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Carl and Shirley Carby: mixing business and social changes
Sunday, February 24, 2008
For most companies operating within the free-market economy, broad social development is at best a desirable but often elusive by-product of their key objective: that of providing strong dividend yield to shareholders.
Carl Carby, the executive chairman and joint owner of Carlong, and his wife Shirley in front of their 16,000-square-foot warehouse and office complex by Newport West. This complex houses the office of the executive chairman, the accounts and sales departments.
However, one Jamaican firm Carlong Publishers Caribbean Ltd has found a direct route to making social and cultural transformation its core ethos, even while pursuing its goal of assuring its two owners a reasonable return on their investment.
The principals Carl Carby, the 62-year-old executive chairman, and his wife and managing director, Shirley set out nearly two decades ago to develop a local publishing enterprise that aimed to both educate and kindle a sense of personal and national pride in their impressionable target market.
This entrepreneurial team reckoned that this audience the primary and pre-primary readers is at that crucial stage where its collective value can be significantly shaped by the reading material to which it is exposed.
In fact, a decade-and-a-half before she helped create Carlong in 1990, Shirley began in increments to swim against the tide of conventional wisdom by insisting that tailoring publications specifically for the Jamaican market, and in particular at the primary level, could be a viable undertaking. At the time, Longman's approach was to publish on a pan Caribbean basis.
Glynis Salmon (centre), marketing manager at Carlong, Juliet Green (right), and Shirley Carby examine Carlong publications on display at the company's corporate headquarters on Ruthven Road in Kingston
Today, Shirley, having followed her conviction with millions of dollars in investment in her publishing company, no doubt has a sense of vindication.
One measure of the validation of her conviction is the 1.2 million books that Carlong sold in 2007 throughout the region the bulk in Jamaica, and nearly 70 per cent Carlong's own publications.
With 50 full-time employees and dozens of freelancers and part-timers, Carlong generated sales of $770 million last year, again mostly reflecting written material that were created by local intellect and indigenous hands. Currently there are over 150 Carlong titles in production and distribution at schools pre-primary, primary and secondary public libraries, bookshops, in the knapsacks of thousands of students and on the desks of hundreds of teachers.
Annette Lewis, personal assistant to the executive chairman, helps her boss to retrieve information from the computer.
Carlong operates from two main locations in Kingston. Its corporate headquarters is housed in a three-storey building on Ruthven Road that was once owned by Jamaica Unit Trust and which Carlong acquired a few years ago. Here, its managing director, marketing team, editors, graphic artists, and all the personnel directly involved in the publishing side of the business can be found. At the other location 16,000 square feet of warehousing and office space at Newport West are the executive chairman as well as his accounting, administration and sales team. This building was bought by Carlong around 1993.
Carl says that one key strategy that he and Shirley agreed on early in the development of the company was that capital for all investments, including fixed assets like the company's buildings, and intangibles like title development, had to be generated organically, or raised through the sale of personal assets. There would be no bank borrowing.
"I am an accountant, so I am very conservative," was his understated explanation.
"It's a good thing we didn't," he continued. "We saw what happened with Finsac, to those individuals who had borrowed money only to see interest rates skyrocket above 50 per cent. If we had gone that route, we may have been bankrupt today."
While Carlong's staff represents a potent mix of intellect and experience, at the very top are two distinctly contrasting skills set and personalities: he, an ultraconservative and avowed tight-fisted accountant with an affinity for numbers; and she, a philosophical, outward-looking entrepreneur with less aversion to risks.
The mixture works but only through a carefully crafted bifurcation of roles.
"I definitely do not interfere with the publishing side of the business," Carl concedes. That is definitely Shirley's domain and she guards it with jealousy."
The sense of caution is reciprocated: "Carl runs the sales, accounting and manages the receivables side of the business," notes Shirley. He understands the numbers, has all the details and is good at negotiating deals."
Despite this obvious synergy, there is no doubt that it is her side of the business that has the sex appeal, and that she is the one who has been the personification of the company during its, 18 years of existence.
