Episode 22: George Slowik, Jr. on the 150th Anniversary of Publishers Weekly

This week’s guest is George Slowik, Jr., the Chairman and Owner of PWxyz LLC, the parent company of Publishers Weekly, who joins us to discuss the magazine’s history, the digital archive, and more.

Publishers Weekly was launched in 1872 as a bibliographic source for all publishers to list forthcoming titles. Over its 150 year history, the magazine has continued to provide news and features about the publishing industry, and has even expanded to provide over 9,000 new book reviews every year.

George gives a brief overview of the magazine’s history, discusses the development of the digital archive, the special anniversary edition to be released in April, and his thoughts about the future of publishing. 
You can learn more about Publishers Weekly and sign up for their free email newsletters, at their website, https://www.publishersweekly.com/.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent 

This week on the BookSmarts podcast, I’m excited to have George Slowik, Jr., who is a media specialist and an expert in brand development, business and strategic planning and financial modeling. In April 2010, George acquired Publishers Weekly from Reed Elsevier, and now serves as the chairman and owner of PWxyz LLC, which is the parent company of Publishers Weekly, and also The Millions and BookLife. George, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

George Slowik, Jr. 

Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, this is pretty cool, because in this year, 2022, Publishers Weekly is celebrating 150 years as a publication, that’s a very long time. So a few weeks ago, you guys launched kind of a year-long celebration of this to kind of mark that anniversary. So for those in our audience who may not be very familiar with Publishers Weekly, for whatever reason, I was wondering if you could just share a little bit about the history of the publication.

George Slowik, Jr. 

Sure. The magazine started—was started by Frederick Leopold, who also was the founder of Leopold and Holt, a publishing company. And his intent then was to be a bibliographic source for all publishers to list the titles that were forthcoming, you know, in the next week. And along the way, he got into a little bit of heat about being both a publisher and the publisher of the compendium. But he launched Publishers Weekly, first, as the annual—no, excuse me, the American Literary Gazette and Trade Circular. So that was a mouthful, it didn’t become Publishers Weekly until 1873, and at that point, contained an apostrophe, which it no longer does. Other than that, it’s been published every week, throughout, you know, feast and famine for all those years, in fact the last two years we’ve been publishing remotely. Course, we’re not just a print publication anymore, either. We now have, I think 10 different newsletters at various frequencies all free that people can sign up for on our website. We of course, have a website publishersweekly.com, and a variety of social media. So we’ve done webcasts, ebooks, radio show all sorts of things. And as each medium sort of comes our way we have a go at it in some work, some don’t. And it makes for a very interesting and very busy, small independent company.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah. How many people do you have working on your team right now?

George Slowik, Jr. 

Just under 50. Kind of a deliberate threshold in terms of New York state laws, things get more complicated after that. But with the pandemic. You know, we’ve been working remotely for two years. And we even downsized our office mid-way, came back for a couple of weeks—literally only a few weeks, one day a week for each department. And then as soon as omicron hit, we decided, let’s just let everybody go back to remote. It’s rather amazing to me that with all the deadlines we had, that we were able to pull it off and continue uninterrupted. But when I thought back over PW’s history and the many things that it’s continued to publish through including World Wars and other epidemics, and a variety of political issues and times is rather amazing to me. I enjoy perusing the archive, both physical and digital, simply because, you know, I’ll go down the rabbit hole of an individual topic and find myself quite amused.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that’s great. And you guys have actually been working on digitizing that entire archive. How long has that process taken?

George Slowik, Jr. 

