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Specialist Courses for Publishers

Our Principal Consultant, Valerie Fawcett, spent sixteen years in a variety of roles in the publishing industry before moving into training. She thoroughly enjoyed her time in publishing and has developed a variety of courses for publishers which tailor the topics of the training to the publishing environment. Courses developed for specific publishing clients include:

Achieving Effective Author Care

This is a course for commissioning editors and desk-editors dealing particularly with authors of high status and reputation in their field. Topics covered include:

• Building and maintaining a good author-editor relationship
• The dynamics of the relationship – power, motivation, rights and responsibilities
• Negotiating content, deadlines, incentives, responsibilities
• Behaving assertively with authors
• Managing emotions – on both sides

Two days: 9.30-4.30 with optional half-day follow-up after 4 months

Working in a Publishing Team

Publishing is an industry based on project teams and the successful fulfillment of a project depends on the ability of the members of that team, both inside and outside the publishing house to work well together. This two-day course covers topics such as:

• The nature of working in a team
• Team contracts
• Communicating assertively
• Meetings
• Team problem-solving
• Team roles
• Team development

The course includes team activities and games to enable teams to examine how they work together and have fun doing so!

Two days: 9.30-4.30 with optional half-day follow-up after 4 months

Publishing Team Awaydays

We have put together a variety of team-building days for individual teams within publishing houses. These days focus on the specific needs of the team and consultation of members of the team (through a questionnaire or short meeting) is used to inform the content of the day. The day can provide a mixture of topics, including helping a team with many new members to get to know each other, or focus on a particular issue and facilitate the team finding a way forward to work better together. Please contact us with your needs to obtain a no-obligation proposal.

Negotiating Skills for Publishing Staff

This is a tailored version of our Negotiating Skills course which addresses the specific situations in which your staff need to negotiate. Role-play situations are developed in consultation with you and your staff, so that the training is as relevant as possible. For further information on the content of the course, please see Negotiating Skills.

Two days: 9.30-4.30 with optional half-day follow-up

Effective Use of Interviews and Questionnaires

In some areas of publishing editorial staff need to obtain useful information from advisers in order to develop both the concept and detail of a publishing project. It can be difficult to get people’s true opinions, as advisers may be too busy to give you much time, unwilling to be too critical or unsure how to translate their experience into advice which is relevant. Publishing staff may unwittingly lead a conversation in an unhelpful direction, or not know how to best extract their advisors’ true opinions. This one-day course was developed to address these issues. It includes:

• Strategies for obtaining information – questionnaires, arranging interviews, stages at which to obtain advice
• Factors affecting the success of an interview
• Asking questions
• Building rapport
• Listening skills
• Avoiding unhelpful behaviours
• Devising a questionnaire

One day: 9.30-4.30

All of these courses use a mixture of individual, small group and whole group discussion and practical activities and cater for a variety of learning styles.

In addition, our other courses can be tailored to suit people working in a publishing environment and we are always interested in developing new courses to meet your specific needs.

Contact us to enquire about costs or to arrange a date to run this course in your organisation.

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Keywords: publishing, publishers, editors, projects, negotiating, teams, team-building, team-working, interviewing, questionnaires, team roles, team development