Shirleys role during these 18 years as Carlong's public persona is understandable, given that she has had a much deeper experience in the industry than Carl, and that to his credit, by shouldering all the backend responsibilities, he has created space for her to be in the limelight.
Moreover, as Carl is quick to point out, he himself is not a personality that is given to public exposure.
Perhaps the root of his shyness is in his rural upbringing. He was born in Kingston, the first child to Gwendolyn Louise Carby, and Cecil Lister Crooks, but quickly moved to Portland for pre-primary and primary school.
He then went to live with his aunt, Lucille Jackson, in Cambridge, St James, where he grew up with cousins
John Jackson, Freddie Jackson and Clement Jackson, among others. After Cambridge Primary he attended Cornwall College. On graduation Carl worked for two years in Kingston before moving to the Bahamas where he was employed as an accountant and later cost analyst at The Bahamas Cement Company a subsidiary of US Steel Corporation. After 10 years, Carl went to England to study accounting at South West London College.
Back in Jamaica he landed a job at Colgate Palmolive as chief accountant and then financial controller and eventually financial controller for the Caribbean region. He spent 10 years at Colgate.
It was while at his next job T Geddes Grant group office in Jamaica as financial controller that the opportunity for the Longman acquisition presented itself.
At this point there was about to be a fusion of the corporate and personal lives of Carl and his wife. But Shirley took a different road to Carlong Publications. The first of five daughters for Gwendolyn and Leonard Sangster of Hopewell in Hanover, Shirley, now 62 years old, studied special English at the University of the West Indies between 1964 and 1967.
After graduating, Shirley taught at St Jago before taking a teacher/librarian post at Wolmer's Boys School. In 1973, she accepted a job at Sangster's Bookstore where she spent two years as educational advisor. From here, in 1975, she was recruited by the British book publishing firm Longman Group Ltd, to be its Jamaican representative for its local subsidiary, Longman Caribbean.
In this job Shirley developed Longman from a one-person operation in 1975 to a staff complement of eight by 1981 climbing in the process to the position of managing director.
Shirley recalls that it was through her persistent urgings that Longman began, with painful trepidation, to slowly allow greater Jamaican input into the books that were being marketed to local readers. Her initiatives to Jamaicanise the content and authorship of the books were reinforced by the policy posture of the Michael Manley regime which began to advocate greater local ownership, especially in areas (like publishing and trading) with relatively low capital barrier to entry.
By then Shirley, now a well-known and highly respected CEO within the industry, had developed entrepreneurial ambitions of her own.
"Having played a key role in developing the company, with my local publications initiatives having greater success than the products from Longman, I decided that it was only appropriate and fair that I should have equity participating in Longman," she explains.
Shirley says that the Britons first agreed to sell her 17 per cent of the company, then later rescinded the offer in response to which she tendered her resignation.
That was around early 1990. It was not the end of the matter.
"To my surprise, I got a call from them about two weeks later offering me the entire company. I could not believe it."
Shirley's instinct, she still smarting, from what she considered to be a bit of Imperial arrogance on the part of her former boss, was to outrightly reject this latest overture.
"When I told Carl I wanted none of it, he said to me wait a bit, I think we should look at the numbers and negotiate the best deal we can."
That same year - 1990 - Shirley and Carl went to London to ink the deal. Carl remains unsentimental and matter-of-fact about the moment: "Essentially, what we purchased was the stock of books in Jamaica and an ongoing purchasing and distributorship agreement with Longman/Pearsons."
Shirley says she sold three houses and Carl his stocks, pension and terminal gratuity from his employer T Geddes Grant to fund the acquisition, and to secure enough capital for the ongoing operation.
Shirley now had the untrammelled opportunity to create the kind of locally oriented publishing house that was in line with her vision.
Under the arrangement with her former bosses, Carlong had the exclusive right to distribute Longman, Pitman and Ladybird products in Jamaica.
"Carlong's emphasis was to be on primary and Pearsons (which had acquired Longman) on secondary," explains Shirley. "The idea was that we would complement rather than compete against each other."
