An Interview with Brian O’Leary.


Over the past few months I have met some amazing people in the publishing industry. One of them is Brian O’Leary. As a publishing veteran with 25 years of operational, management and consulting experience, Brian is an expert in his field. Here he shares how he got to where he is today and his thoughts on the evolution of publishing.

Bio
Brian O’Leary is founder and principal of Magellan Media, a management consulting firm that works with publishers seeking support in content operations, benchmarking and financial analysis.

In addition to his consulting assignments, O’Leary is the author of a research report on the impact of free content and digital piracy on paid book sales, as well as the editor and primary contributor for a study of the use of XML in book publishing.  Both reports were published by O’Reilly Media in 2009.

Before becoming a consultant in 1998, Brian served as senior VP and associate publisher with Hammond Inc., an internationally recognized geographic reference publisher.  Responsible for database development, editorial content, production, and operations, Brian restructured editorial operations to benefit from the firm’s prior technology investments.

Brian came to Hammond after a 12-year career overseeing production and distribution operations at several of Time Inc.’s weekly magazines.  He earned an A.B. in chemistry from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Tell us about Magellan Media and how it got started. 
Magellan Media is a consulting firm that helps book, magazine and association publishers better handle the creation, management and dissemination of content.  We do mostly tactical work - “faster, better, cheaper” - and work with publishers to address a variety of challenges and opportunities presented by the need for digital content.

The firm was launched in 1998, after I had been working in magazine and book publishing for about 15 years.  I have a somewhat unusual background in publishing, having started with weekly magazines and then switched to reference publishing.  I see a lot of overlap there, something not always evident to those working on one format or the other.

That experience has helped us bring different perspectives to planning for and managing cross-platform content.  It also has helped us work with associations, whose publishing activities often include a mix of periodicals as well as books.

How did your career in publishing begin?
After business school, I was hired by Time Inc. to work on operations for Time International.  The international edition was printed, bound and distributed from eight different locations each week, and I was responsible for coordinating editorial and advertising requirements with the eight printing plants.

What led you to the kind of work you are doing now?
I’ve always been interested in how things work and hopefully how they might work better.  Between 1983 and 1995, I was able to work on three different weekly magazines: Time, People and the launch of Entertainment Weekly.

Frequency is one of the good things about weekly magazines.  If you want to try something, an opportunity might be as little as seven days away.  We had many chances to try new or different approaches to our part of publishing, and I learned a great deal over that time.

When I left Time Inc. I joined a small reference publisher, Hammond Inc., that is now part Langenscheidt.  Because the company was small, managing our part of the business was very “hands-on”.  The two experiences combined to make me think I could earn a living helping publishers fix things.

Can you talk more about how you work with publishers to address the challenges and opportunities that the need for digital content presents?
Most publishers have well-established workflows to handle print products, so we typically start by finding out how they work today.  Sometimes we’ll recommend changes in how they make print products, even before we talk about digital opportunities.

We also talk to clients and potential clients about their goals.  It’s accepted that everyone wants to be digital, but the reasons vary.  It could be that one publisher wants to make it easier to create e-books; another publisher may be thinking about creating digital content to use in an app.

We usually recommend one or two big things and a range of smaller things to change or do.  Publishers, particularly smaller ones, often have a hard time making a lot of changes at once, so we try to focus our clients’ attention on a limited number of important initiatives.  We also check back in after each assignment ends to see how the recommendations are taking hold.

Where do you see publishing heading in the next 3 to 5 years? What should publishers be doing now to prepare for those changes?
Well, it’s certainly a time of significant change for publishing. The tools used to create, manage and distribute content have never been cheaper, and many good resources are available for free as open-source alternatives.

This means that all publishers are competing against both established players and new entrants at the same time.  The newer players often have much lower costs than we’re used to, making them potentially tough competitors.

More and more content is coming into the market, so publishers are fighting for readers’ time and attention as much as anything.  When services like Google Editions come online, the struggle will become even more pronounced.

I’ve been thinking lately that publishers need to work more aggressively on creating agile content that can be discovered and easily reused or recombined.  Creating content that is sold in one format just won’t be cost-effective in the future.

I also think publishers need to think more about making their content accessible digitally, either directly or through third parties, in ways that lets readers compile and consumer content in their own ways.  The days of format-driven distribution of content are probably coming to an end.

Who do you think is doing interesting work in publishing right now?
I think there are lots of interesting experiments and models.  I like magazines like the Economist, Harvard Business Review and People for their ability to produce publications that readers pay good money to receive.

I also like Bloomberg, which has been a client, for its ability to grow a significant content business by leveraging its reporting and research across multiple platforms.  They may have been the only company that could buy BusinessWeek as a going concern.

Among book publishers, I like O’Reilly Media for its book-content subscription service, Safari.  They also participated in our piracy research, another sign of their willingness to look at macro issues affecting publishing.

Richard Nash, formerly with Soft Skull, has been working hard to launch a new and different imprint, Cursor.  Along with Bob Stein, who runs the Institute for the Future of the Book, Nash was named by Utne Reader as one of 75 people who are changing our world for the better.  That’s not too shabby.

This isn’t an exclusive list, and I don’t know every good idea or interesting contributor.  One of the things I like about publishing is its ability to attract smart and motivated people.  I’m sure many of them are busy doing stuff we’ll benefit from in the not-too-distant future.

Learn more about Brian O’Leary at http://www.magellanmediapartners.com/. Follow him on twitter @brianoleary.