Welcome to this episode of Inside publishing the series where we interview industry experts on everything publishing
Hi, I'm Eleanor and I'm the podcast lead for the SYP North this year. In this episode I'll be chatting with Dr. Wayne Noble who has been the Digital Director of UCLan publishing alongside lecturing on the digital publishing module for the MA course Wayne has been a published criminologist for over a decade making him an expert in all things cybercrime, digital piracy and digital rights management. Hi, Wayne, thank you for agreeing to join us today for the inside publishing podcast. Thank you. Well, I'm really excited to record this and to talk about cybercrime and how that's going to affect publishing and particularly with the rise of AI and different software's and stuff, how things could change, I think it's potentially a pretty niche area, or one that a lot of publishing holes and publishing professionals might not be aware of or might not know too much about. So hopefully, we can shed some light on that to start off your academic background is in criminology and then cybercrime rather than English literature or your kind of typical publishing background, what was it that drew you towards publishing? Or how did you kind of end up there if it was an accident?
Well, it's kind of accident, but also opportunity as well. So I went to university as an undergraduate when I was 37 years old, so I was quite late to the party, so to speak. And in my final year of my criminology degree, I saw an advert for a paid internship at UCLan, and it was working in publishing and it was something to do with books. Now, at that time, I just completed my dissertation, which was about internet piracy. But I'm a big book reader. I've always read a lot of books always collected a lot of books, I was attracted to that anyway. And I thought, what I could do here is that I could actually mould it so that it's something more to do with how I wrote my dissertation. And my specialist subjects, I applied for it, and got it, which was great. And then set to work doing some research. So I just basically had a look on what were all the different pirate websites, looking at the books that were being shared on there. And come to some sort of conclusions about you know, what was being shared? Was it significant? Was it general fiction or something like that. And that's how I got started. Basically, I did that study. And then not long after that I got asked to do some teaching around digital publishing and things like that, because I'm quite adept at computers as well, that seems to be quite a commodity, if you're good on computers. And, you know, you're kind of in demand. And then from there, I started working across two schools. So I was working for publishing and I was working for the law school as well. So I was teaching criminology one day and teaching digital publishing the next which led to some confusion. Occasionally, I'd walk into the wrong room on the wrong day and have to go running across campus to find the correct room. And then I got full time employment. And you know, I've been here ever since I came here in 2007. As a student, got my first working position, first paid gig if you like in 2010. And that was it. It just kind of snowballed from there. So I kept on doing my cybercrime stuff. So I did an MA and a PhD, and wrote some chapters for a book, articles, that sort of thing, while still doing the digital publishing because I could see an overlap between the digital world of cybercrime and publishing as well. And, well, I'm just about to leave you club in a couple of days to go and pursue my cybercrime interests at another university. But it's been an interesting journey. While I've been here, and one that I think that I've rather enjoyed, really, it's been thoroughly nice to work in publishing and meet people in publishing. It's a great industry to work in.
Really interesting to hear how you kind of tailored the role. And I think it's interesting as well that you say that you saw the overlap between publishing and sort of cybercrime. But perhaps that's not been emphasised before, at least not until kind of the rise of eBooks and digital formats and things like that.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of these things are dependent on the technology, you know, and the technology advances and as technology advances, the opportunities for crime advances as well. So I mean, you know, we nobody would have considered ebooks actually exists in our being a thing, you know, and then suddenly, there they are. Now, criminals are able to exploit that, and that's something that publishers have got to start thinking about. I mean, they've been thinking about it for a long time, obviously, and there's things like DRM and things like that, but really hasn't been stopped the progress of it at all.
If the shoe was on the other foot, so to speak, and you were the publisher producing ebooks or audiobooks, for example, what kind of online behaviour? What kind of things would you be wary of? And how would you go about discouraging those behaviours?