From Carl's perspective, it was also strategically important for Carlong to be anchored around an existing portfolio of reliable and steady business to generate cash flow that could provide a springboard from which his company could deepen its roots in the local end of the market.
"We had an operation that required capital," he says. "Development of titles is capital intensive. We had to employ high-end skills and invest heavily in training, which is costly. We have never borrowed in the development of the company. We have a model that generated revenue from the arrangement with Pearsons. That is what we used to invest in our own books."
At the same time, the new owners began putting in place the requisite internal infrastructure and personnel ahead of their full-scale attack on the Jamaican market. They appointed a senior manager of marketing, a senior manager of sales and distribution, and an accountant. The trade sales staff grew from 18 in 1990 to 24 in 1994.
Fortuitously, around this same time, new opportunities were being presented by the Government's emphasis on primary education, including the unveiling of a new curriculum for grades 1-6. Carlong began to angle for a major stake in this emerging mass market.
By the end of 1994, the company had some 50 titles under its belt and its primary science and social studies series adopted by the Ministry of Education, for free distribution to schools under the primary school textbook project.
By the mid-1990s, Carl and Shirley were confident that they were on the right track and went for broke.
"The local publishing was a marginal component of the business, and indeed the industry when we took over," she recalls. "We decided to go for the core of the primary curriculum. At first we went for the supplementary books. That is where the opportunity was, because the market was controlled by the British.
Additionally, the ministry had language and math that they had developed for themselves. But when the ministry developed a brand new curriculum, which was integrated during the first three years, we got an opportunity. We went after it and assembled the leading educators in the different disciplines. It paid off. There was a qualitative difference between what we produced and what the competition had to offer."
Shirley began to dust off project proposals that she, while managing director of Longman, had submitted to her bosses in the UK but which had been rejected.
"We went after the virgin opportunity and niche market of the Jamaican curriculum," she notes. "I implemented a number of ideas that I had given to Longman and which they had rejected."
Among them: a model for a combined textbook and revision book in one, which was later adopted by the other islands of the region.
Here is another of Shirley's perspective on Carlong's early focus on primary education:
"We were specially interested in the primary level because it is here that the whole context is more important. It is important that the child's introduction to learning is anchored in his or her environment. When the child opens a book and sees familiar people, places and things, it validates his or her own experiences, which is critical to build identity awareness and self-confidence."
By 2002, Carlong was generating annual revenue of $274 million, of which roughly 60 per cent was from books published by Pearsons, and the other 40 per cent representing those from its own titles. By 2007, that balance reversed, with over $520 million or two thirds of Carlong's $770 million gross revenue attributed to local titles.
The impact on the Jamaican market of this publisher goes beyond the cold numbers. For, in its role as the region's largest publisher of educational material, Carlong has its tentacles deeply embedded into Jamaica's intellectual, cultural and social foundation.
Along all stages in the long process of book development, the company plays a vital role, not only as the ultimate risk taker, but a virtual husbandry of a wide range of skills and talents that are crucial to sustain a credible publishing industry. Where these skills are deficient in quality or numbers, Carlong creates them through its ongoing training programme.
To begin with, to move from concept to product, the publisher is the primary risk taker. Carlong begins this journey by undertaking a market survey to estimate the potential sales, and to establish pricing models for the books. Once a detailed profile of each proposed publication is developed, the company has to find authors who are commissioned to write the books. The next stage in this process is evaluation and testing of the manuscript, followed by copyediting.
Carlong is also responsible for the physical appearance of the book from the cover design, format, layout of pages, to selection of typeface to the placement of illustrations. The production phase involves a range of issues from paper selection, to selection of printer and quality assurance.
This is followed by marketing, which is done through a wide range of channels from promotional literature, news releases, to book reviews, and personal visits to schools, and workshops.
Sales and distribution staff also have to be in place to ensure availability and delivery of the books to customers. One of the vexatious aspects of the industry that local publishers like Carlong have had to face is dissatisfaction among printers with the minimal volume of work that they are able to secure from publishers.
Carlong itself prints most of its locally developed books in the Far East, a decision which Shirley says is driven by economics.
