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Richard Charkin was recently preparing to head for the Dordogne with a bag full of blockbusters. "I went in to my local Smiths and asked for 20 bestsellers, especially those with embossed covers," he grins, slyly pulling Hollywood Husbands out from a pile of documents. By now he's probably ensconced in leafy tranquillity, sipping Bergerac with Jackie Collins and Sally Beauman. And maybe even Wilbur Smith. It's called research.
He will return from France refreshed, ready to start work as Managing Director of Octopus Paperbacks. It's a far cry from his job as Managing Director of the Academic Division at Oxford University Press, and Charkin's appointment caused some surprise in the trade when it was announced last month. The man himself takes pride and pleasure in its wider implications. It is, he says, evidence that publishing is not based entirely in London, that talent and creativity also lie elsewhere. "And the trade is going through such changes that paperback experience will be less important than it has been. Ambition and talent are going to be more important.
"We've got enough leeway to hire the best for Octopus, and the best doesn't necessarily mean the most obvious people. Publishing is largely a matter of motivating clever people. You've got to have a crust of experience but I think we can make things happen by mixing the traditional with the revolutionary."
Charkin chuckles and runs a hand through his elegantly greying, tousled hair. He recalls how he went up to Cambridge intending a career in medicine. "On the second day, I went to my first anatomy practical. I took one look at the cadaver and switched to psychology instead, which meant I couldn't do medicine." He did four years, dropping out in the second "when I fell in love" and then returning "to prove I wasn't a madman - a very difficult job".
A career in journalism took his fancy and he went off, on Sunday Times expenses, to write about pollution in Colorado. Back from the States, he was told that the paper didn't want the story. "So I sold it to the Guardian for a tenner. It had taken me three months to write it but they told me I'd never make any money out of journalism until I got an NUJ card. They said the way to get a card, freelance, was to write six to ten articles. At that rate it would have taken me two years and I'd have starved to death. Then I discovered that you could get an NUJ card by going into book publishing, so I wrote to about 50 publishers saying 'please can I have a job?' and Harrap, God bless them, gave me one.
"From day one, I was commissioning. Well, I did a week in the copy editing department to see how it was done. The company was rather old fashioned and as a result it was the best training ground. We had to do our own foreign rights, production, publicity, copy editing - and finding out sales figures was a matter of obtaining the original print quantity from production and deducting what was left in the warehouse. Now I can go into the rights department or the production department and I have a reasonable idea of what people are really up to." Charkin leans back and takes a drag on his cigarette. Doubtless, the words are intended as a warning.
He learned more about the art of the possible in his next job, as Senior Publishing Manager, Life Sciences, for Pergamon. "I joined the same day Maxwell rolled up after the Leasco affair... Every morning he opened all the mail himself, everyone's letters, and then he would distribute them. He felt there was a message in every piece of post: an invitation to a conference - perhaps we should be publishing the proceedings and if not, why not? A return - why didn't that book sell? A response from an ad, a letter from an author complaining about the production schedule not being right... And it's true, at OUP, I didn't get to see everything, but I used to sniff around the post quite heavily." Another warning. "Whatever anyone says about him, Maxwell's a very able publisher.... When I arrived the place was not doing very well and it had to be turned around."
At Pergamon, Charkin learned his one piece of trade philosophy. "There aren't any strategies in publishing. Just guerilla warfare. The extra sale here or there, a degree of cutting costs... With a mass-market book, maybe it's an extra 10,000 copies here or there; with a scholarly book it's an extra 10 here or there. But the principle's the same: attention to detail."
After a year, "a job came up at OUP as Biology Editor. I applied and got the job at £3,600 a year! Two weeks later they rang me up and said we've got a better job, Medical Editor at £4,000. So I said yes. Several years later, I learned that they'd offered it first to Tim Hailstone, who'd turned it down because at £7,500 the pay wasn't good enough! Even so, I've never regretted taking that job."
Under Charkin, Oxford moved to a place among the top five medical publishers and a list that in 1975 was doing some £250,000 a year is now turning in £2 million. "It was five vears of solid commissioning," he recalls, adding that the Oxford Textbook of Medicine (of which he is very proud) is already in its second edition, having generated sales of over £1 million. "Law and medicine, of all academic publishing, are the most commerical. You're dealing with professionals, not dons. Doctors understand money, though maybe not quite as much as lawyers... The margin for error is tiny - the average print run is 1,000 so you have to be very disciplined. It's a good grounding, because it's entirely international. You have to know your way around.