That's a tricky one, really, because from the studies that I've done of these sorts of things, it's very hard to determine what is effective in terms of a strategy for stopping people from from copying your intellectual property, because you can have DRM which you apply to your ebook files, and some clever clogs will reverse engineer them, and then suddenly, they will appear on the internet, you know, for for downloading for free. So it is very difficult to do that. I know there are some companies whose entire profession is to go and pursue these things. But it does seem a case of you know, shutting the door after the horses bolted. What may be more effective is to have the e book as a kind of addition to the print product and make that freely available. I think it's Head of Zeus there, Arthur grey masseter. When I've read some of his books, there'll be something inside the paperback that says also available as a free ebook, could you just go down and collect that yourself. And I think it's a case of realising this difference between reading an ebook and a paper book. And lots of people read the paperwork and don't want to read the book, they're not really that interested in the eBook almost becomes like an adult where people may want to buy the ebook, but they're probably more likely to read the print book. In my research, I come across a lot of people who say, Well, I just downloaded this, whether it's a film, music or whatever, simply because it was there. And they've not got any particular strong interest about purchasing it or buying it anyway. It's just like, literally there. And we'll see what it's like some people have tried the honesty box approach, you know, where he makes something freely available. And you say to the consumer, if you do like this, please consider buying a copy of come to see me in concert, give me some sort of revenue as a result of that, I think was it Neil Gaiman was saying that pirated copies helped his sales in foreign territories, because people were coming across books that they wouldn't normally come across. I think maybe that's more of an approach, having programmed into your publishing that you may lose money on this, but you may also gain more from other sales avenues as well, by making these freely available.
Yeah, I'm interested to hear as well do you kind of buy into the idea that sometimes you're not actually losing a customer because they wouldn't necessarily be a customer in the first place, particularly with academic work, if I'm reading a chapter of a book, and then they refer to another chapter, I might try and kind of find that through, I don't know, deviant methods, I wouldn't be particularly concerned to buy maybe just to kind of find a different book that would work instead, if I download it illegally, or whatever, they haven't necessarily lost me as a customer, because there wasn't really like an interest.
You never had any serious intention of buying it anyway, you had a need for it, but you weren't going to entertain pain, however much it was for that. And I've seen that online with some of my studies, I've looked at the comments that people make, and a lot of people have said, you know, I really didn't have any intention of going to see this film or listen to this music. It was just there. And I thought I'd give it a go but really not interested didn't like it. So there is a kind of try before you buy feel about things as well. And some people just kind of drift through and they go, Oh, well download this will download that. So it's like, and then they may never listen to it again. And they wouldn't go out and buy it. They just happen to drifted along found it and thought, Oh, what's that like? And you do get some people who think oh, yes, well, I've, I'm kind of wedded to an artist or a writer, or a particular series of films or something like that, or a character like Harry Potter, and then they will buy every single thing that's got Harry Potter in them. And they may download the ebooks or something like that, but they probably bought them as well. And they probably bought every single print edition that there is. So you could do get two different types of customer you get the ones that are committed to buying things and they do that not because they're thinking about the economy or anything like that they buy it because they want to own things and they like having physical objects and then you got the other ones who just kind of go what's all this about and also download and we'll just see what it's like not gonna cost me anything. That was rubbish not interested in that. So you know, in a sentence, would they have gone out and bought a book anyway.
Another thing I wanted to touch on was the idea that if you've already bought the paperback, but maybe you might feel less of an obligation to purchase the ebook or the audio book, because in your mind, you're like, I have given money to the publisher and that kind of thing.