"Our printers never secured the incentives to be able to invest in digital technology to keep up with the large printing jurisdictions like Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and China," she says. "We have a three-month turnaround from those countries, and despite the shipping cost they are 30 per cent below local printers and the quality is superior."
Shirley concedes that only a few simple black and white publications are printed locally.
Importantly, by remaining in the background as the partner with the steady hands that guide critical areas of finance, distribution, receivable management and sales, Carl has given Shirley, space to immerse herself in the regions wider publishing industry. For example, in 1989, she spearheaded the formation of the Book Industry Association of Jamaica created to improve the standard of service offered to the public by this industry. She was the founding president. She later assisted with the formation of a similar organisation in Trinidad & Tobago. The year before, she helped to create, and was founding chairman of the Jamaica Copyright Licensing Agency (JAMCOPY), to manage reprographic reproduction rights of creators of intellectual property. Again, she later helped to replicate a similar institution in T&T.
In 2005, Shirley was elected chairman of the Regional Steering Committee for the establishment of a Caribbean network of reproduction rights organisation.
Additionally, she has, since 1992, been a board member of the National Book Development Council of Jamaica, and was, between 1998 and 2006, a board member of the National Library of Jamaica. Since the 2000 formation of the Caribbean Publishers Network she has actively represented Carlong, and has been working through this vehicle, to develop a vibrant region-wide publishing industry.
Last year October, Shirley was invested with the Order of Distinction for her contribution to publishing and literacy development.
She has also found time to be involved in other endeavours within and outside the reach of her industry. These include:
. Board member of the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office since 2003;
. Chairman of Excelsior Primary School;
. Board member of the United Theological College of the West Indies;
. Board member of Women Business Owners Jamaica;
and
. Member of the National Gender Advisory Committee from 2004 to 2006.
Carl and Shirley have two children: Jason, a 22-year-old final year accounting student at UWI, Mona, and part-time worker at Carlong; and 17- year-old Candice, a student at Campion College.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
For most companies operating within the free-market economy, broad social development is at best a desirable but often elusive by-product of their key objective: that of providing strong dividend yield to shareholders.
Carl Carby, the executive chairman and joint owner of Carlong, and his wife Shirley in front of their 16,000-square-foot warehouse and office complex by Newport West. This complex houses the office of the executive chairman, the accounts and sales departments.
However, one Jamaican firm Carlong Publishers Caribbean Ltd has found a direct route to making social and cultural transformation its core ethos, even while pursuing its goal of assuring its two owners a reasonable return on their investment.
The principals Carl Carby, the 62-year-old executive chairman, and his wife and managing director, Shirley set out nearly two decades ago to develop a local publishing enterprise that aimed to both educate and kindle a sense of personal and national pride in their impressionable target market.
This entrepreneurial team reckoned that this audience the primary and pre-primary readers is at that crucial stage where its collective value can be significantly shaped by the reading material to which it is exposed.
In fact, a decade-and-a-half before she helped create Carlong in 1990, Shirley began in increments to swim against the tide of conventional wisdom by insisting that tailoring publications specifically for the Jamaican market, and in particular at the primary level, could be a viable undertaking. At the time, Longman's approach was to publish on a pan Caribbean basis.
Glynis Salmon (centre), marketing manager at Carlong, Juliet Green (right), and Shirley Carby examine Carlong publications on display at the company's corporate headquarters on Ruthven Road in Kingston
Today, Shirley, having followed her conviction with millions of dollars in investment in her publishing company, no doubt has a sense of vindication.
One measure of the validation of her conviction is the 1.2 million books that Carlong sold in 2007 throughout the region the bulk in Jamaica, and nearly 70 per cent Carlong's own publications.
With 50 full-time employees and dozens of freelancers and part-timers, Carlong generated sales of $770 million last year, again mostly reflecting written material that were created by local intellect and indigenous hands. Currently there are over 150 Carlong titles in production and distribution at schools pre-primary, primary and secondary public libraries, bookshops, in the knapsacks of thousands of students and on the desks of hundreds of teachers.
Annette Lewis, personal assistant to the executive chairman, helps her boss to retrieve information from the computer.