Well, it was my primary goal when we acquired the magazine in 2010. I thought, you know, it needed to be saved as a digital archive. We were fortunate enough to retrieve the physical archive from being destroyed. Reed had pretty well decided it was done. And we had we acquired the business in three days on an as-is basis and then had 60 days to get off of their platform and out of their offices. They were done-done. It’d been a long process for Reed of selling off it’s some 140 magazines. And so, that we were able to capture and keep the physical archive led me to really wanting to and—I think I articulated even before knowing we had a physical archive, because there were other resources we could draw upon, that it was really important that we digitize it and preserve the history. Little did I know the undertaking it would be to scan what has amounted to just under 700,000 pages, 7,700 issues, I guess 7,800 If you go exactly by 150 years—well, for many years, we’ve published 51 simply because we take a break over the Christmas holiday week. But we initially matched up with a vendor and distributor who ultimately went out of business right toward the end of the project. And we had to go into mad scramble to retrieve the files from India, New Zealand, and somewhere in the Midwest. It had gone so far and then almost exploded. But we were able to retrieve it all and are still—it’s a work in progress, we’ll continue to work on it add to it as we publish new copies. Add other elements to it. For example, the show dailies that were produced at the various international shows, I think, have historical significance. The one that was done with Book Expo has not appeared for the last two years for obvious reasons, as the others haven’t either. That was a big hit to our business that we lost the live shows and the show daily newspapers or magazines that existed during those. But the history in them is also quite different and interesting because it is show-specific, whether it is Bologna or London or Frankfurt. And then we have a precursor, progenitor publication that I’m becoming convinced really should be part of our claim, historically—we’ll digitize it either way. It was a publication done by George Childs that existed for 20 years prior to PW and was rolled into PW within its second issue. And so we may date back to 1852 instead of 1872. And we’re still sorting out some of the history around RR Bowker, which Richard Rogers Bowker bought the magazine in 1878 from a then-troubled Leopold, financially troubled, I mean, not—he wasn’t crazy. And he left the publishing business and the “Holt” part became Henry Holt. So there’s a lot of fascinating history—if you like that sort of thing you can go into that rabbit hole as often as you like. The other day, I was watching the Truman Capote tapes, which are a new documentary about Capote, and thought, I wonder how PW treated him over the years. And it was fascinating to see some of the, you know, sightings of him over the years. And so just another, you know, personal interest that I chose to pursue. And that’s what’s interesting about it is it’s the history of publishing in the United States, and through various periods of its time, did more or less international coverage, depending on kind of where it was, in its own history. Certainly a huge touchstone for publishing in general, in the English language, but remember, too, that all—many of the translations flow from English to other languages more so than come the other way. The other way is about 3% of our titles, and fairly limited.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s interesting. I love history. I’m a history buff. So that’s a that’s really great to be able to go back—

George Slowik, Jr. 

Have I got a place for you!

Joshua Tallent 

[laughs] So the archive is available digitally. It’s available on your website. And anyone can go and access that and see that history?

George Slowik, Jr. 

Well, no—that’s possibly going to be the outcome. We’ve marketed as a separate tool that is part of a site license. So major publishers have bought site license so all their employees globally can access everything. And they are different—it can get confusing because if you’re a print subscriber, you definitely get a digital companion edition, which is largely a PDF replica, you know, of that issue. And that goes back about 20 years. Then we also have a paywall, which again, if you’re a subscriber, you get behind the paywall, certain news stories and features are left behind it for a three week period. Other things like the review database, you have to be—you don’t have to be a subscriber to come to, you can come to it via search organically, because it’s of interest to consumers, we now have over 400,000 reviews that relate to about 1.2 million products. In that, you know, there are audio editions and ebooks and large print and God knows—you know, there’s so many ISBN issues now, that and different formats, that it’s really a very rich database. And we do about 9,000 new book reviews a year. So it’s constantly being updated.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s great. So for those, those people who are interested in seeing some of this, obviously, the archives themselves are available. Also Jim Milliot, the Editorial Director is going through and doing a weekly [column], kind of bringing back some of the historical, some of those historical articles. What about that? What is what is the thought process around which articles are being brought back into kind of that weekly, archive?

George Slowik, Jr. 

Looking for things that are both of historical interest, and are just perhaps amusing, or, you know, snapshot of a window in time, and how things were different at that time, in roughly the same period. So it’s not going to match week by week, we were doing that and decided that would cause us to select things that were less important than perhaps something that you know, followed later. There’ll be you know, several that happened within one week that, you know, we’d like to spread out and use. So we’re still selecting. The first issue of January, which is actually the anniversary—the true anniversary—included a story from the first issue in 1872, about publishing in 1871. So it’s kind of an interesting, just starting point to the whole thing. And then the next one, I believe—and I may be missing one in between—covered the Caldecott and Newbery, and one of our early people, I think it was Melcher, established both of those awards.

Joshua Tallent 

One of the next big things that you’ll be doing in the coming months is a special edition of the magazine. And that’s going to be guest edited by Michael Coffey, who was the former co-editorial director of the magazine. So that’s coming in April. What is that special issue going to be covering? What’s the what’s the topic of discussion that you want to bring up most of that?

George Slowik, Jr. 

Since we’ve done issues historically, on the 25-year anniversaries, we have covered various aspects of the publishing history, and we’ll make that available in some collected area. But the focus will be largely on the last 25 years, and the fact that publishing has been, I think, more changed in the last 25 years than probably its entire previous history, at least of Publishers Weekly. There have always been forces that have moved into the market and, you know, upset the applecart, from department stores selling books to radio, TV, video, CDs, but the last 25 years have really been rather remarkable. With the advent of the Internet, and you know, the Chicken Littles of the world, when we bought the magazine, we’re running around saying, “Oh, it’s the end of the book! It’s the end of the book!” you know, and we bought it in the face of that. I never believed that was going to be the reality because we’ve gone through that. I was publisher of PW back in the late 80s, early 90s, and Sony had taken a pass at ebooks that with the Sony Bookman, it was on the success of the Walkman. And it was essentially a debacle. It didn’t work for a lot of reasons, but it did upset the applecart for reference publishing, in terms of you know, when you can access the content of a book, from any angle, you know, or any word it was pretty amazing. You know, it’s kind of when I say any angle, I always remember that when Dorling Kindersley launched their visual books, they wanted them to be random access reads, so you could enter any page from any item and begin. If it was an illustrated book of snakes, you know, you could pick whatever snake you wanted to start with and jump—around or countries or whatever topic they covered. And certainly the CD-ROM and later ebooks have made that, you know, so—and the Internet, of course—made so accessible in terms of access points, that it’s, you know, different experience. But then, you know, there’s the advent of Amazon in those years, there’s the change in audio books, that’s really more recent, that they’ve just ballooned in viability. And, you know, podcasts, the same, you know, did have webcasts and blogs early on, but you know, each art form evolved. So you know, you’re able to produce your show I’m assuming from home and via, you know, a third party tool. I’m at my home, and it all works, and works beautifully.

