In Depth
Field of dreams
13.09.07 Joel Rickett
Here's a Dick Whittington story in reverse. In bleak, late-1970s Britain, a regional newspaper circulation manager by the name of Peter Field was down on his luck. "There was a miners' strike, power cuts—it was depressing," he recalls. "I had two young kids, and frankly we were sliding into poverty because there was a wage freeze and interest rates were driving the mortgage up."
His parents and sisters had emigrated to Australia and sent back a stream of "propaganda" about their sunny new home. Field didn't need much convincing. Within a week of arriving in Melbourne, he had found a job at a printing firm. The following year, he joined Penguin's Australian company as a marketing manager. After a decade, he was running the show, and Penguin was dominating the market. This summer, he was honoured with the Lloyd O'Neil Award for Outstanding Service to the Australian Book Industry. Now, 30 years later, Field has returned to the UK as chief executive of Penguin.
"If I speak to someone here, they always ask if it's great to be back," he observes of his dual nationality status. "But if I speak to someone from Australia, they ask what it's like ‘over there'."
Yet unlike his wife and sons, Field has long defined himself as Australian. The realisation came when he was watching a Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and found himself cheering on the Australian side. He certainly has the unshowy, straight-talking style, and his muscular tones carry a distinct Aussie lilt. But he fears his accent is being eroded: "I can throw in the odd ‘fair dinkum' or ‘beaut', but other than that I sound like a London local."
From Rugby to Rooney
When Field's appointment was announced last summer, observers wondered where he would fit at Penguin UK, which has bounced back from the Rugby distribution débâcle with a stellar couple of years under UK managing director Helen Fraser and global chief executive John Makinson. The answer can be found in Field's CV. In Australia, Penguin (joined at the hip with Pearson Education) bestraddles the market—both as number-one publishing group and the distributor of a vast array of international lists. Renowned for his work on sales and marketing, back office systems and the supply chain, Field has a brief to take a clear-eyed, unsentimental approach to driving up margins—without forcing unnecessary upheaval.
"I hope I'm going to bring a cohesiveness to Penguin, UK and globally," he says. "That means making sure everything behind the front line is playing a part. It's no good having Wayne Rooney up front if you can't get the ball to him. Defence and midfield both have to be hard-tackling and creative, and understand the game plan. That's not rocket science but it's amazing how many businesses don't get it right."
This can free up editors and writers, he insists. "We have talented people here who have been labouring through some clunky systems and processes." High on his agenda is the roll-out of an integrated production and rights management system. "It will cost time and money, but will enable people to concentrate on creative things, rather than filling out forms." He has also been managing the reworking of the HQ in the Strand in central London into an open-plan space, with the Penguin General division poised to move back ahead of schedule.
Field feels that the UK and Australian markets are "remarkably similar", particularly in terms of the expansion of retail space for books over the past decade. Pushed on the differences, he cites the absence of major wholesalers in Australia: "That means each publisher has to understand distribution, and have an individual relationship with every bookseller in the country". On the negative side of the scorecard, Australia boasts no Amazon or major internet retailer.
Although he is leaving publishing decisions largely to Helen Fraser and her teams, he notes the higher profile of UK literary agents. "When I look at the advances here I blink. But the market is bigger and you have the whole Commonwealth to sell books into." He is sanguine about endemic retail discounting: "[The work of] Australia's most popular author, Bryce Courtenay, is treated the same as Harry Potter—you find independent booksellers queuing up for their copies in supermarkets."
Field shared some of these observations at a dinner with London's other publishing chief executives, hosted by Ursula Mackenzie of Little, Brown. A recent president of the Australian Publishers Association, he has already joined the cross-industry BA/PA Liaison Group. Yet he hints that he doesn't feel the UK trade is as collaborative by nature as his adopted homeland: "There's a lot of big problems and we have to work together to tackle them."
Top of his list is lowering returns and reducing supply chain wastage. While he qualifies the notion that the entire Australian market operates firm sale on backlist—it doesn't apply to re-promoted backlist titles—he clearly believes the practice could work in the UK. "Our industry will be named and shamed if we don't work on fixing this, and those companies that don't respond to that call will in turn be named and shamed. I know it can be done."
Globetrotter
Not many publishers can boast such a global perspective. As chief executive of Pearson Australia Group, he oversaw activities in China, India, New Zealand and South Africa. "You have a different view of the world if you're not in London or New York. I became a kind of travelling mentor."
He bristles at the suggestion that they are offshoots, pointing out that Penguin's turnover in these fast-growing English-language markets easily eclipses its UK sales. But he hastily adds that operating truly globally gives Penguin and Pearson "great cohesion . . . we're trying to make our business more international because our readership certainly is".
This is most visible in educational publishing, a kind of "bell-wether" for consumer expansion. "There are 350 million Chinese people studying English, and not many are able to read Nick Hornby's latest novel—but that's going to come." Field rejects the thesis that these are new fronts for battles between US and UK publishers. "I don't see it as the third great publishing war. The important thing is that the world's fastest-growing English-language markets are not the US or UK. Our competitors are now coming to the same conclusions. People are jumping on the planes I've been getting on for years."
He is still catching those flights, continuing as chairman of Pearson Australia (including New Zealand) and director of Penguin China. When we meet, he's just back from the Beijing Book Fair and partying in India to mark Penguin's 20th anniversary there. "I am away [from the UK] a lot, but we've got a terrific team in London. I've just been away for two weeks and sales rocketed. There's a collection going round to send me away next week," he jokes.
Field is still readjusting to the smaller scale of his new life—Great Britain could easily fit inside his Aussie home state, Victoria, and he could barely squeeze his furniture into his two-bed flat in Kensington. But he remains upbeat: "It surprises me that you can spend half an hour in the car [from London] and you're in the countryside. You can find the space, unless you want to go to the beach."
He's committed to a five-year stretch in the UK, without access to stretches of golden sand. "I've got four years and two months to go. Not that I'm counting," he laughs.
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