing on some book sitting in front of you that are going to come out soon, but also fielding a call with an author whose books came out six years ago, and also cultivating relationships with authors whose books might not come out for another year or two. So, the range of the timeline I have to think about is enormous.
Steve: I acquire books, work with authors in developing book projects from idea to concepts to drafts to final publication. And then as President of the company I work with all the different operations of the company, the department heads, and the Board of Directors.
Berrett-Koehler is famous for the unique ways in which you partner you’re your authors. Tell us what you do and why you do it.
Johanna: Our signature practice is the author days when our authors are invited to come into our office for an entire day and interact with all parts of the our organization. This ideally takes place at some point between the delivery of the draft and the delivery of the manuscript. They get to meet their editor in person, they get to talk to production about the internal design of the book, talk to marketing about the marketing plan for their book, and then they make a presentation about their book over lunch to the whole staff – it’s their first chance to pitch their book to the world. I don’t know any other publisher who does that does that – it will be wonderful if other publishing companies picked this up because they will see a lot of benefit from it. If you don’t do that, then there is a lot more chance for misunderstanding, but if you sit down and develop a relationship and explain to them early on how publishing works and how the production process works – it reduces chances of misunderstanding and conflict with the author.
I think it’s really wonderful for the authors too – there are many situations where the editor might be the author’s only connection with the publishing company. We think that with all the shifts that go on during the entire process, it’s a real asset if the author is connected to everyone in the organization, and not just to one person – and that way they also know that they have a relationship for the life of the book, not just for the tenure of the editor.
Steve: Most of book publishing is based on a transactional model in which the publishers views that they have bought the book because they paid a certain advance and as a result they often end up treating the author as a nuisance. Our view is that we don’t own the book, we are a steward and we are accountable to the authors and to our other stakeholders – customers, employees, investors, suppliers, and the communities we operate in – they are all stakeholders in the business. And we are a steward to operate the business in a partnership – so we bring them inside the tent, into how the organization is run, and into the decision making structure. What comes out of that is that we try to work with authors as equal partners – we have created some structures that operationalize this approach. are more friendly towards authors – for example, we have a clause in our publishing agreement that says that if the author is not satisfied then the author can take away the rights of the book. This is a radical idea in publishing.
We also have mechanisms like author marketing workshops, author retreats, the Berrett-Koehler authors cooperative, through which we share more information with authors, connect them with each other, helping them learn from each other and creating ways for all of us to learn together. A lot of benefits come out of this approach.
It sounds like a risky idea to give authors the option to opt out and take away their rights to the book. Has it ever happened to Berrett-Koehler?
Steve: In the fifteen years we have been operating and over several hundred publishing contracts, it has happened only once when an author exercised that clause and took back the rights of the book. Interestingly in that one case, the author did a new agreement with us to represent the foreign language rights of the book – so we still have a good relationship with that author. It’s risky in once sense but not risky in another – what it amounts to is putting what you believe on the line. It provides a way to make us not just lord over the book, and not treat the authors like a nuisance, but makes us responsive by creating a different dynamic. It’s more of an engaging dynamic, not a transactional dynamic.
It seems that with this practice you have gone against the grain of the how the publishing industry works. How and when did Berrett-Koehler adopt this approach?
Steve: It dates right to the beginning. And it came out of my experience in the corporate publishing world before I founded Berrett-Koehler. I was working with Jossey-Bass which got acquired by Robert Maxwell who put Jossey-Bass as a unit of Macmillan Publishing Company which was a big successful company and we became one unit of Macmillan. I soon found out that the way things worked was that only one thing mattered and that was the new corporate owners. We had employees who had worked with the company for a long time, authors, suppliers, other stakeholders who had been part of the company but suddenly none of them mattered to the new corporate owners –New owners came in and they were calling all the shots, that didn’t seem like an equitable or effective way to run an organization. The Berrett-Koehler stance was born out of that distasteful experience with the corporate publishing model.
Johanna: This is our strategic advantage at the company because the experience it creates for our authors is radical and exciting. When our authors have a good experience they tell other people about it. The single largest way in which we discover new authors is from this channel because people have heard good things about us from other authors.
We know we can’t compete with the New York model on money upfront, so we choose to compete in these other ways.