Carlong operates from two main locations in Kingston. Its corporate headquarters is housed in a three-storey building on Ruthven Road that was once owned by Jamaica Unit Trust and which Carlong acquired a few years ago. Here, its managing director, marketing team, editors, graphic artists, and all the personnel directly involved in the publishing side of the business can be found. At the other location 16,000 square feet of warehousing and office space at Newport West are the executive chairman as well as his accounting, administration and sales team. This building was bought by Carlong around 1993.
Carl says that one key strategy that he and Shirley agreed on early in the development of the company was that capital for all investments, including fixed assets like the company's buildings, and intangibles like title development, had to be generated organically, or raised through the sale of personal assets. There would be no bank borrowing.
"I am an accountant, so I am very conservative," was his understated explanation.
"It's a good thing we didn't," he continued. "We saw what happened with Finsac, to those individuals who had borrowed money only to see interest rates skyrocket above 50 per cent. If we had gone that route, we may have been bankrupt today."
While Carlong's staff represents a potent mix of intellect and experience, at the very top are two distinctly contrasting skills set and personalities: he, an ultraconservative and avowed tight-fisted accountant with an affinity for numbers; and she, a philosophical, outward-looking entrepreneur with less aversion to risks.
The mixture works but only through a carefully crafted bifurcation of roles.
"I definitely do not interfere with the publishing side of the business," Carl concedes. That is definitely Shirley's domain and she guards it with jealousy."
The sense of caution is reciprocated: "Carl runs the sales, accounting and manages the receivables side of the business," notes Shirley. He understands the numbers, has all the details and is good at negotiating deals."
Despite this obvious synergy, there is no doubt that it is her side of the business that has the sex appeal, and that she is the one who has been the personification of the company during its, 18 years of existence.
Shirleys role during these 18 years as Carlong's public persona is understandable, given that she has had a much deeper experience in the industry than Carl, and that to his credit, by shouldering all the backend responsibilities, he has created space for her to be in the limelight.
Moreover, as Carl is quick to point out, he himself is not a personality that is given to public exposure.
Perhaps the root of his shyness is in his rural upbringing. He was born in Kingston, the first child to Gwendolyn Louise Carby, and Cecil Lister Crooks, but quickly moved to Portland for pre-primary and primary school.
He then went to live with his aunt, Lucille Jackson, in Cambridge, St James, where he grew up with cousins
John Jackson, Freddie Jackson and Clement Jackson, among others. After Cambridge Primary he attended Cornwall College. On graduation Carl worked for two years in Kingston before moving to the Bahamas where he was employed as an accountant and later cost analyst at The Bahamas Cement Company a subsidiary of US Steel Corporation. After 10 years, Carl went to England to study accounting at South West London College.
Back in Jamaica he landed a job at Colgate Palmolive as chief accountant and then financial controller and eventually financial controller for the Caribbean region. He spent 10 years at Colgate.
It was while at his next job T Geddes Grant group office in Jamaica as financial controller that the opportunity for the Longman acquisition presented itself.
At this point there was about to be a fusion of the corporate and personal lives of Carl and his wife. But Shirley took a different road to Carlong Publications. The first of five daughters for Gwendolyn and Leonard Sangster of Hopewell in Hanover, Shirley, now 62 years old, studied special English at the University of the West Indies between 1964 and 1967.
After graduating, Shirley taught at St Jago before taking a teacher/librarian post at Wolmer's Boys School. In 1973, she accepted a job at Sangster's Bookstore where she spent two years as educational advisor. From here, in 1975, she was recruited by the British book publishing firm Longman Group Ltd, to be its Jamaican representative for its local subsidiary, Longman Caribbean.
In this job Shirley developed Longman from a one-person operation in 1975 to a staff complement of eight by 1981 climbing in the process to the position of managing director.
Shirley recalls that it was through her persistent urgings that Longman began, with painful trepidation, to slowly allow greater Jamaican input into the books that were being marketed to local readers. Her initiatives to Jamaicanise the content and authorship of the books were reinforced by the policy posture of the Michael Manley regime which began to advocate greater local ownership, especially in areas (like publishing and trading) with relatively low capital barrier to entry.