There is a kind of mindset of entitlement that does that does manifest itself and I can understand why because we've always been taught to buy things that we own. In actual fact, we don't really own anything. What we actually own is a licence to access intellectual property through the medium of a DVD, CD, printed book, ebook, whatever it is, the intellectual property still remains the property of the copyright holder. So if I was to buy say a CD, then I couldn't say well, I automatically Cleve must have an mp3 download of it, because that's not what I've paid for I pay for a licence to access the audio on a plastic disk, a CD, not an mp3 download. So it'd be like me going into HMV with all my old cassette tapes and saying, Can I upgrade this to a CD I've already paid for. It's just ridiculous. What I've paid for is to listen to something on a tape, not on a CD. So you know, these different formats actually come under different licences for different products. So I can understand why people would think that but from a publishers point of view, I think it would be nice to give people a little bit extra. So I think, you know, if you if you do sell the paperback hardback, then you can say, Yeah, I have the ebook as well, because it doesn't actually cost a great deal more to manufacture the book. Once you've set up your InDesign and everything like that, it's it's a very simple process. And it can just be a basic text based ebook without anything fancy in it, just to say, Okay, if you buy this book, you get the book free. And the cost is minimal, I think, in actually doing that.
You've reminded me actually, when I did my GCSEs, and I think my levels as well, I used to buy CGP revision guides, and they always had a QR code in the back where you could access the PDF version, I think they're kind of argument was that it avoided you have like a stack of textbooks in your bag at all times, you could just take your phone or your iPad or whatever there. That's like, unlocked in memory from the back of my mind. I hadn't thought about it from that angle before.
But you can see the benefit with academic books, definitely, because academic books can be quite expensive. And if you only need to have one chapter, you're not going to spend, say the books on 40 pounds for one chapter that just seem like a lot of money to spend, which is why you know, we have libraries and things like that one of the books that I've contributed to, you can actually buy the whole book itself, or you can download individual chapters. So you go online, you find the book, you find the chapter that you want, you pay to download that single chapter, and you reduce your expense. And also as well as the way we used to do it, or you go to a library or a bookshop to read the books and go through and find the individual references. Now you can just literally put a word recognition, search and go through an entire PDF and find the things that you want straightaway. So in terms of the quickness of accessing information, you can do that much faster now than you can before.
When you compare it to a paperback or a physical copy as well, you would read maybe the blurb or something like that. Whereas with the digital, you can just do a quick search and think how many times does cybercrime come up in this, and I can use that to tell how relevant it's going to be.
Plus as well also, don't forget that your print versions are going to depreciate over time, you know, they're going to become dogeared, you know, pages is going to fall out things like that. Whereas the digital version will remain exactly the same states throughout the whole of its life, if you like.
You have led me on perfectly to my next question. Actually, I wanted to talk a bit about the sort of buy and sell or peer sharing aspect of things in your lectures, you use the example of having a physical book and kind of taking it to the charity shop, that's kind of fine, someone else can come along and buy it, you can lend a book to a friend, but within the ebook, you're kind of stuck with it on that device or attributed to that person's account or whatever. And there's no legal kind of framework in which you can do an ebook charity shop kind of thing.
We've seen like you could read a book, I could lend it to my wife, next door neighbour, you know, Sister in law and then give it to a charity shop. And then they could sell it on and do exactly the same. So for that one purchase, there may be half a dozen or a dozen people read that book. So in a sense, really, you've got a lot of missed sales there haven't Yeah, I mean, I buy books from charity shops all the time and secondhand books more than I buy new books, actually. So in a sense, there's a lot of miles is going missing there for publishers and authors. Now with an ebook, obviously, you are approaching the same kind of thing but it's a different products and you don't have the options to share him like he do. Although some do, you know, you can have a like a reading list. And you can share things on a certain scale, but nothing like we expect with a physical book. And this led me to think what do we actually own then what's the difference? I mean, we come to expect a certain amount of freedom with our products don't matter. You know, if I buy a car, for example, I expect to be able to make modifications on that car and then sell it and things like that. But what if I couldn't make any modifications? And then I couldn't sell it at all afterwards? What would I be able to do with it and think, Well, you buy the electronic book and well I can't really lend it out to anybody and I can't sell it I can give it to the charity shop afterwards. And that was what started making me think about what do I actually own then I thought it's just licences that's what we're buying licences and I know that been a few attempts to kind of have digital licences you know where people sell mp3 and things like that but quite honestly book selling is predicated on scarcity you know if you've got 1000 books once you sold those 1000 books Yeah, I'd have to print some more or you create a demand for it, which may make the price go up but when you've got a digital book that can be copied infinite amount of times with no degradation of quality at all, then how do you impose the scarcity value tree I put in DRM on and things like that. But then like we say can be reversed engineered. So scarcity element just simply doesn't exist with digital.
