About Us

Publishing Talk was started by Jon Reed in April 2007, initially as the business blog for Reed Media, his social media consultancy. What started as a way of communicating tips, trends and issues to help publishing clients get to grips with social media marketing has become a resource for both publishers and authors.

You can find us on many other social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter, where we have around 65,000 followers, making us the largest publishing community on Twitter, and consistently in the top ten Twitter accounts about publishing by both influence and number of followers according to the Twitter directory WeFollow.

Contributors

Jon Reed is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Publishing Talk. He is also a writer, lecturer and social media consultant. He previously worked in publishing for 10 years, including as publishing director for McGraw-Hill. Jon produces blogs, podcasts and video for clients; runs workshops on social media; and provides in-house training for a wide range of clients. His book Get Up to Speed With Online Marketing: How to use websites, blogs, social networking and much more is published by FT Prentice Hall in November 2010 (see www.getuptospeed.biz).

Tom Evans is a published author and poet who also mentors other authors in the writing and publication process. He is a specialist at curing both writer’s and author’s blocks – and yes, they are different. He works with clients on a one-to-one basis and runs regular Blockbusting workshops. He teaches the principles of whole brain and whole mind thinking and how to get our minds into the state where they can tap into unlimited creativity. As an BBC trained broadcast engineer, Tom also has an amazing understanding of multimedia and Internet technologies and is a master of the ebook. By ebook, Tom doesn’t mean a PDF but a fully immersive work with audio, video, animation and user interactivity. This year he has launched an iPhone application development service for authors and publishers.

Rich Holman is a user experience consultant, designer and web developer. He previously worked in publishing for over eight years working on websites, blogs and systems integration across a few divisions in Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Since leaving publishing Rich has been working in the social business consultancy Headshift (part of the Dachis Group) helping a wide range of organisations use smarter, simpler, social technologies to improve business performance. Rich is involved in early consultancy with clients (including BBC, British Airways and NHS) to realise the focus, architecture and design strategy of a website or service. He is also involved in the realisation of websites and services via development on open source systems such as Wordpress, Movable Type, Confluence Wiki and Jive SBS as well as application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails.

Suzanne Kavanagh is Publishing Sector Manager at Skillset, the Sector Skills Council for Creative Media. She is the key contact for the publishing industry, working with industry to develop strategic plans to support skills and training for the sector. Suzanne has over 15 years’ experience in the publishing industry across trade, academic and professional markets. A marketing professional with extensive team management and strategic experience, she holds an IDM Diploma in Direct Marketing and has worked as a consultant with a range of clients. She was also a visiting lecturer at City University on the MA in Publishing Studies.

Danuta Kean is a journalist and publishing analyst whose work appears in national newspapers, including the Financial Times, Independent and Daily Mail, as well as specialist magazines, including The Author. She also writes about the wider creative industries. As well as journalism, she is a regular speaker at festivals, interviewing authors and revealing the inner workings of a trade that seems opaque to many writers. She has also presented radio shows and teaches Paths To Publication, a module on the MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University. When not writing she is invariably found at the back of gigs in small venues or looking guilty as she walks past her gym.

Anna Lewis is the co-founder of CompletelyNovel.com, a publishing platform which enables writers to publish their work online and in paperback, and link into a community of readers. The website was launched in 2009 and has seen a number of writers use their success on CompletelyNovel to obtain publishing deals or successfully self-publish their work.

Adele Ward is a published author and fiction editor with a poetry collection called Never-Never Land published in 2009 by Bluechrome Publishing. She spent many years as a business and technology journalist and has a book of non-fiction published plus a novel in progress. Adele and her colleague Peter Chowney run the main project for writers on the virtual world of Second Life and is involved with authors, publishers, broadcasters and educators who are finding new ways to use 3D internet. The writing project is called The Written Word. This is a non-income project but Adele also works as a journalist and editor and will undertake work for businesses wanting to establish a presence on 3D internet.