Episode 57: Phil Madans on Book Publishing Next and the Importance of Metadata

Phil Madans is a seasoned publishing executive with over 42 years of experience in trade publishing, including more than a decade as Executive Director of Digital Publishing Technology at Hachette Book Group.

Throughout his career, Phil has championed the use of technology to enhance—not complicate—the publishing process, bringing deep expertise in publishing systems, metadata, workflow optimization, and digital strategy. He has led major enterprise system implementations, overseen the integration of large-scale acquisitions, and played a pivotal role in developing and promoting industry standards. Phil has been an active member of the publishing community, particularly the Book Industry Study Group, where he has volunteered for more than twenty years and currently serves on its Board of Directors.

Phil is available for consulting engagements and can be reached on LinkedIn or at philipjmadans@gmail.com.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent
This month on the Booksparts Podcast, I have the pleasure of talking to Phil Madans. We’ve known each other for a long time. Phil’s a seasoned publishing executive with 42 years of experience in the publishing world. Phil, thanks for joining me today on the podcast.

Phil Madans
Oh, thanks for having me. It’s really a pleasure to be here.

Joshua Tallent
So I’d like, before we dive into our conversation, just briefly, give people a little background on your publishing experience, and what’s happened recently, and kind of changes in your publishing process.

Phil Madans
After 42 years, I’ll try to be as brief as possible. I’ve had a very checkered career in publishing. I started back in the 80s. Early 80s, I started out really as an editorial assistant at Crown publishers, working for the managing editor as her editorial assistant. And that’s actually where I got started. In technology, oddly enough. As an editorial assistant for the managing editor who was in charge of the publication list, I was in charge of maintaining it, which, as you can imagine, is a very, very enjoyable job. Basically, what I had to do every week out of the editorial meetings was update the list, which I had to do on a typewriter with scotch tape and white out and a scissors. When books moved around, I had to cut out where they were in the old list and tape them where they belonged and white out dates and move it around. It wasn’t that bad. We had photocopiers. I didn’t have to go and do it on a mimeograph machine, which is where I had to make copies when I was in grad school. This is what I had to do every week. And it took hours and hours. Then in one day an old early word processor showed up, which was about the size of a chest freezer with eight inch discs and a little 12 inch monitor, which was character based, monochrome. So it was nothing like we had now. I was chosen to be a test case on this along with the person in production who did the production scheduling. We climbed onto it like it was a life raft, because all of a sudden with this, even though it’s not very easy to use, this cut down what I had to do every week from hours to minutes, and that’s where I first realized what technology could do, and that’s really where this became my mantra, where technology should empower people and not hinder them. And I carried that with me throughout my career. When I left crown, I really got into operations at Crown. I wasn’t an editorial assistant anymore. I was doing acquisitions, and I was handling the internal list for outlet publishing. I went over to Warner books, where I was the director of inventory management, and there I found it again, where they were just using these analog systems. I was doing purchase orders for the mass market, and I was in charge of the book list. I was in charge of the print histories for all the books. And this was kept on index cards outside of my office. So whenever we did a PO, my assistant had to take the PO, grab this index card, put it into a typewriter, and then put a new line in for the next printing, and then update the print history. So anybody needs to know when a book was coming in, when a reprint would come in, they would either have