Episode 33: Michele Cobb on Publishing Associations and Awards Programs

Michele Cobb is the Executive Director of Audio Publishers Association and PubWest, publisher of AudioFile Magazine and MMB media, and a partner at Forte Business Consulting. Needless to say, she is a very busy woman and joins us at the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss what it’s like juggling so many hats at once.

The Coronavirus pandemic threw a wrench in many areas of the publishing industry. Michele shares how significantly the pandemic impacted how her associations handle publishing conferences and award ceremonies. Michele also discusses the transition from online back to in-person conferences as well as the judging process for her many awards, including PubWest’s Book Design Awards, the APA’s Audio Awards and The Ambies, run by the Podcast Academy.

Follow Michele Cobb on Twitter @mleecobb or visit her business website at www.fortebc.com. To learn more about the book associations mentioned, visit www.pubwest.org, www.audiopub.org, and www.podcastacademy.com.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent 

This week on the BookSmarts Podcast, I’m happy to have Michele Cobb, who is currently the Executive Director of both the Audio Publishers Association and PubWest. She is a partner at Forte Business Consulting, which provides business development services for the publishing industry. And she’s also the publisher of both AudioFile Magazine and MMB Media. Michele, thanks for joining me.

Michele Cobb 

Well, thanks for having me.

Joshua Tallent 

It’s great to have you here. So it’s really fun, because I’ve known you for quite a long time. And I think a lot of people in the industry know your name and probably your face from just seeing you around so many conferences, and all the work you’re doing. I’d like to start off our little conversation here by just having you tell us a little bit about the history of how you became Executive Director at two publishing associations. That’s a lot of work. So how did you get into that role?

Michele Cobb 

Well, for a long time, I was a volunteer with the Audio Publishers Association. So, I was on the board, I think since 2001, and a number of years ago, we had decided that it would make sense for the first time in a long time to get an Executive Director who knew about our industry, because we were working with management companies that weren’t really well versed in books, and it didn’t always work out well for us. So we decided to do a search for an Executive Director. I was President of the association at the time and I helped recruit a number of people that I thought would be good to apply for the job. And I was a freelancer at the time, I had left the publisher I had been working with, I had briefly sold printer labels and ink, and after a couple of months of that, people kept calling me to sort of give me these freelance jobs. And I thought, if I stop trying to work in manufacturing, and try to put together a consulting company that just takes a bunch of little projects, I can probably do fine, which is exactly what happened. But when we came up with, you know, what the job description is for the Executive Director of the Audio Publishers Association, I stayed out of that process because I was a freelancer. And they said, we think you might want to apply. So I said, you put all that together, and then I’ll think about it, and when they came back with the list, I was like, “Oh, wait, this is everything that I’m doing for free. So perhaps I should apply.” And I had recruited some really great people to apply for the job so there was stiff competition. It was quite a rigorous process of having to write essays and do all these things, and have all these interviews. Eventually, they decided yes, to go ahead and give it to me. We were working with a management company at the time that, again, it wasn’t the best match for us but we knew some people that had worked with APA before, would join Alaska’s. And so when that relationship started to break down, and that company is actually out of business, so I’m glad we left them, Joanna and I reconnected and she sort of created the rest of the back end for us. So, you know, we have a team of people that work on multiple accounts and that’s how we came to PubWest. So for a number of years, we’re doing the APA, the pandemic hit and, you know, I’m a freelancer with a lot of freelance clients so I got a little nervous. And I saw the job for PubWest come open and I had been to the conference for a number of years, I really liked that group of people. So I thought, “Okay, let me turn to my team and say, Hey, should we try to take on another Association?” And we all got together and said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” So there’s three of us that work on both the APA and PubWest. The APA is a much bigger account so we have more people that work on that and we do other Association work as well. But Joanna and I joked for years that the last thing we ever want to do is create a Management Association. And it turns out, we did, because we also work on the Podcast Academy. So, you know, that’s okay. We just are using economy of scales to understand software that is appropriate and how to do different things and it’s through really great groups of people so we’re really lucky to be interacting with great minds from various sides of publishing.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so tell me a little bit about what does it mean to be an Executive Director of a book association. What skills do you need? What are the things that you’re bringing to the table to those positions?

Michele Cobb 

Well, a lot of it is herding cats, I have to say. So I’m a Virgo. I always talk about me being a Virgo, because that means I’m super organized and that’s really, really helpful. A lot of it is just having to interact with a wide variety of groups. So executives to, you know, running committees, and you just have to be able to, sort of, juggle a lot of balls, and be organized, and be able to help groups of people make decisions. So I’m not the decision maker, but I’m helping the group get to a decision. And that’s something that I never thought I would be good at but it turns out, I’m doing all right.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that’s actually a really interesting thing about working in associations. I’ve been really active in BISG and IBPA for a long time and those organizations like that, publishing organizations, tend to be very much of herding cats situation. It’s very much bringing more people to the table, getting more voices involved, trying to get more people involved, because the more voices you have, the better the output will be and the outcome will be in whatever the group is doing.

Michele Cobb 

And I was gonna say, also, you know, the other thing you’re really doing is you’re creating community.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah.