It's interesting what you said about scarcity. I'm an avid library user for one, but particularly, I'm a bit obsessed with the Libby app. So you can use that to kind of borrow audiobooks, which sounds a bit like a weird concept, it kind of depends on what your particular library has available, but you just put your library card number in, and it gives you all these books, but they kind of seem to have manage a sort of halfway house, I suppose, because they kind of have a limited number of copies, even though it must just be a file that's centrally available, you kind of have to request a book and then kind of wait a few weeks for it to be ready for you to have particularly with popular titles. So I don't quite know how that works. And I should know more because I volunteered with my local library for almost a year. But I know they have something similar with borrowbox, and PDFs and things like that, I don't know quite how that works with giving it back at the end.
They've got to find a way of introducing this scarcity. If you just put a borrower Redbook, if there was one print book of this particular volume in the library, only one person can have it at a time currently. So the thing with the digital is from being in the library database, if you like to be in on your Kindle reading device, it has to be copied in some sense. So when you copy it, it's on your device, but it's still in the library databank they've not raised it or anything like that, what they do then is they send it over you have a limited period of time, and then it becomes deactivated. So they have to put some sort of scarcity in there. So like you say, one person at a time, but if it's digital, why can't 12 People have at a time, you know, it's depends on the licence, you know, so if they live, we have only got a licence for one copy. And it's digital, then they can only let one person at a time. Also on the subjects of libraries, I started off really reading books from the library, I was an avid visitor to the library, and I got it was back in the days when we had yellow cards. And there was a card in system and used to get the books and they take the cards out and put them in. And first of all you're allowed to and then when you show them that you were, you know, a good library subscriber, then you were allowed for, and then that went up to eight. So I made sure I got all me eight. And there was some books that I liked so much that I just get them out all the time, you know, because I couldn't afford to buy them. And I just loved these books. And now I find that I've got a house full of books. And I think that's because I went to the library at an early age because obviously I didn't have any income as a child, I had very few Books and Beyond that I could buy. But the library was such a great resource for me that when I grew up, I wanted my own library, basically, you know, to be able to pick my own books and read them whenever I want was such a joy, that I think making books available. Whether it's, you know, through digital means free, I think is going to help people come to love books when they grow older, and they understand the responsibility of having books.
It sounds kind of obvious that a child wouldn't have an income. But you don't think about it like that, that there's not really another way for without kind of parents pitching it or ever for a lot of children to kind of get so so much access to books. Actually. My next question kind of follows on as well. I wanted to talk a bit about the audio side of things. Particularly I wrote my essay for you on Spotify, the new streaming platform for audiobooks are not a new streaming platform. But the new kind of expansion into audiobooks. Do you think that consumers are kind of starting to show a preference for these kind of subscription services? I saw some ones that were specifically for indie publishers, and specifically for this kind of publisher. So it seems like it's kind of whatever you think of Spotify, that it is kind of the way the tides are turning. How do you think that's going to shape the publishing landscape?