Joshua Tallent 

It does. So this is uh—this is really awesome. In the couple minutes we have left, I’d like to know what your thoughts are on the next 25 or 150 years of Publishers Weekly. What do you project for the magazine itself—not necessarily for publishing—but project for the magazine itself in the next in the next couple of years, for next 25 years?

George Slowik, Jr. 

Well, like Bill Gates we’ll be implanting a chip in your brain via vaccine. No, seriously, I think that we’ll continue to see a remarkable level of change that’s facilitated by the equal access that is allowed for content via things like the internet, things as yet un-invented, maybe in the metaverse or, you know, NFT’s—there’s any number of things that are already, you know, on the horizon, that we just don’t know, how they’ll manifest themselves. And the critical thing that book publishing brings to the—and I mean, it broadly and when I say book publishing, I mean in all formats—is content, you know, the content at the end of the day, and edited content, I believe, will be more important, not less so. You know, in a world of alternative facts, you know, with people like Beyer retiring, saying, you know, “Well, it’ll come back to facts.” I’m not so sure it will. But the trusted brands that deliver facts become more important. And I continue to believe that. And so journalism may only be found in certain places, but it will be found and it will be under trusted brands that people say, “Okay, I believe what they have to say.” There’s always been a bias brought to any kind of journalism, but became far more evident of late. And far more international, you know, just the global impact of what’s going on. So I think another big thing that will change in publishing is translation. I first bought the magazine in 2010, the smartphone had yet to come out, iPhone was a month away and that was exciting. But also Google Translate was just in the infancy, it was doing 54 languages, you know, people self-correcting the translation, and it’s become quite good. And now there’s a raft of tools that are doing text-to-audio and text-to-translated-audio. And to my eye that’s gonna make, you know, literature and nonfiction, flow more fluidly and in a fascinating way. I don’t particularly know our form. I think print will continue to exist throughout. That’s my drumbeat still, but it will also be accompanied by many other access points and formats. Publishers have gotten to a point where they’re more nimble than they were. And, you know, understand that that’s just fundamental to being in business these days.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah. That’s great. Well, George, thanks for joining me, I really appreciate the conversation. And it’s exciting to see 150 years of, you know, the industry’s main key publication, and you guys are still strong and running fast and doing what you’re doing. I’m looking forward to continuing—I’m a subscriber to our company, and I’m looking forward to continuing reading all of the all the great things that you guys write and, and seeing, like you said, I think there’s a lot of value in having journalism that is focused on publishing specifically. It’s nice to know that we have publications like yours, and some others that are, that are invested in the industry and you know, making sure that everyone is aware of the changes and what’s going on and how things are affecting their businesses and how things might affect them in the future. So thanks a lot for all the hard work that you’re doing. Before I let you go, share with us if you don’t mind, where can people find out more about Publishers Weekly, and anything else that you think is important for people to know.

George Slowik, Jr. 

Probably the easiest access point is the website PublishersWeekly.com. In the upper right hand corner there’s a free newsletters box that you can easily tap into. There’s also a subscriber box so you can get there or you can just spend some time on the website and enjoy what you’re able to access and try it out. Very often when you do a search, you’re going to be driven to Publishers Weekly anyway, if you search an author title or book title, and you’ll be driven to our reviews. So we welcome all comers. We do have a organic consumer audience we didn’t plan on—or we did, but, you know, we haven’t chased, let’s put it that way. And so people should access it. It’s a reliable arbiter of books.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah. And for those of you who are listening to the podcast—I know that most of our listeners work at publishing companies, talk to your publishers about this and see if you have a subscription already, a site license, and get in there and dig into that archive. It sounds like it’s got some really great stuff. I’m excited to go look myself. So George, thanks a lot for joining me. I appreciate you coming on the show. And I look forward to the next 150 years of the publication.

George Slowik, Jr. 

Hear! Hear! We may not see it, but it’ll be there.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please leave a review or rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen to the podcast. And also please share this podcast with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com thanks for joining me and getting smarter about your books!