http://blog.book-fair.com/files/2013/06/Zhang-Zhijun-blogpost-150x200.jpgDare to experiment! Not only cross-media, " />Ms. Zhang Zhijun is deputy general manager of Joint Publishing Company International, China, which is majority owned by Sanlian Bookstore Beijing. Her book projects have been awarded numerous prizes in China, among them Beijing News’ “Children’s Respect” Book Prize.

At StoryDrive China 2013 she talked about the future of the publishing industry and shared some of her company’s innovative strategies how to address the challenges.

Ms. Zhang, could you summon up what the crisis of traditional publishing is about?

The most important factor for the changes in the publishing business has been the internet. Before the internet, the distribution channel was like a tunnel, at one end the authors, the institutions and the professional publishers and on the other end the readers. With the internet, everyone has become a creator and disseminator of content, of stories and information. Therefore, our old “one-way” model does not work anymore.

In China, right now, the publishing industry does not know how to turn from a traditional model to a new model. The only thing we can imagine for the future is to turn existing paper books into ebooks. The competition is fierce, the prices low and we do not find a balanced model to make a profit.

What is Joint Publishing Company International doing do to deal with this crisis?

We have undertaken some daring experiments to create original content and develop new ways to exist. This experiment is not finished yet. We organize workshops, for example “Picture Book Workshops”, where we invite people from different areas – not necessarily publishing – to share their ideas. Among the participants are city landscape architects, fashion and graphic designers, pottery artists, stage designers and so on. We offer these people an equal, sharing and constructive platform where they can link up with each other and unleash and develop their creativity. We realized that by doing so we can solve a lot of problems of individuals but also of our industry.

What is the main purpose of your workshops?

During the last 12 years, I have published several bestsellers but they were all imported – for example the graphic novel “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi – and so for us the question is how to discover and develop Chinese authors or works and strengthen our core competitiveness.

We need homegrown content, that is what we are looking for at the moment. We want to make Chinese picture books or graphic novels. I think that in the digital age, more pictures and less text suit the reading habits of people. And we have experience in this field. But we still need a good core story, a nucleus of which we own the copyright, which we can sell and which can then be developed across different media, for example into an interactive children’s game or a theatre play.

Do you have an example of a home grown author whom you have developed across different media?

We have a very popular illustrator of children’s books, Xiong Liang. Apart from publishing the books we have cooperated with a website called Tongle Net which organizes interactive games and we have also sold rights to a shopping mall which uses Xiong Liang’s illustrations to decorate a climbing wall. There are so many products which can be developed around these children picture books – I am only now about to discover all these possibilities.

That is the idea of merchandizing. But where do you get your inspiration to identify new ways of making your content profitable?

On the one hand, as a publisher, we have to be profitable to survive. On the other hand, as a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) program, we are every year invited to attend trainings and study tours in different countries. Of course, these are not publishing specific trainings, but they have introduced me to the concept of social innovation. This has given me a lot of inspiration and I try to introduce these concepts into my work: participative and collaborative methods, building of communities…

 Do you have an example, how these concepts enter your business?

Take our project “Meeting Beijing”. City planner Feng Feifei used to write professional reports on the development of Beijing that were only read by a small group of experts. With our support she has organized workshops with the inhabitants of specific neighborhoods who could share their ideas on the development of their specific area. One result of this cooperation are street maps, which could be commercially developed into a series of maps of the still existing old quarters of Beijing. Other cities like Zhengzhou, Guiyang and Chengdu have also shown interest in this project.

We just think, just publishing books is not enough, we would like to become some kind of cultural company. Beijing has 12 cultural districts and we would like to participate in their development and realization.

You obviously have already crossed the boundaries of a traditional publisher.

We have to play a more active role and create content by participating in and even initiating social innovation, by building communities. That is very different from what we did before.

For more information, please visit: www.storydrivechina.com and www.book-fair.com/academy