Well, I think audiobooks have changed so much over the years since since I grew up, I used to buy audio books, probably in my mid teens and used to go in and they'd be double cassettes with an abridged version of Hound of the Baskervilles or something like that, because the tapes could only last a maximum of maybe three hours, something like that. So they had to be cut down and abridged now of course, we can have the full unabridged version of things, which, you know, depending on the size of the book can be 18-20 hours sometimes. So when I think now about our culture and the way we consume things, once you've consumed your 18 hour audio book, what do you do with it then afterwards, you know, if you if you bought it on CD or cassette, it will just sit on your shelf, wouldn't it? Well, now we don't have that problem. We like literally have a subscription. We listen to it. And we never think about it again, in terms of the products. We may remember the story and the experience. But we don't actually have it. There's a physical item. And I've often thought as the years have been rolling on and I've got, you know, DVDs and albums and things like that and I've got stuff that I think will ever listen to this again will ever watch this film again. And I'm thinking you Maybe not, maybe I should just give it away. But then I think, well, if I'd have rented it like a subscription, I probably would have enjoyed that and thought, oh, yeah, enjoy that I've not had any other thoughts about keeping anything I've recently been. And it's gonna sound a bit morbid, actually. Because the older you get, the more you start thinking about what's going to happen to your stuff once you've gone. And I've got some very rare old books and collections of books. And I thought, What should I do with them? Should I give them away beforehand or find you know, like, a museum or something and give them to them, present them, and then suddenly suggested that I build a funeral pyre with my favourite books. And then other books to read in the afterlife. But also as well, I mean, people have got a different attitude towards property, you know, and with the living spaces that we have in lot of overcrowding and things like that a lot of people just simply don't have the room for large collections of stuff. Because of the subscription models that are around for Netflix and things like that people are enjoying content, whether it's books, films, wherever through subscription means and then not thinking about it afterwards, once they've consumed it. So then, you know, like, we've got to think about All right, well, I'll give this book to charity or something like that. That's all changing gradually. The downside to that is that when you have subscription models, they control the content that you can see, it's basically curated by somebody. So if say you wanted to see a particular film or read a particular book, but for some reason, it wasn't available, maybe it's a licencing issue, or maybe, you know, somebody deems it has been not politically correct or something like that, then how do you get to access that material? But for those of us who don't have a lot of room to live in, you know, it can make a lot of sense to have those options for us. But it's just when those options dry up, where do you go for your books? Where do you go for your films, and so on?
It's a bit like what we've said already with wanting to try before you buy, I guess, like, you know, you must watch some films or read some books and just think that was rubbish, even if it's not rubbish. But if it's not really I can't think of when I'm picking this back up, again, like you say, so there's a lot of appeal for being able to sift through that kind of middling content. So perhaps you would assume that their quality of content might increase over time, because the kind of fighting to get people's attention doesn't happen.
No, because I mean, to give you two examples, I had Netflix for years. And vase basically gave up on it, because every thought it was just rubbish that I was watching. And it was like, you may like this, and I go, I've not liked any of this. So far, it's just been terrible. So I'll cancel there. And then a while later, I got Amazon Prime and go through Amazon Prime in the keynote, this is rubbish. There's just no quality in the subscription service quite a lot of the time. It's just volume of content over quality. You know, it's just like, the subscription services are great, as long as the quality is good. But there does seem to be a move towards volume over quality. And I think that's probably one of the downsides of a subscription service.
Yeah, one of the things I hate about Amazon Prime is, well, it does feel like they don't want you to find the content. I feel like at least with Netflix, you feel like you're looking through menus and things like that Amazon Prime, if you're not knowing like exactly what you want to search for, you'll never find something on the off chance. It's awful for that a lot of people talk about when there was just kind of four channels on TV or wherever that everyone had watched the same thing. Now everyone's really off in niches, it almost feels like we're going back to where we were. And there's like the same five things everyone's seen on Netflix. And most of the time, the only kind of sign of being good to watch like you say, there's so much rubbish on there is if it's in the top 10 in the country, or liked by people like you, or whatever, you use that as the kind of metric for if it's good or bad, but then you end up just everyone's watched the same 10 things on Netflix.
Even someone who's lived through that period where there was only four channels, I remember it very well there wasn't as much TV viewing anyway because there simply wasn't resources there. And you know, you wouldn't just sit watch anything because some of it was rubbish. But there were certain things I got to who and those sorts of things where everyone would talk about it. And the nearest thing I've come to over the last few years is things like Breaking Bad Game of Thrones, those sorts of things, but nobody talks about most of the other stuff because it's just rubbish and even Freeview. Now I go through fee view, I spent half an hour looking for something I'm just given up to kind of round us out.
