Books
Travelling to the top
26.06.08 Victoria Arnstein
Having grown up with a bookseller father, Katharine Leck always wanted to work with books. “I had a glorious childhood where my dad would arrive home every night with books from various publishers,” she says. This led to a BSc in Publishing & Economics from Oxford Brookes—the only such course on offer in the mid-1980s—and a job within Ebury publicity.
After being made redundant a year into the post, Leck decided to travel, spurred on by a lack of glamorous holidays growing up. “As a kid my parents never left the country so I spent my holidays on the canals while my friends went to places such as Majorca.” A year later Leck joined Random House to work on the Fodor’s list—one of America’s leading travel publishing brands.
After eight years in various roles, Leck got her “career break” with a move to Lonely Planet. She worked at LP for seven years before a restructure that saw her working six months of the year in Melbourne and six months in London. “It was glamorous and fun for a year and then became a real pain,” she recalls.
As it was, Leck was approached by Jeremy Westwood, the now former m.d. at APA. He introduced her to APA’s parent company, Langenscheidt, and she became APA’s publishing director last November before becoming m.d. on Westwood’s retirement in May.
Westwood was in the role for more than a decade, so Leck is the “scary new person”—but has tried to make herself accessible by sitting among the team in the open-plan office on London’s Borough High Street. “As an m.d going into a company you are immediately assessing and appraising the way people work and everything they do, but that needn’t be a bad thing,” she says.
The company has already launched two new slim guide series under the Insight brand, Smart guides and Step by Step guides—something Leck had felt was missing when she assessed the range as a competitor. She will now concentrate on building brand awareness—which she says is already strong for Berlitz but could be better for Insight.
The biggest challenge facing all travel publishers is handling the global market. “The British and Europeans are big travellers and want less and less [information] which is why the whole under-£8 [r.r.p.] market is booming. However, the US is fairly nervous about travel and still want that really big bible.”
Going digital at APA is the photo library, which has around a million pictures (only a quarter of which are currently digitised). Eventually the plan is to make a digital library available to users outside of the company. APA also plans to focus more on “green” issues in its guidebooks, but will make its business more environmentally friendly first. “I think it is important to get your own house in order before you start,” Leck says.
She is keeping an eye on the case being brought against APA’s distributor GeoCenter International by Compass Maps. While GeoCenter, which publishers some of its own products, licences the Berlitz name for the popout map product involved in the dispute, Leck acknowledges it is still “not a good situation to be in”.
Things are busy at work, but Leck also has exciting times ahead in her personal life, with her forthcoming marriage to John Sadler—m.d. of Thomas Cook. The pair met at Lonely Planet and Leck confesses it’s a relief that Sadler is now moving to run Virgin Books. “It will be much better—I can start leaving my paperwork around the house a bit more readily.” And was the honeymoon to India and Sri Lanka planned using Thomas Cook guides or APA guides? “Insight Guides, of course,” she laughs.
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