about

The Digitalist is a blog by the Pan Macmillan Digital Publishing team, colleagues and friends.

So this is a publisher’s blog. And, in some senses, it is a corporate blog. But we hope it will be more authentic than those general categories are sometimes perceived to be. We don’t want the Digitalist to be an announcements page or a personal record.

Rather, we aim to make the Digitalist a mixture of a number of elements important to us:

  • A sounding board, a place where we can listen to people, and participate in discussions with them.
  • A news service, keeping watch on developments in the new digital era and the convergence of culture and technology.
  • An interrogative, investigative realm for looking at, and challenging, new ideas.
  • A place for introducing people within, and outside, the company to new ideas, and for discovering new ideas ourselves.

Please feel free to comment and get involved.

Please note: Opinions expressed on the Digitalist are not the opinions of Pan Macmillan or Macmillan Publishers Limited, or any of its companies.

Sara Lloyd - Digital Director

Favourite book: You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon
Favourite website: www.badmothersclub.com
Favourite things: shoes; roast chicken; optimism; cocktails; sleep; my kids (not in that order)

I’m the energetic (bossy) one with the infectious (too loud) laugh who likes to talk about things like ’strategy’ and ‘vision’ and then relies on everyone else to work out the detail. The polite way to describe me is still best expressed by my Mum: ‘She’s not backward in coming forward’.

James Long - Head of Digital Development

Favourite book: The Tidewater Tales: A Novel by John Barth
Favourite website: tor.com
Favourite things: reading, baby watching, smooth commutes

Quiet and serious on the outside; whirlwind publisher on the inside. Background includes: bookseller, academic, software UX designer, branding guy, project manager.

Rebecca Lloyd - Audio Publishing Manager

Favourite book: I don’t think you can have one favourite book so my favourites are The Princess Bride by William Goldman, The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
Favourite website: I’m assuming internet shopping sites aren’t what you’re looking for here so it’ll have to be news.bbc.co.uk
Favourite things: good food, good wine, my family, my friends

I am the audiobook person so I spend my time juggling schedules, scripts, actors, producers, CD duplicators and, of course, metadata. I need to get over my morbid fear of blogging (it’s almost as bad as my fear of spiders).

Nicholas Blake - Editorial Manager

Favourite book: White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
Favourite website: Wheelerstreet.org
Favourite things: Georgian naval history, brambly Australian shiraz, “Outnumbered”, “Big Bang Theory”, live music, my Canon EOS 450D, the Faversham Hop Festival, Wheeler Street, the Medway

I’m the one who makes sure the standard of our digital publishing is as good as our print publishing. Simple and quite complicated. I think about metadata rather a lot.

Mike Grady - Web Production Editor

Favourite book: American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis / The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
Favourite website: www.guardian.co.uk/football
Favourite things: The predictable answers of films (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), music (The Kinks, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young), talking, being from the North East and really bad, often immature, jokes.

I work on the Pan Macmillan website, uploading the content and interviewing authors via email or in front of a camera. It’s a pretty diverse job so it always keeps me on my toes.
Ryan Chapman

Ryan Chapman - Internet Marketing Manager, Macmillan USA

Favourite book: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, by Richard Fariña
Favourite website: acontinuouslean.com
Favourite things: travel, 1960s French and Italian films, David Foster Wallace, Christopher Wool, anecdotes about drinking

I work as an Internet Marketing Manager for the U.S. side of Macmillan. Sometimes I’m the Digital Marketing Manager, and other times, rarely, I’m the Digital Internet Singularity Consultant Marketing Defibrillator.

Digitalist Alumni

Michael Bhaskar - Digital Editor

Favourite book: Ulysses by James Joyce (…what?)
Favourite website: 10 Membranes (my tumblelog)
Favourite things: pubs, sunshine, curiosity, reading, blogging, thinking, travelling, chatting, planning, dreaming and succeeding

Defining what I do at Pan is fairly difficult as it seems to change quite a lot. Daily in fact. At the moment I spend most of the time looking at spreadsheets, eBooks, RSS feeds and Outlook while thinking about sci-fi, blogging, databases and the next meeting.