I suppose I wanted to move on and talk about any advice you might have publishing hopefuls, or for people that might want a career in publishing or publishing adjacent. I know, obviously, with you being a lecturer that you interact with a lot of people in that position on kind of a regular basis. What kind of skills do you think are particularly useful for someone looking for a role, particularly in digital publishing? And how do these skills kind of differ from those required for other entry level publishing roles?
When we look at creating the modules for the course a lot of the time, we will ask employers what sort of thing that they want and they want people that have got skills that they can bring in straight away they said we get lots of students that know about the history of publishing and They're good English graduates and things like that. But they don't really know how to use InDesign. They're not familiar with design concepts, they don't really know about the sales and marketing side of things, those skills that there needs to sit down at a desk and start working straight away. So what I would say is have some sort of an idea about what publishing is about, because a lot of students don't really understand publishing is a business. And in that business has lots of different roles in that, whether it's editorial, business, publicity, design, all those sorts of things. And once you get into a publishing course, like the one that you can, then you can experience all these different roles in a safe environment. So you're working with uwchlan, publishing the business and you'd be working with Alexa. And they will give you experience of what that feels like in a way that you can make mistakes without there being any, you know, big consequences to that, because you're gonna make mistakes anyway, because you're still learning, but we're here to help you through that. So it gives you a kind of safe environment to experience those things. And as you go through, you will come to learn that there are things that appeal to you more than other things. It's classic, really, because every year students start they'll want to be in commissioning editor first day, what your big commission editor almost everybody, and then about Christmas, you ask them again, and they suddenly think, Oh, well, I quite like design a quite like marketing, you know, so they just don't realise that there's these different jobs actually inside publishing itself. And being on a course like the one that you claim gives them the chance to discover these different things and then decide for themselves, what best suits them and what they enjoy. Because obviously, you're starting your career, you're going to be a new career a long time, hopefully, and you want that to be something that you're going to enjoy and something that's going to be fulfilling for you. Now in terms of digital skills, I would say that obviously things like InDesign Photoshop are pretty much essential. But also having a knowledge of HTML, I think is going to be very useful in the future for formatting ebooks. But also, if there's any kind of web design, things that come up like that, in terms of ebooks, HTML, you don't need to be a wizard at it, you just need to know the basics of it so that if you had a problem with an ebook, you go and fix it. Obviously, once you've reached that level, then you career will progress as you go into your industry and you decide what it is you want to do.
Basically, I think as well, I didn't do an English degree. But I did do a kind of humanities essay based degree. And I think a lot of the reason that a lot of us came in my like editorials, the one for me is because you perceive yourself as that kind of person you know, I know how to write, I know how to edit, you might even have some experience with that already in a school paper, or whatever it is, I never did art. When I was in school, I couldn't draw. Someone had told me a year ago that I would be doing the cover design for an upcoming you can't publish in title, I'd have laughed in their face, I'd have been like, Oh my God, you're gonna get stickman on the road. But actually, when you introduce yourself or get introduced to these software's you find mostly that they're a lot easier than there perhaps made out to seem. And also the being good at those software's are good at InDesign good at Photoshop has nothing to do with whether you're good at drawing or whether you perceive yourself as an artistic or a kind of design oriented person. And I think perhaps digital has the same fears of like, I've never done coding, I've never done computer science and things like that. But it's only when you get into these kinds of courses and get to dip your toe in a lot of different things that you then can see, actually, I can do this.