Michele Cobb 

So you are trying to, you know, yes, get more members, but engage more members, get more people involved. So a lot of what I’ve turned out to end up doing is work on online events, which are great for creating community and great for getting people involved. So I think the pandemic and turning people towards that type of interaction has actually been good for book associations. And, you know, I’m on the BISG Book Association Council so it’s all the executive directors that have been getting together and we have just had great collaborations that I think have been really important in community building outside each individual association. So I have to thank, you know, Brian O’Leary for really bringing all that together. And I’ve just seen so much benefit come out of that as well.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah. So what’s it like, though, to plan an event in person after having built all that community online? You know, there’s a big difference between publishing events that are in person and publishing events that are online. I think people tend to be actually more engaged in person and the conversations are different in person. So, what’s it like doing that post-COVID?

Michele Cobb 

I think actually, there is a lot of engagement in the online conferences as well. I will say that. It’s more equalizing; you can get more people there more people involved in the conversation. So I think online has that advantage. But in person, the biggest changes for the first year, because we did a PubWest live conference in February of 2022. So what do you think everything we did was all about? What’s your vaccine policy? What’s your masking, and so that has really changed within a year. So, you know, people are less concerned about that depending on the organization. The voice talent is much more concerned on the Audio Publishers Association level with the policies than, you know, the publishers were and the vendors were at PubWest, which I think is just interesting, and has to do with, you know, voice talent really work off their voice, so they don’t want to get sick. I do have to remind them that they always got sick when they came to the conference prior to COVID, as well. A lot of the differences really are just the changes in dealing with vendors because the hotels have been understaffed – just how much you have to kind of stick on it and follow up has been important. We’ve had good experiences in person, but you can definitely feel a lot of empathy for hotel staff. They don’t have the level of staffing that they had prior to COVID  and, you know, they’re doing their best and you just feel for them because, you’re like, wait, you were downstairs as my catering manager, and now you’re here at the restaurant as my waiter and that’s a little intense. Or you’re running the elevator. So, my heart really has gone out to the people that we’re working with at the hotels on this, but there’s such an appetite for being in person. You know, in early February of 2023, you came to PubWest, we did that in conjunction with the Book Manufacturers Institute. Another example of collaborating between book associations, and there was such a hunger to have conversation amongst each other. That was really, really exciting. You know, we’ve been through a trauma as a society and now we’re willing to talk about it. We’re willing to talk about the changes and we’re willing to say, hey, based on what has changed, how can we help each other? Yeah, it’s a bit different to plan in person, but there’s just such a joy of being in person that it’s really, really nice.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, I think there’s a lot better connection you can make with individual people. If you’re online, and you’re in a group of people in zoom or something, and so you just get, you know, that interaction that you’re able to get with the group. And you know, mostly it’s just listening to someone talk. But when you’re in person, you’re sitting around a table, having lunch together, you can meet new people that you never would have met otherwise, you can make connections, and for most publishers that I’ve talked to, one of the biggest things they want to know is: what’s everyone else doing?

Michele Cobb 

Yes!

Joshua Tallent 

How can I learn from the other people in the industry, my colleagues, my peers, and what can I do to grow my business or to change the issue that we’re running into? Or how do people handle that, you know, that big west coast retailer and how do they fix the problems that they see in their manufacturing processes or supply chain issues they’re running into. Those are things that you can get a lot better connection to other people from in person than you can in most online settings, at least from what I’ve seen.

Michele Cobb 

Yeah, I would totally agree with that. You know, there are different ways in which you can interact in the online version, and you can meet people from a wider variety of places. But, as I said, you know, we had a great in-conjunction conference with BMI. And, you know, here we are just a few weeks after that conference, we’ve already started talking about dates to do this again with BMI. We already know that we want to invite other associations to join us and to think about being in collaboration. Because, as you say, that face to face, “hey, what have we learned? How can we help each other? What can I learn from you?” is really important.

Joshua Tallent 

So let’s change tacks a little bit and talk about all of the different awards programs that you’ve run. So I think there’s three, right, different awards programs that you’re running at the different across the organization? So talk to me about what they are, and let our listeners hear, kind of, what they’re about. And I’d love to hear – how do you handle that? How do you handle the actual, you know, operational side of running those awards programs?

Michele Cobb 

Well, that’s where it’s really important to have a team, let me just say that, first of all. So for PubWest, we run the Book Design Awards. So, publishers actually physically mail a copy, or several copies, of their title for the different categories that they want to put it in. And all of those books are hand brought to a location. And judges come in in person and touch them, look at them, feel them, talk to each other, and award the honors, gold, silver, bronze, based on those in-person interactions with the book itself.

Joshua Tallent 

I just have to say, that’s crazy. That to get everybody in one room. I’ve done award stuff before and it’s hard to get people in one place even virtually. So, that’s actually really interesting to get them in the same place.