to call us or go to these index cards and look it up. And they were doing these POS and if they had to change it, they had to white it out and redo it. And I said, My God, this was Warner Communications. And this is when Warner merged with Time Inc, and became Time Warner. And, this is crazy, billion dollar company, and we were working on this old computer, mainframe computer, and as soon as we got PCs, I taught myself databases, and I automated it. But that really didn’t help us, because they couldn’t get into these databases. And this was in the 90s when intranets were getting popular. So I taught myself HTML and some scripting, and I created an intranet so people could go in and do it. And that was the course of my career. After a while, I just really started getting more into the technology. And in those times, IT were all back office. It was all inventory and order processing. But the people who had to deal with this stuff in the publishing side, on the business side, started putting together their own little applications on their desktop PCs, and I would help them. And this is how I learned the business. This is how I learned publishing. And after a while, I became more interested in that than the job that I was doing. And so I went to the president of the company, I went to my boss, who was at that point the CFO, and I said, you know, I really like doing this better than what I was doing when I was doing the inventory management. And I think I could be more helpful doing this. And they thought that was a good idea and I became probably the first business analyst that they had there, because I could translate what was going on from the business side to the IT side. And they were getting to the point where they weren’t supporting. They had, like, 100 of these little databases going on, and they were looking to build these enterprise wide systems, like a Title Management system or po system, or something like that. So I started transitioning over to IT. And this was at the point when digitizing was becoming very big, and we were building our first asset management system. And so then I got over into IT, and that started me over into that thing. And at that point I started getting into metadata, because that’s what runs all these systems. And we found that all of our systems which were built internally, had all of this data, and they weren’t talking to each other, and all of this data was different in all these systems. For instance, author names. In one system, they’re all in one field, first name and last name, and another system they were fielded, you know, and in one system, they’re uppercase and lowercase. And my system, they’re all uppercase. And we realized that we had to bring all this stuff together. So that’s how I got involved in that, because I can translate from the business over into IT. That’s how I got involved with BISG, I started into that. I was involved when ONIX 1.0 came out from the AAP. I was involved in that, because this is when Amazon was getting installed, and bnn.com was getting involved, and they wanted this metadata, and they wanted to get it digitally. And so I got involved in that. I became the metadata guy and I got involved in BISG. I got involved with standards. That’s really where I started with standards. I was the identification committee. I became the Chair of that, and the metadata committee and a number of other committees. I started a publishing systems, a department at hBg, and we did a product po system, then we did a Title Management system. And then I got involved in integrating systems and redesigning workflows and processes and all that stuff. Then I started bringing new technologies. Got involved in trying to do contextual keywords and things like that, and bringing in NetGalley, and starting doing implementations. Then we started buying companies, and I started doing that kind of thing and bringing data over. And eventually I joined the board of BISG, and I’m about to start my second term. And then this past April, I retired from hBg. They just got tired. Started buying companies, and I had to start integrating the company. So I became kind of a jack of all trades. And I became, when anybody had a question, they came and talked to me.