I mean, the thing is, when you first see an InDesign page or a Photoshop page, your immediate reaction is just to kind of freeze because there's so much going on on that screen that you don't know where to start. And I can understand that I've been used to get that word. You know, when people first saw work back in the late 90s. They just thought of all these buttons doing you know, it takes you a little while to orientate yourself and realise that you don't have to do everything at once. You just need to master a few basic things. And as time goes on, then you you become more adept at it. So my approach for doing anything on InDesign or Photoshop was to keep it really, really simple. And just baby steps on and be a reassuring presence for people that were doing that that yes, you can do it. And I can't draw for toffee. I wish I could draw but absolutely terrible at it. And I get it by part of the job of Electra really is taking concepts which are quite complicated and breaking them down into their component parts, whether that's InDesign, whether that's criminology, veterinary science, or whatever it is, it's all about breaking those things down and being able to cascade that information on so that people can understand it.
I actually wanted to ask if there's a particular project that you're most proud of.
I wouldn't say there was a particular project to such I would say that the students in my project, really when I see them get jobs in industry, you know, enjoying themselves and making the best of their lives. And you know, when they get married and you know, they get promotions and things like that, and I see that they're happy and I feel like I've made a really positive impact on those people's lives. When I do see students doing well getting jobs, enjoying themselves being happy. And then I think that's probably my greatest achievement. Yeah,
I think it's such a scary time you finish your day, and then you don't know what to do with yourself. And I think that the publishing ma really helps guide people to where they need to go next. So I think you've definitely done that. From my perspective, I always like to round off the interviews by asking what's next? Or what our listeners should be looking out for? So we know with you it's a new job. But what's kind of next for you clan publishing? Or is there anything in the works that we should be keeping an eye out for?
Well, the big thing is going to be the adult imprint, which is a development uwchlan publishing. So I think that's going to be a really interesting thing. I do know that a lot of students have asked about adults books rather than children's books, and YA fiction, even though the principles in terms of production and you know, all the rest of it is still the same. I think it would be interesting, from an editorial point of view for students to work on more adult texts, I think from a uwchlan publishing business perspective, it's a good variation for them, as well, you know, opens up a new avenue of revenue for them. So yeah, I'm excited about that. And I'm hoping that they'll keep me in the loop about what's happening.
So I think we're coming to the end of the podcast now. But any parting words of wisdom, what's one piece of advice that you'd give to someone looking to get into publishing,
I would say, Take every opportunity that you can, basically, so you'll come in, and you'll go on a course like like the one that you plan, and you're trying lots of different things, don't be afraid to try them. Because you may come across something that's going to change your life. And the way you work. Once you've got those things. If somebody comes up and said, we're looking for a volunteer to format an ebook, do that, if you're looking for a volunteer to run a bookshop, please do that. And then when you you know, when you see jobs advertised, it may not be the job that you want, but it's in a publishing house that you want to work for. And it's a step on the ladder, people will go in there maybe going in as a publishing assistant in a department that they're not really looking for. But that opens up opportunities within the organisation. I've seen it so many times where people will go in, they will literally take any job in publishing that they can and then they'll make a sideways move within like 12-18 months, and they'll get in the areas that they want to be in, they may even find an area that they hadn't thought of that is suddenly the best thing since sliced bread never turned down an opportunity. Always put yourself out there and see what you can do.
Absolutely. That's brilliant advice. Thank you so much for giving up some of your afternoon to talk about publishing and being on the podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure. And I'm sure this is gonna be really interesting for listeners both to hear about digital publishing, perhaps for the first time and particularly cybercrime and those kinds of things and also send out some of your experts wisdom as a publishing lecturer.
Well, thank you, Eleanor, it's been a great pleasure to speak to you. But as I'm just about to leave you UCLan Publishing I'd just like to say a big thank you to my colleagues in UCLan Publishing, Charlotte and Hazel, Alexa, Gary, Becky, everybody that I've been working with over the years. It's been absolutely fantastic. I wish you all the best of luck and please, make me proud of you.
Thank you for listening to 'Inside Publishing'. I've been your host Eleanor. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It really helps us reach more people. Also, feel free to let us know your thoughts on social media or send suggestions our way at podcast or syp@gmail.com. See you next time.
