Sheila Bounford founded Off the Page Ideas in 2012 and works with a variety traditional print publishing and digital publishing & services businesses as they embrace the challenges of rapidly changing market forces. She blogs about books, ideas and change at www.otpi.co.uk. She’s one of our top speakers at BookMachine Unplugged, so we thought we’d find out a little bit more…

1. How did you end up working with the publishing industry?

I’m a typical example of someone who started out in publishing after leaving university just because they liked books and wanted to work with them. It was before publishing qualifications became common. I started in an administrative role at Batsford  (now part of Anova) in the days when it was an independent with offices in Marylebone. I never wanted to be an editor – I liked learning about what goes on under the bonnet of a publishing company to make the whole process work.

2. What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned (without giving away your talk idea…)?

That unless your team knows and welcomes the fact that change is continuous, you will spend your life rolling stones uphill.

If you’d like to hear more from Sheila, you can sign up to hear her talk about he experience of collaborating with others at BookMachine Unplugged on 21st February