Joshua Tallent
It’s a great history. And the fact that you’ve been working in the technology side of publishing for so long, and have seen that transition that so many publishers have made over the years. You can speak to those struggles and the frustrations and even the potential concerns going forward as well, right?

Phil Madans
Yeah. I came along at a very good time, because technology was advancing at a very fast pace, and I was advancing at that same pace and getting involved in all these things as it were advancing. I was also at a good company. I have to say that. A lot of people move from from company to company. It’s very natural in publishing to move from company to company, move forward. I did the exact opposite. I stayed in the same company, and they kept moving around as things changed, and the company encouraged that. So I was very lucky. It was good timing. Timing is everything, as they always say. And I was able to do that and keep moving forward. And so, that was good. It led to a really good career. I have to thank them for that. And a lot’s changed. It’s certainly a very different industry now than it was when I first got it started.

Joshua Tallent
So speaking of that, and kind of leaning on your experience with BISG and the work that is happening on the board of BISG, we’ve been working for the last couple of years now on Book Publishing Next, and you’ve taken a pretty pivotal role in that. In that effort, could you give our listeners a little overview of what Book Publishing Next is, and then maybe an explanation of kind of what the goal is of that movement?

Phil Madans
The goal is to bring the book publishing supply chain up to date, up to speed. The supply chain was really designed back when it was really a very analog supply chain for print, and it worked very well. It started in the 70s, and worked its way through when BISG and it was built for print. It wasn’t built for digital. But everything changed when the internet came along. Everything changed. And it really hasn’t kept pace with that. We work at a much faster pace. Now, ONIX is wonderful. It really saved the industry. I don’t know where we would have been without ONIX, without the digital processes that we have. Now, if you think back to the pandemic, we survived the pandemic because we could move data the way that we did, and we could get the data out, and we had the process to do that. I don’t know where we would have been if we didn’t have those kind of processes, but it’s all changed now, and if you look at the speed with which we need data to move now, which we need the transparency for the data to move now, everything changed with the pandemic. We moved online, we moved into new marketing. We moved into new platforms, where we’re selling books, on Facebook, on Tiktok. We need to get that information out faster. ONIX is wonderful for a lot of things. ONIX is not only about getting things online. There’s a lot of back office things that ONIX handles, returns, discount codes, selling territories and things like that. But for the marketing aspect of books, that needs to be handled a lot faster. And the thing with ONIX and the things with a lot of the other parts of the supply chain, we need to get that data out faster, like with returns, with the information that goes back and forth between the suppliers, the book printers, and the public, between the book purchase and the publishers on how you’re scheduling books. You’ve had a lot of issues in the past few years with scheduling printings. A lot of people have had problems with that. But if you can have more transparency in the data that’s going back and forth, you can make decisions faster, and it’s just not happening as fast as you can have it. And one of the issues is you have a lot of legacy systems and they don’t talk to each other. The biggest obstacle to change is inertia. The bigger the rock, the harder it is to get rolling. And if you have something that that seems to be working, you don’t want to change it. For instance, ONIX three, oh, it took so long for people to move to ONIX three, because ONIX 2.1 was working for people. So why change it? But ONIX three is so much more efficient for digital, for making changes to part of an ONIX record, but to get people to make that move, because it seems to be working for them and I understand it, but the bigger players didn’t want to move because it costs money, and they have other things that they need to do, and it still isn’t working. That’s still not being adopted in some places, but we need to do that. We really do need to do that, and we need to keep moving on that. And I think the biggest area for change for this is not in the big publishers, the big publishers have enough people to throw at this so they can keep it going. But I think the biggest opportunity is just for the smaller publishers, the mid size publishers and the smallest publishers, because this gives them more opportunity, and it levels the playing field. I’ll tell you this story. I heard this story 25 years ago when I was chairing a task force on barcodes, of all things, and it’s really in the supermarket space. The supermarkets and the general retailers didn’t want to take digital data, and this was a big supermarket, one of the major chains, and they had this setup. They had a data center. They had 50 people in it, and all they did was input data all day long, for their new products, for pricing, for their deals and their discounts and everything like that. And they didn’t want to take digital data, because they said it works fine for us.

Joshua Tallent
Manually entering data into database. So they would get print copies of things, or data, spreadsheets, whatever.

Phil Madans
And they would just put it in and it would go out to their stores, and this is how they did it, and it works. We have training set up. We have vacation set up. Everything’s backed up, and they didn’t. And there was this other chain in the Midwest. It was a small chain, made 15 stores, or something like that. They jumped on this idea. Said this is going to level the playing field. I can get my information to my stores faster than these guys can do it. And that’s what they did, and that’s what that’s what digital data can do.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, I think the biggest problem I see with all of that is, in many ways, it’s a software, an IT led movement. If a publisher is big enough to have an IT department, that department’s responsible for a bunch of different things, and implementing new software or updating changes to software. If you’re building your own software as a company, because a lot of larger publishers, especially, build their own databases, they build their own systems. Now they’re in the software business, and that’s not necessarily their main bread and butter. It’s just “we’ve done it because we’ve had to”, if I have to go fix that thing or change that system that I built 10 years ago that’s working really well. Not only is it an investment of time, but it’s also not in my normal everyday responsibilities for job. So I might have to rebuild the whole thing, because it hasn’t been touched in 10 years, and it’s just working, sitting there doing its thing. So it’s those big questions, right? For even the bigger companies, it’s a big question of, how do I implement something new when the things are really working, and where’s the resource? Who’s the resource for that, and how much am I going to put have to invest in order to make it happen? Where’s the ROI on that? So if you were talking to a publisher today, large or small, what would you say is the actual ROI on the work we’re doing in book publishing next. What would be the biggest thing you could say to a publisher, the most kind of the selling but the biggest selling point to say the efforts of book publishing next are beneficial for this reason?

