Digital publishing expert Anne-Marie “Her Geekness” Concepción has been growing and adapting her Chicago-based cross-media publication and production design studio since she founded it 25 years ago. At Seneca Design & Training, she and her team create ebooks and tablet apps for authors and publishing houses, and help publishers make a smooth transition to the latest software and workflows.
As an independent Adobe Certified Instructor, Anne-Marie teaches hands-on classes at client sites and conferences worldwide, in addition to developing and recording hands-on video tutorials for lynda.com. Countless creative professional have relied on the expert video training she serves up in 20 courses on the site, covering topics like creating ebooks using InDesign, making the most of Acrobat X, using Twitter for business, and more.
Anne-Marie is also the co-host of the InDesignSecrets blog, podcast, and videocast, and is co-producer of the annual Print + ePublishing Conference (PePcon) and co-publisher of InDesign Magazine, through a partnership with David Blatner.
I spoke with Anne-Marie last week to learn more about how she began her career in design, what it took to start her own business, and where she sees the publishing industry heading in this era continuous change.
Anne-Marie, can you tell us about your background and how you got involved with publishing?
After I got my master’s at Northwestern in education, I started working at DeVry as a retention counselor and a teacher. This was in the early ‘80s, when everybody had IBM PCs with the green text and the black background. I was kind of fascinated with it, and I bought myself a Commodore 64 and tried to teach myself Basic. Then my boss brought in a Mac Plus, and my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it—I wanted one. So I ended up quitting my job and waitressing while I started my business.
I bought my first Mac, a Mac II, in 1988 or ‘87, for $6,000, and a LaserWriter printer that was $6,000. I started out doing resumes and brochures for everyone I could think of, starting with DeVry students and staff. People I was doing stuff for bought their own Macs, and they asked me to teach them how to use them, so I thought, “I could do this, too; I love to teach, and I could charge a lot more money than the school district can pay me.” So I’ve been doing training and graphic design ever since.
How has the industry changed since you first started out?
When I was teaching and doing graphic design, I started out doing print, but I then began doing more web design, and doing all hand-coded websites for myself and my clients, and I was teaching Photoshop, Illustrator and QuarkXPress. Then I wrote a book on web design in 2000, called Professional Web Site Design From Start to Finish.
My web design clients started asking for things I didn’t know how to do and that to me were boring, like dynamic sites driven by databases, MySQL, and PHP. So I sort of went through a crisis after about 10 years in business. Everybody by that time knew how to use Photoshop, Illustrator and QuarkXPress, I thought, and there wasn’t much for me to do. People were asking for Macromedia Authorware training, or video editing with Premiere. And I thought, “Man, this is a lot of equipment; I just want to stay with applications.”
And so I changed the name of my company from Seneca Design & Consulting to Seneca Design & Training. I really started pushing training, and included three years of 24/7 follow-up support for my clients. I also started my DesignGeek newsletter, which I ran up until a couple years ago; it was a tips and trick newsletter, and I had about 8,000 subscribers at the end.
While I was doing that, Adobe found out that I was teaching Quark and Copydesk to World Book Publishing and asked me if I would be a teacher for InDesign and InCopy. I wasn’t into it at all; I thought it felt like PageMaker. Finally, one of my freelancers said, “I can’t believe you’re still using QuarkXPress.” So I learned InDesign and loved it, and started teaching it and writing about it.
How did your partnership with David Blatner start?
David was a subscriber to DesignGeek, and he and I started to get to know each other because I was a speaker at some of his events. He asked if I’d like to write a book with him, and I said of course; I had about 12 of his books on my bookshelf. And so we wrote a book together; we had a great time and got along really well. We started doing an InDesign podcast in 2005. Then we needed a website to host the show notes, so we made this cheap-o WordPress blog called InDesignSecrets, and then we incorporated in 2006. And that’s where my second business, Publishing Secrets, started, with David and me as equal partners.
He and I do the InDesignSecrets blog, and we publish ebooks, we do podcasts, we do videocasts, we do seminars, and we do PePcon, the print and e-publishing conference that we started four years ago. And I still run Seneca Design & Training.
And you also do some training with lynda.com, is that right?
I had been approached by lynda.com in 2004 to do videos after they saw me speak at an event, but I wasn’t interested; it seemed like a lot of work at the time. But when Adobe asked if I could work with them to create InDesign training videos, of course I said yes. I did a couple of courses and they didn’t make any money because they it was all niche stuff, and I started doing more courses and now I’m up to 20.
My next course I’m really excited about; it should be out by the end of July. It’s about getting Word and InDesign working together. It’s a thing with me about how Adobe completely ignores the content creators. Designers—what they call “creators”—are like the tip of the iceberg of Adobe’s customers. What about all the production people? What about all the people who actually write the content? No InDesign user I know of also writes the brochure content, the catalog content, the book content, or the magazine content. It all comes from somebody else, and everybody else uses Word, which can be kind of a nightmare. This course addresses those pain points.
What advice do you have for women getting started in the publishing industry?
My advice is to understand digital and to get away from old meanings of “publisher” and “author,” because I think anybody stuck in that world is doomed. Look at someone like Dominique Raccah from Sourcebooks. She grew the company on her own. When she gets an author to write a book for Sourcebooks, it becomes like a whole other business. The author, depending on what kind of book it is, will not only get a book and a book design and a book cover design, but also often a website to build a community, their own newsletter, their own app, and a digital version, and they build it out in just a few weeks. She keeps talking about how a book is not just a book, it’s more of a community that is all interested in a story. She keeps pushing the boundaries of what publishing is really about.
So what other shifts that you’re seeing in the industry? What are people struggling with?
Now, an author doesn’t just write the book and send the manuscript off and not think about it anymore. The author is often self-publishing—that is huge. But an author who self-publishes cannot get a premium book out unless they also hire a book designer or a cover designer, and especially an editor. So I think that editors, copywriters, and cover designers who might not be able to find jobs at publishers anymore have a huge market out there that doesn’t know it needs them.
If I were a publisher and I was hiring an editor or a designer and that person came in and they knew all about digital production and distribution and metadata, they’re worth their weight in gold. So I think the best way to make yourself more marketable is to see what the publisher is hiring other people to teach them, and learn it.
What do you think the next big shift is going to be?
I think that books will become more interactive, and even trade publishing books will become more social than they are now—where you’re reading a paragraph and you can check to see if anyone else liked that paragraph in a pop-up. It’s happening with music sites like Soundcloud, and I think it’s happening with all publications.
Do you have a favorite app?
I use Downcast at least once a day; it’s a podcast downloader. I subscribe to about 35 podcasts. But the latest thing I like is called Dropcam. It’s a USB wireless security camera that connects to whatever Wi-Fi router you’re using, and it takes a fantastic HD picture and does live streaming of whatever it sees to the cloud. So wherever you are, if you want to see what’s happening inside the house, you can just tap the app and it shows you the live stream. I mainly got it to use as a “doggy-cam,” to peek at my two new puppies while I’m away.
Technology for Publishing’s Women in Media blog highlights the news and achievements of female leaders and role models in the publishing and media industry. Look for our monthly in-depth profiles and interviews of top women to watch. Is there someone you’d like to nominate for an upcoming Q&A? Drop us a note!
Posted by: Margot Knorr Mancini