But Charkin also demonstrated his ability with a trade books and lay medical list called The Facts. "It was a response to the observation that GPs don't have a monopoly of interest in health, as Thorsons have far more ably demonstrated." Oxford's big change came with Robin Denniston, whose trade background had OUP's delegates looking askance. "But the irony was that he pushed the academic side, very hard... He brought a new dimension to whole operation, shook it up desperately. He amalgamated the general books with the academic side. Half the books went through the trade but the point was that underpinning it all were proper academic standards, even with s popular book. "Robin, more than anyone, recognized that bright people can do anything. The fact that I was in medical publishing didn't mean that I couldn't deal with reference books or paperbacks, or whatever. I owe him a lot. As does the University of Oxford, but perhaps they don't know it."
The launching of Oxford Paperbacks also raised the sales curve and serves to demonstrate another of Charkin's maxims: that much of publishing, or at least of selling, is about repackaging. Different formats are aimed at different markets. They also give the bookseller something to promote. Repackaging was what restored Oxford's dictionaries to their rightful place in the face of strong competition: new editions, new livery, presentations, seminars. "We had to respond to the market, and that involved money and publicity."
Charkin looks back with particular pride on his setting up of a complete electronic publishing unit. "We're computerizing the dictionaries, the whole lot. We couldn't continue with hot metal." Clearly, this makes the process of new editions much less daunting. It also opens the way to new projects, new packages: the OED is now available on CD-Rom, all 12 volumes on one disk. "If you said you wanted all the words used by Shakespeare which have a Turkish derivation, that search will probably throw up 500 words in 10 seconds. That would have taken a scholar six months. Or you could produce a dictionary of English as it would have been in 1710. The data's all there, and it happens to cost a lot less than the book as well." Shakespeare has now been similarly packaged and, from next year, a major new micro computer will come complete with the Oxford Shakespeare. "It gives them added value. We're also going to sell it on floppy disk, on magnetic tape and it'll probably end up as a chip to go into your pocket calculator."
Such vision must have endeared Charkin to to his new boss, who made his offer in mid-May. "I didn't spend a long time thinking about it. I'd been MD of Oxford's Academic Division for five years. I'd got to the end of my useful time. Either I had to be promoted or get out. I wasn't promoted," he says, referring to the appointment of Sir Roger Elliott as Seceretary to the Delegates, "so that only left one option."
In fact, he and Hamlyn have known each other for some time, from Bounty deals for such titles as The Oxford Book of Wild Flowers and World's Classics. "Paul impressed me enormously, not just by his ability, but also his total honesty," observes Charkin. "The fact that everyone's committed to this new venture makes Octopus Paperbacks feasible... There's a draft business plan but... we've got to have ideas as we go along." There are, he notes, several possible routes to success. "One is to become a house paperback outfit. The other and non-existing one is to create a new paperback house which stands on its own feet. I'd be very disappointed if, after two or three years, we hadn't bought in as paperbacks a number of titles that turned out not to be of great service to the hardback houses in the group.
Octopus will, says Charkin, publish in all areas: fiction, non-fiction, children's, up-market and mass market. Not too surprisingly, he's personally keen to start a reference list and hopes for collaboration between the new company and all other parts of the group, including George Philip, Mitchell Beazley, Secker, Methuen, Heinemann Adult and Educational. "Obviously, we can't do without the mass-market novelists but we also need a balanced list. Our first priority is to deliver sales. "I don't believe there's a better hardback sales organisation in UK publishing than Octopus. With this new paperback imprint we will become rapidly the best publishing and selling organisation for authors and books of all types. We mean to achieve all this by first-class service to our authors, to our customers, and to our readers."
Paul Hamlyn once described Richard Charkin, Executive Director of the Octopus Group, as "not an Establishment human being". His reputation within the trade rests on charisma, energy and a natural tendency to be outspoken, and now, more than at any other time during his career, he is being watched to see what he will do within the giant Octopus trade publishing operation.
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How has his background in academic publishing prepared him for his role at Octopus? "To start with I always bought world rights when I was at OUP, so I am aware of the advantages, which is partly why I am keen to be able to do so again. Secondly, I've been surprised at how few differences there are: the same two basic disciplines are at the heart of both, which are maximising income and minimising expenditure. And thirdly, in academic publishing you're not expected to read the books, so I've learnt how to skim effectively. I get through three books on the train from Oxford to London."