Phil Madans
You have to look at the future. You really have to look at the future and it’s not tomorrow and it’s not the next day. You’ve got to look at where you’re going to be in five years, 10 years down the road, and where is the ROI, where are we going? We are still in a very siloed supply chain. Every publisher that I know is looking to sell outside of the publishing supply chain. Every bookstore isn’t selling books. They’re selling everything else. They’re selling merchandise. We are not in general retail. There’s a lot of obstacles. We looked at general retail before and there are obstacles for us to do that. We only get into general retail through the independent wholesalers. That’s who handles it, like a readerlink. They’re the ones that supply it. But I know even before I left, we want to get out there. All of our special markets is looking to get out there, because there’s a wide world. Go into any bookstore during the pandemic. I bought a book from one of my local independent booksellers, and I said, it’s too bad your closing. And he said, well, the worst thing about being closed is all my general merch, their markups and general merch are much better than they get from books, like, 30% and that’s what was killing them, not the books. The books are bad, they were sorry they were being closed. But that was not a big part oftheir income. We have this tiny little bridge that gets us into the general market. If we can move past that. You know one of the biggest obstacle is? We put prices on our books. They don’t like that out in the general retail world, because in the general retail world, you change the price, you have to put a different identifier on that product. And we don’t do that with merchandise. So, you know, there’s that kind of stuff. And I think we have to start looking at that if we really want to get out there. And just get out of this little world that we’re in.

Joshua Tallent
And so, speaking, of the smaller publishers, they’re in that same space, right? They’re trying to figure out, what’s the next thing that I need? What can I do to actually benefit from these changes in the bigger publishers? Just like looking at the future, this is where you want you need to go if you want to be able to sell books in a broader way. But small publishers want the same thing. So what would you say to a small publisher, then, who is saying I don’t have the internal resources to build stuff. I’m going to have to try to figure out how to be more productive with the small resources I have. How can they be more engaged in the Book Publishing Next idea.

Phil Madans
Own your data. I don’t think any company really pays as much attention to their data as they should, even the big publishers. They don’t. They’re starting to, I’m seeing more publishers like putting in metadata departments, not leaving it to their first, their newest employees to take it over, who get two days of training and said, here, put your metadata in there. But we did a survey at BISG. We’re asking people about metadata and how they operated. Some people, they create it once, and then the last time they look at it. Some people, they have distributors. They have third party distributors. They depend on them to do their metadata. You can’t do this. This is the most important thing, especially now today. This is what goes out and sells your books. There are no more catalogs. There’s no more stuff. You’re sending this stuff out early. It goes out there, and it’s not easy to change once it’s out there. It’s not like the old days where the bookstores own the customers. That’s not happening anymore. So when you’re going out on book talk, you’re going out on Facebook, you’re reaching out, and you’re reaching your readers directly. And you need to own that and that’s what’s going to happen. And, that’s what’s happening in the big publishers are doing that now. It’s all marketing now, that’s seriously where it is. Editors are marketers. That’s happening now, for good or bad, I’m an old fashioned guy. That’s how I got in there. It’s changed. Now that’s what it is. There’s too many books and there’s too many outlets, and if we really want to reach your reader,you’re doing it through your metadata. Just glom onto it and think about when you’re doing your metadata. Think about, how do you buy a book? What do you look at when you’re buying a book? It’s like we used to do these metadata courses at hBg. I used to do them with the managing editors and the marketing people. I used to put up menus for takeout. And I said, look at this. Look at this menu. And I used to doctor them up. And I said, here’s a menu. It’s got a nice picture. It tells you what it is, how much it is, what’s inside it, what makes up this dish. Then you do another one. The prices are wrong. It doesn’t tell you what it is, there’s no picture. It looks terrible. Things like that. Where you gonna order from, right? It’s the same thing with your books. This is what people are going to they’re doing it on the phone. They’re doing it online. Hopefully they’re going into bookstores. I wish they would. I love bookstores. I love independent bookstores. But today, the younger people, this is what they’re doing. This is where they’re interacting with your books. Make them look nice, right?

