REFLECTIONS: The World at our Feet

So there we were! We’d had our much-anticipated mystery meeting with the American publishing house and had been informed that ‘we had a deal’ without really knowing what the deal was or what work was involved. But the world was at our feet and that was all that mattered, really. The ‘deal’, it turned out after a very short time together, was not at all the same as the arrangement we had first anticipated. But let me give you a spot of background briefing before I go any further.

The American Publisher, hereinafter named Adiwes, our pet name for it, was a sprawling publishing venture, perhaps the biggest and most successful in its field. It was represented in all parts of the world either through partnerships with others or, more often, through its own subsidiaries that were, to all intents and purposes, local publishing houses.

In the States, Adiwes had two main headquarters, one just north of Boston and the other in Menlo Park, California. A couple of years prior to our meeting, Adiwes had decided, after some serious lobbying by all its international sales force, that its catalogue desperately needed to include ESL, English as a Second Language, which was then, and to some extent still is now, one of the hottest, most lucrative areas in international publishing. Bob, whom I mentioned in a previous piece, had worked his whole life for Adiwes, starting as a schools’ sales rep, travelling from the Gulf of Mexico. north to the Canadian border each year before he climbed the corporate ladder to a senior position. He had been given the task of researching the market to find a suitable partner to provide content for the newly created World Language Division (WLD), which he was to lead. We, as it so happened, were the suitable partners.

Adiwes bought the world rights to our signature series, This Way, which meant that we were no longer allowed to sell the series to any other countries than those who had already signed on, which was fine by us. However, we had fondly imagined that Adiwes would take care of any required adaptations of the books for new markets. We were wrong. Adiwes had bought US. We became their resident authorship team for all WLD products. The first series, given the unlikely title New Horizons in English (NHE), was supposedly based on This Way, but the final product bore no resemblance whatsoever to the original series.

Despite this, for contractual reasons we had to share our royalty, which was a meagre 6%, with our original publisher: 2% for them, 2% for Lars and 2% for me. But again, the series was an instant success wherever it was introduced in the world so the income from royalties was still quite significant. Within two years, Adiwes was clamouring for new versions of NHE for specific markets; the original generic series needed to be tailor-made to fit different school systems and linguistic backgrounds. From this point onwards, our original publisher was cut out of the arrangement and we were able to share the royalties between the two of us: 3% and 3%.

Languages have always been my passion and so I became the one, rather than Lars (who was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud when it came to other languages) who researched the various linguistic backgrounds for each new market. I came up with a checklist of predictable problems for speakers of other languages who wanted to learn English, which we had to address differently as we moved around the globe. It turned out that this checklist became the key to our successes. Our aim was to make the business of teaching and learning English as a second language as easy and enjoyable as possible. We coined two catchwords: learnable and teachable. Before we came along no one had really been concerned about the happiness of the teacher. We made sure that both teacher and pupil approached each new lesson with the confidence that they would succeed.

NHE was being used by millions worldwide and Adiwes was begging for new product. We discovered that no-one was publishing for the very young so we came up with the idea of YES, English for Children, which the sales force at first strenuously rejected because nobody else was publishing for this age group, which was exactly why we wanted to do it. Time and time again we created new markets where previously no markets had existed. YES became as great a success as NHE. Strangely enough, we had produced this new series without a contract, which gave rise to an interesting situation.

We were in Amsterdam working with the European sales force. Bob was with us and he had clearly received instructions to sign a new contract to cover the new product, but his mission was impossible. With our history of success behind us, we held all the cards. Basically the conversation went like this:

“Bob, I think we should receive a larger royalty now that NHE is selling so well and you must have recouped your investment several times over. So we want 10% instead of 6%.” He agreed a little too quickly, so I added, “Retroactively, from the beginning.” I remember his grin. Bob: “OK, but it feels like a knife in the back, but OK, retroactively.” Me: “And we’ll take the same 10% on anything new from now on, until, at least, sales justify another increase.” All in all, that was a memorably profitable afternoon.