Also, everything that’s going on in the media world with the web 2.0 trend is all about publishing to community. The fact that Berrett-Koehler has been run since its inception as a community service will be a strategic advantage for us as we head into the turmoil in the future where all the other publishers will have to learn how to adapt and change while we are already half way there. We are seen as an active positive force in the communities for whom we publish, not just a parasite.
That’s a really interesting concept – publishing to a community. How do you describe Berrett-Koehler’s community?
Johanna: There are many of them. One of the original and strongest communities we have served is the organizational development community – organizations like OD Net, SHRM, ASTD, the professional training and development groups. We have been publishing and serving them – it’s been a very very solid component of our list for long.
For our current affairs list, we provide a lot of services to the progressive community, that you can define that in many different ways. Our mission with respect to the progressive community is exposing the consolidation of power that’s happening and offering alternative ideas and views. We are looking for authors from this community and actively collaborating with organizations in this community.
Steve: Our community is basically people who are trying to bring about change in their organizations, their businesses, their personal lives, and in the world. Some of them are doing it through consulting to organizations, others are doing it as activists, yet others as instructors, or authors, writers, speakers. But they are all trying to bring about change to make things better. Some times it’s just to make managers treat people decently. Other times it is to change the political power structures. It’s people who have an interest in these ideas and they reside in lots of different places including fields like the organization development field, the progressive field, executive coaches, etc. And all these people understand each other. There is something they all share in common that bridges their differences.
Tell us more about Berrett-Koehler’s mission – Creating a world that works for all, and how does it relate to what you publish?
Johanna: It’s a very big and ambitious mission. There are lots of people around the planet who believe in something like this. Our contribution towards this mission is by publishing content that helps this goal. We aspire to publish books that promote positive change at all levels – personal, organizational, and national and global. So, our list is roughly divided into those three categories – BK Life, BK Business, BK Currents.
Our personal development list is devoted to books that we hope will help people align their personal practices with their aspirations for a better world. Our business list is about how to create more progressive leadership practices, organizations practices, and cultures. There are lots of business publishers out there who are anti corporate. We are not anti corporate or anti business. What differentiates us is our radically democratic streak. Our focus is on books that talk about how we can make workplaces work for all how to make them collaborative so they are serving everyone not just the investors.
At a global and national level – we are looking for books that shine a light on the consolidation of economic and political power and offering alternatives to that consolidation. So there is the streak of democratic pre-occupation that runs thru our entire list and we see that feeding into the mission of working for all.
Steve: Intentionally we don’t spell it out in detail. As a general aspiration most people know what that means. “Creating a better world that works ” means you are trying to bring some change – that it’s effective, sustainable, good things are happening and “for all” means that everyone shares in that world. There is some meaning in the words, and beyond that we intentionally leave it open ended because the idea is that it is a continuous aspiration, we never arrive there. And we don’t want it to become dogmatic. As Johanna was saying, change has to be at all levels – personal, organizational, national and global. Some times people get too focused on one of these like the political system. Our view is that we need change at all levels. We paint it in pretty broad brush strokes.
Do you see yourself expanding beyond these genres?
Johanna: I think we will be very careful about that. In this world, the format is a lot less relevant than the audience you are publishing for and the community you are publishing for. You have to serve value to the community you are serving. And you can only serve so many communities at the same time. For us to be successful, we will have to very disciplined about what communities are we serving.
In what other ways is Berrett-Koehler different than other publishers?
Steve: We have to acknowledge that we are more alike than different. We are in the same environment. We sell thru same channels, have same processes to produce books, so much of what we do is the same. We are different in philosophy, mindset, and approach.
What is a publisher? Publisher is more than the staff or the books, what really are as a publisher is nerve center. We are center of this ecosystem of manuscript reviewers, publicists, distributors, booksellers, staff, authors, and our role is to operate this enterprise as a connector for everyone’s benefit. Within the company there are a lot of differences, the company has a open egalitarian structure of compensation and human resource policies. We don’t have an executive compensation structure – one compensation structure applies to everyone. Lot of decisions about the company are done at the monthly staff meeting where everyone can add an item to the agenda and everyone has a voice. We are less hierarchical than other publishers. We are more multi-channel than other publishers. We are focused on trade, but also direct. We market thru a lot of channels like special channels, conferences and meetings where authors are presenting.