Michele Cobb 

Well, it was much harder last year and COVID, when you know, everyone came in to actually touch and feel and make comments, but couldn’t be in the same room at that time. So you’re cycling people through on a part-time basis, as it were. But this year, there was a lot more of that able to have a conversation and interact, which was really nice around the Book Design Awards. And PubWest does the Rittenhouse Award, which is something that, you know, recognizes people who have worked in publishing, specifically in the western portion of the country, although PubWest is not limited to publishers in the West, and they do the Hall of Fame some years and award scholarships. There’s actually an awards committee that does a lot of work for PubWest to make sure that all of those things are happening. But yes, we hand, poor Janet packs up all the books into a car and drives them somewhere to be looked at, and then they are shipped to wherever the location of the awards is with the conference. And some people can touch them and feel them and see them, which is kind of fun.

Joshua Tallent 

And so for the Audio Publishers Association, you also have other awards of programs as well.  What are the things they’re looking for? I’m assuming there’s obviously quality issues, but with narration and other things, what are the standards you’re looking for?

Michele Cobb 

Yes. So we have the Audio Awards that is, you know, a huge scale in comparison, luckily, mostly digital these days. So it used to be that people would ship in, I think it was six or eight copies, of the CDs. And those would go out to the various judges. I’m pretty sure was eight copies of all their titles on CD. Now, for the most part, it is done digitally. So what we do is, the publishers submit them, this is judged online by a group of judges who are not involved with publishing. So they are librarians, they are booksellers, they are people that are super users. And we have over 200 people that are putting the title through rounds and rounds of judging. So publishers submit, it goes through a judges round to reduce the pool, and then it goes into a second judges round, where it gets down to five, sometimes six, finalists. Then it goes to a third judges round where those finalists are listened to and the winner is determined from that. So that is a very long process because, you imagine, we had over 1,500 submissions this year. Your average audio book, let’s just use 10 hours, just to be easy math. That is a lot of listening that the judges have to do. So we need a nice, long time to give them the opportunity to do that listening and make their evaluations. Yeah, so because this is an Audio Book Award, they’re definitely listening to the narrator. Does the narrator’s voice match the text? Is their accent correct? Are there things like music and sound effects that are impacting this? And so they’re really doing a deep dive into the performance and production of the title. So maybe the judge doesn’t think that this was the best written book ever but the audio book narration of it was amazing, and so it might get an award, or really what we find his most successful is the amazing marriage of fantastic text and fantastic narration and that’s really what tends to rise to the top. We just released the finalists on February 23rd, a really great list of finalists, and that will be awarded on March 28th in New York City, at Chelsea Piers 60 in the evening, and we’ll stream that on YouTube as well.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s awesome. I’m assuming there are different categories as well. Audiobooks have grown extensively over the years so there’s got to be different categories for things like a full cast narration versus an individual narrator, things like that, right?

Michele Cobb 

That’s correct. So we have lots of genres. We’ve got fiction, nonfiction, mystery, romance, erotica, and then you’ve got a audio drama, that’s where the actors are in that full cast situation. They’re interacting, there’s usually sound effects and music. We have multi-voiced, where you have more than one narrator but they don’t interact, and then we have Best Male and Female, as well as all the different genres that I mentioned.

Joshua Tallent 

You also do a podcast award. What is that about?

Michele Cobb 

Yes, my team and I run the Podcast Academy. We have The Ambies, and that’s an award, and an association that is set up like they do for the Oscars or the Emmys. So it’s an academy, individuals belong, and those individuals actually are doing the voting. So there’s, you know, over 100 Blue Ribbon Panel judges. Those are all members of the association that agree to whittle the pool down. And again, two rounds of judging. And then, right now, all of the members of the academy can judge in any category. On March 7th, that will be announced in Las Vegas with host Larry Wilmore, a podcaster himself, so we’re very excited.

Joshua Tallent 

Well, this is really fun. Anything else that you’re working on that people should know about? I mean, you’re pretty busy as it is and this is spring, right? So you have you have a ton of things going on with all of these different award programs and conferences, APAC is coming up, so there’s a lot of stuff going on already.

Michele Cobb 

Yes, Q1 of each year is intense and when I hit, you know, March 29th, I will be taking a big sigh of relief, because we will have gotten through all the major events. You know, in association work year round, you’re doing things like membership drives, online events, in-person events, and a lot of conferences. So, you know, when it comes to like the American Library Association, I’ll be there on behalf of PubWest and the Audio Publishers Association. I’ll go to podcast conferences. A lot of what I do is travel and talk about the different associations and participate in other people’s conferences as well.

Joshua Tallent 

Well, Michele, I appreciate you taking some time to chat with me. Where can people find out more about you and the work that you’re doing online?

Michele Cobb 

Sure. On Twitter, I’m @mleecobb. And then my personal business website is www.fortebc.com. And then, of course, you can see all the association websites at www.podcastacademy.com, www.pubwest.org, and www.audiopub.org.

Joshua Tallent 

Awesome. We’ll have links to all of those in the show notes. Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking some time.

Michele Cobb 

Always great to see you. One of my favorite conference buddies, Joshua.

Joshua Tallent 

Well, 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 or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast. And we also appreciate when you share the podcast with your colleagues. If you have a topic, suggestion, or feedback about the show, you can email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining me and getting smarter about your books.