I am frequently asked how the publishing industry, where I am today, compares to the pharmaceutical/healthcare industry, where I spent the majority of my career.
My wife, Patricia, and I retired in 2000 from Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest healthcare company, and, in 2006, we launched Oceanview Publishing, an independent publisher of mystery/suspense/thriller novels. We went from high-level positions at Johnson & Johnson (I was the chief scientific officer and she was the worldwide vice-president for consumer pharmaceutical R&D) to the two top positions at Oceanview—in fact, the only two positions.
Now, eight years later, our company has over 60 authors under contract and more than 100 books on the market, with 18 titles that landed on various bestsellers lists. All titles are available in print and e-book formats, most are in audio, and a few are under contract or option for film or TV.
Comparing a career in big pharma to one in small publishing is not like comparing apples to apples, or even apples to oranges. They are different worlds, but let’s face it: in each, we are dealing with a “product.”
In publishing, we’ve found a cooperative spirit, camaraderie, fun conferences, and fascinating collaborators. Each product is unique, although each still competes for the reader’s dollar. In publishing, the clear originator of the product is the author. The author may learn from other writers, but he or she single-handedly provides the imagination, innovation, and voice.
In pharmaceuticals, the product is the result of a blend of complex sciences. The competition is intense and the research secretive as companies develop drugs to treat similar conditions, and whichever gets there first is the big winner. The pharma team, diverse and strictly adherent to the scientific method, targets a disease and starts to tackle it. Discovery chemists design and synthesize a drug, pharmaceutical chemists put it in a drug form and test it for activity, toxicologists test it for safety—all before the clinicians start the four phases of human testing. And then all processes receive regulatory scrutiny.
So for us, going from the pharmaceutical team approach to the author-dominated publishing approach has been quite a dramatic change. Not that teamwork isn’t important in publishing; we consider our Oceanview team—now with a total of five members—to be a dream team. We find that all facets of book selection, book production, and book promotion benefit from a team approach. Coming from the team-oriented attitude of big pharma, this was natural for us.
Time to market is another glaring difference between the two industries. Publishing is relatively fast and there are few barriers to entry. At Oceanview, we like to contract each titles one year in advance of the pub date because it gives us time for copyediting and proofreading. More importantly, it gives us the opportunity to get advance reading copies out in plenty of time for long-lead reviewers and to get the titles in our catalogue so that we can start amassing preorders. With pharmaceuticals, by contrast, the time to market can span years (in many cases more than a decade), with R&D and extensive regulatory review. And during that period, development costs run into the billions of dollars.
What about pricing? In publishing, setting prices was straightforward up until a few years ago. Now, with e-books, pricing is all over the place. In the pharmaceutical industry, pricing is an entirely different story. The billions of research dollars that go into the development of new treatments can mean astronomical prices for new, innovative drugs. Patent lives are short, and the prices decrease once a drug goes off patent.
Marketing is another important area where publishing and pharmaceuticals differ. Here, pharmaceuticals have an advantage. If a doctor prescribes a medication for a patient, the patient generally takes it. In publishing, we, the publisher, try to convince the public to buy and read our books. We use advertising, social media, author events, promotional pricing, and whatever else we can think of to attract readers. There is no doctor saying, “Take this medicine... or else.” Drugs save lives. Books make life more enjoyable.
For us, the similarities between our two careers are more important than the differences: in both, we have had great satisfaction when products succeed and the opportunity to meet many terrific and dedicated people.
Bob Gussin is the CEO and cofounder of Oceanview Publishing, and the retired chief scientific officer of Johnson & Johnson.
