Get your publishing acts right with this scorecard

Publishing has paced up the dispersing of thoughts and information to the needy ones to an amazing level

Publishing has paced up the dispersing of thoughts and information to the needy ones to an amazing level. This revolution started right on the day paper was invented and has been undergoing evolution since then. It has been through its share of ups and downs and now has cropped into the electronic domain also.

This is to say that publishing has come a long way since the start of this act of making the material viewable to the public. Consequently, the term encompasses everything from the most initial stage like 'conceptualizing' to 'making the stuff readable to masses', and presently includes in itself 'websites, blogs, video games' also. Thus, it is actually an umbrella that covers different and varied aspects under it.

In some cases, authors themselves take this responsibility of publishing their expressions. This demands considerable investment from the person as the act of getting every single job rests on the same shoulder.

As one gets inside to understand the technicalities involved, it is observed that the 'publishing business' scales high on both 'interesting' and 'risky' parameters. Former is due to the immense opportunities lying ahead as evidenced by a research according to which the doubling time for academic material that is being published has come down from fifteen years to ten years; thus emphasizing the speedy manner in which exchange of information has been occurring. However, this comes at a price due to chances of legal issues getting into the way of making publishing business a success. Thus, there has to be a team to pay attention to 'likely troubling aspects' to make sure that you come out unscathed without falling into 'defamation pits'.

On the whole, one can make use of it provided the strategy 'watch your step' is followed. The acts involved in the actual area of publishing are 'editing', 'proofreading', 'design', 'layout' that might be given to freelancers to be done. This hints that by specializing in any of these areas, one can extract the desired amount of work.

Post this discussion of the pros and cons that are inherent in this area, it is required that a thoughtful route be followed for achieving the pre-decided aims and purposes. A BSC (Balanced Scorecard) has the potential to help reach the ultimate objectives in careful manner. One can lay down the indicators believed to help in tracking the progress and follow those in timely manner.

To start with, the areas can be 'popularity assessment", "subscription gauging", "internal operations perspective" and "legal aspects handling".

Indicators for assessing popularity can be "readership share", "accolades jump", "number of domains mastered" and "publication fraction acknowledged". Further, gauging of subscription is possible with metrics such as "mean subscription length", "percentage subscriptions exceeding the average length", "annual rise in subscriptions" and "renewal scale".

Moving on, internal operations can be evaluated with indicators like "number of dealers", "yearly publication rise", "efficiency ratio" and "productivity expansion". Lastly, legal aspects can be tackled thoughtfully by using metrics like "number of cases registered so far", "efforts scaling", "drop observed" and "loss due to negative publicity".

Saying it all, one can count the steps and activities in a publishing business by adopting BSC (Balanced Scorecard) route.