The Future of Educational Publishing: multichannel made manageable

Education publishing faces tough challenges

The rising price of raw materials and energy is driving up production costs, reducing publishers’ profit margins. At the same time, educational publishers need to control prices as the cost of living crisis cuts deep. The market is already synonymous with high RRPs, education budgets are facing downward pressure, and - in 2021 - 65% of students admitted skipping buying textbooks because of the cost.

To continue to meet their remit to disseminate knowledge, some publishers are looking for ways to reduce costs such as lighter paper stock but experts predict prices may still need to rise by 10-20% in the current climate, raising ethical concerns about the impact on readers.

Like all sectors, publishers are also contending with staffing turmoil, new working practices, and supply chain issues stemming from the pandemic and global shutdowns.

At the same time, they’re facing digital disruption to publishing platforms and market demand, resulting in the need to achieve more outputs and manage change in a highly volatile landscape. Plus the prevalence of open-source materials and MOOCs challenge educational publishers to prove the added value they deliver for their price tag.

Against this backdrop, the adage to ‘do more with less’ becomes an imperative. Educational publishers need to improve efficiency, control costs, and protect both prices and profit margins. But internal factors represent serious barriers to this strategy.

We go into these in more detail in our ebook, The Educational Publishers’ Roadmap to Digital Transformation but they include

• Increasing editorial and production complexity
• Unfit-for-purpose legacy workflows
• Print-centric mindsets
• Exponential growth in digital assets
• Siloed systems and staff

Fortunately, there is a solution that answers all of these challenges, providing light at the end of the tunnel for embattled educational publishers.

Multichannel publishing in practice

So what does multichannel publishing look like on the ground for educational publishers? How are other brands managing multichannel? WoodWing has over twenty years of experience partnering with publishers to deliver digital transformation. Here’s how our clients have done it.

1. Set your strategic direction

Digital transformation starts with strategy, not technology. Work out what you want to achieve and where you want to be in five years' time. This will help unlock big-picture thinking, instead of focusing on immediate ‘improvements’ to current processes.

2. Audit current processes

Once you know what you want to achieve, get onto the ground with your staff to understand how current processes will impact your ability. For example, print-centric approaches, siloed systems, workflow workarounds, bottlenecks, and frustrations. Senior managers must be involved in this process but you may find it helpful to work with an external consultant to facilitate things.

3. Ideate your dream state

Think about what your workflow, team structure, and systems would look like if you could design them from scratch. This will form the basis of your business transformation. How do teams create and collaborate? What is the most efficient team structure? What do workflows look like? Where does human input add value and what can be automated?

4. Identify supporting technology

From here, you’ll be able to identify the technology you need to implement to support your new workflows. Our clients typically implement our multichannel publishing platform (WoodWing Studio) and our Digital Asset Management platform (WoodWing Assets) to streamline collaboration, project management, editorial, production, design, approval, and publication from a single system.

5. Manage change

Change is challenging and often unwelcome - especially when your team is already under pressure. Be sure to support them through the change. Help the whole organization see the overall bigger picture of improvements - how five extra steps here means ten fewer steps there. Break big-picture strategy into smaller achievable goals. Understand there’ll be a learning curve and create psychological safety for that. And provide extra resources to cope with reduced operational capacity during the transition.