All members of the stakeholder community are shareholders of Berrett-Koehler which is a pretty unusual model. Most publishers are owned by the founder or the founding family or were acquired by a big conglomerate and become a division. We have about 180 shareholders. Authors, customers, suppliers, employees, publishing community, colleagues – they are all represented. We consciously wanted the company to be owned by all our stakeholder groups.
How does this unique structure impact the day-to-day working of the company?
Steve: Every one have a bigger stake in the company. They have to operate the company for everyone’ benefit, it’s a stewardship model.
So, with Berrett-Koehler being the nerve center of it’s stakeholder community, what’s your core competence? What do you have to be really good at?
Steve: Our core competence is to be nexus of information. We are more conscious of that and we take it further. We are not a printing company, it’s like a movie studio model where you bring together all these resources to produce a movie. We move information around from authors to staff to designers to printers to distributors, to booksellers.
Another core competence for us is new product introductions – every book is a new product introduction. You have to find the product, create the product, rework the product, produce the product, package it, name it, price it, warehouse it, market it, sell it.
The volume of new product introductions is very high in the publishing industry because the average product only creates a $100-200,000 of revenue. So your competency becomes your ability to manage the development and introduction of products for small amounts of money. Every one talks about returns makes publishing unusual. That is significant but it pales in comparison to new product introductions.
Let’s take Ford Motor company as an example. They are a $160 Billion company and I counted on their website they list 59 products. And here at Berrett-Koehler we are 2,000 times smaller and we have 400 products and we introduce 30-35 new ones every year. And Ford introduces six or seven new products a year. There are a lot of sales conference and sometimes the entire sales conference can be about introducing one new product. You go to a publishing industry conference and you will see a distributor introducing 300 or 400 new products. So, our core competence is managing that many new product introductions. And there can be two hundred parties who have a role in introducing that new product. That’s what makes is complex and challenging.
How are the economics of the business – similar or different than other publishers?
Steve: Again they are more alike than different – we have similar cost structure for printing books. They are only different because we don’t pay advances and we have higher staff marketing expense given the number of books we publish (30-35 books a year). The multi-channel marketing model is more expensive. We work more closely with authors which takes time.
We have been profitable for the last four years. We lost some money in 2002 when the book market collapsed after 9/11. But the company is in fairly good financial health.
What have been the biggest accomplishments for Berrett-Koehler in 15 years?
Steve: Right out of the gate we had a best seller called Leadership and The New Science that has sold 350,000 copies. Even more than the level of sales, it was a success because it has been highly influential, it has been a seminal book, and has affected tens of thousands of people about the way they see leadership and management. We have had several successes like that. When Corporations Rule the World was one of the most influential books in the anti corporate movement making people rethink if all this corporate expansion and domination of the world is really what we want. It sold more than 130,000 copies.
Lot of books we have published have sold well as well as influenced many people.
Overall, we have about 27 books have sold over a 100,000 copies. That’s one measure of success. Another measure of success is cultivating this community of people who are trying to practice their work, their business, their leadership in different ways.
What would Berrett-Koehler look like in the future?
Steve: That’s why we are doing the future search. I don’t have the grand vision. There are certain commitments we will stick to. For example, taking care of the interest of all our stakeholder groups – that’s the kind of ground rule that guide us. I don’t know what we are going to be in 5-10-15 years from now. The model of the future search is you bring together all your stakeholder groups – that’s what is going to create the vision. It’s not Steve, a consultant or the executive team that creates the vision.
There are many authors in the LitMinds community and they would love to know what you look for in an author you sign?
Steve: First of all, we look for authors who have bold and new ideas. Second, the content has to stand out in a crowded market, the author has to have a way of conveying those new ideas in a way that will get people excited. Third, authors who have communities that they will be involved with. Fourth, we are looking for authors who do quality work, they are knowledgeable, have real substance, and are experts on their topics. Fifth, they have to be good to work with and will do their part. They will flourish under our approach and not say “this is too much of a burden.”
Praveen and I have just returned from an 8-day visit to jolly ol’ England – there to visit local literary landmarks, and represent The Booksmith as part of the American delegation of booksellers at the London Book Fair. 
On the heels of Litquake comes another San Francisco "literati" festival... the San Francisco JCC is hosting its annual SF Jewish Bookfest this upcoming weekend on Sunday, November 4th.