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So, the final question, and final kind of statement here is to say the metadata matters for everybody, big or small. And if you’re focusing on that first, it’s going to make whatever transition in the future, whenever the supply chain gets fixed, however it gets fixed, whatever that process looks like over the next five or 10 years, hopefully even sooner, as those changes are happening, it’s not going to be any benefit to you if your data is bad. If you have bad quality data, it’s not going to help you. The changes that might happen in the industry and making data flow more quickly or more efficiently, or into different channels. It’s not going to be of any benefit if your product data is out of date.

Phil Madans
No, it’s got to be good and it has to get there fast, because it changes fast. Any opportunity, if something happens, your author, gets picked up somewhere, but it has to get there fast, because it happens fast, and the window is small. Calvin Shrill has had the greatest line and said, the shelf life of your average hardcover is the same shelf life as a quart of milk. Don’t have a lot of time. You gotta do it quickly.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So thinking about the Book Publishing Next project at BISG, we’re in the process of trying to find some organizations, some companies in the industry, who are willing to kind of put the rubber to the road and put some effort behind it. Can you describe a little bit, kind of what the next steps are for Book Publishing Next, and where we’re going with that project?

Phil Madans
I think we need to get out there and talk to people in the industry, get some sponsorships, get some support behind it. It’s going to be a long this is going to be a long range project. It’s not going to be easy. Like I said, it’s hard to get these things moving. Book industry moves very slowly. I think the biggest places to go are publishers follow the bookstores. It’s natural type of thing. This has always been the case, and they also follow the vendors. That’s where we go. So I think that, we’re going to talk about this internally, with the board and with Brian O’Leary, who’s our executive director. I think we have to get the word out and try to get people to see where this is going and how important it is to keep going. We have to be a little more quicker, and we have to really build the next supply chain, as every other supply chain is trying to be. Look at what’s happened in retail, and look what’s happened in that and what’s happened with it, and I think it’s been successful. I think that’s what’s happened. So, hopefully we can do that.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, hopefully we can. And I think we will. And what I’ll do, for those of you listening to the podcast and you’re wondering kind of, what is Book Publishing Next in a more granular way, or you’re interested in learning more about the project and joining in, obviously, it is an effort of BISG. Both Phil and I serve on the Board of BISG, so we’re both pretty heavily involved in that. But I would recommend that you read the white paper. I guess the white paper is what we call it, but a project report, essentially, from the Book Publishing Next project that Phil worked on extensively. I think you actually basically wrote it or edited it like the one of the main people. So I’ll share a link with that in the show notes. I highly recommend you read that and join the working group. Join the committees at BISG, and join the working group for Book Publishing Next. Join BISG, yeah. Well, you have to be part of BISG. It’s integral to the work we do in the industry.

Phil Madans
It’s part of the publishing industry, it really is. I mean, I gotta tell you something, I learned more at BISG than I learned working in publishing, because everybody in publishing is part of that, and that’s really where you learn about the industry.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, it really is. So we’ll put links in the show notes. Phil, thank you so much. I think I probably should have you on to get another time to talk about other things, but it’s a great conversation, and really important. And again, for kind of a last little plug here, metadata matters, right? It’s your most important, non-people resource, is what I always say. So as a publisher, it’s very important that you have good quality data, that you keep your data up-to-date, and that you have systems in place to make that data flow into the supply chain as quickly as you can.

Joshua Tallent
And if you want to talk to me, you can get me on LinkedIn. philipjmadans@gmail.com. I’m available for consulting. Like I said. I’m retired now, but I’m certainly happy to talk to people.

Joshua Tallent
Definitely. Yeah, we’ll put those links in the show notes as well.

Phil Madans
Okay, and thank you for having me. It’s been it’s been a pleasure.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, it’s been great to have you on I appreciate it. Well, that’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating on Apple podcast or Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. And also, we appreciate it when you 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 us and getting smarter about your books.