By then Shirley, now a well-known and highly respected CEO within the industry, had developed entrepreneurial ambitions of her own.
"Having played a key role in developing the company, with my local publications initiatives having greater success than the products from Longman, I decided that it was only appropriate and fair that I should have equity participating in Longman," she explains.
Shirley says that the Britons first agreed to sell her 17 per cent of the company, then later rescinded the offer in response to which she tendered her resignation.
That was around early 1990. It was not the end of the matter.
"To my surprise, I got a call from them about two weeks later offering me the entire company. I could not believe it."
Shirley's instinct, she still smarting, from what she considered to be a bit of Imperial arrogance on the part of her former boss, was to outrightly reject this latest overture.
"When I told Carl I wanted none of it, he said to me wait a bit, I think we should look at the numbers and negotiate the best deal we can."
That same year - 1990 - Shirley and Carl went to London to ink the deal. Carl remains unsentimental and matter-of-fact about the moment: "Essentially, what we purchased was the stock of books in Jamaica and an ongoing purchasing and distributorship agreement with Longman/Pearsons."
Shirley says she sold three houses and Carl his stocks, pension and terminal gratuity from his employer T Geddes Grant to fund the acquisition, and to secure enough capital for the ongoing operation.
Shirley now had the untrammelled opportunity to create the kind of locally oriented publishing house that was in line with her vision.
Under the arrangement with her former bosses, Carlong had the exclusive right to distribute Longman, Pitman and Ladybird products in Jamaica.
"Carlong's emphasis was to be on primary and Pearsons (which had acquired Longman) on secondary," explains Shirley. "The idea was that we would complement rather than compete against each other."
From Carl's perspective, it was also strategically important for Carlong to be anchored around an existing portfolio of reliable and steady business to generate cash flow that could provide a springboard from which his company could deepen its roots in the local end of the market.
"We had an operation that required capital," he says. "Development of titles is capital intensive. We had to employ high-end skills and invest heavily in training, which is costly. We have never borrowed in the development of the company. We have a model that generated revenue from the arrangement with Pearsons. That is what we used to invest in our own books."
At the same time, the new owners began putting in place the requisite internal infrastructure and personnel ahead of their full-scale attack on the Jamaican market. They appointed a senior manager of marketing, a senior manager of sales and distribution, and an accountant. The trade sales staff grew from 18 in 1990 to 24 in 1994.
Fortuitously, around this same time, new opportunities were being presented by the Government's emphasis on primary education, including the unveiling of a new curriculum for grades 1-6. Carlong began to angle for a major stake in this emerging mass market.
By the end of 1994, the company had some 50 titles under its belt and its primary science and social studies series adopted by the Ministry of Education, for free distribution to schools under the primary school textbook project.
By the mid-1990s, Carl and Shirley were confident that they were on the right track and went for broke.
"The local publishing was a marginal component of the business, and indeed the industry when we took over," she recalls. "We decided to go for the core of the primary curriculum. At first we went for the supplementary books. That is where the opportunity was, because the market was controlled by the British.
Additionally, the ministry had language and math that they had developed for themselves. But when the ministry developed a brand new curriculum, which was integrated during the first three years, we got an opportunity. We went after it and assembled the leading educators in the different disciplines. It paid off. There was a qualitative difference between what we produced and what the competition had to offer."
Shirley began to dust off project proposals that she, while managing director of Longman, had submitted to her bosses in the UK but which had been rejected.
"We went after the virgin opportunity and niche market of the Jamaican curriculum," she notes. "I implemented a number of ideas that I had given to Longman and which they had rejected."
Among them: a model for a combined textbook and revision book in one, which was later adopted by the other islands of the region.
Here is another of Shirley's perspective on Carlong's early focus on primary education:
"We were specially interested in the primary level because it is here that the whole context is more important. It is important that the child's introduction to learning is anchored in his or her environment. When the child opens a book and sees familiar people, places and things, it validates his or her own experiences, which is critical to build identity awareness and self-confidence."
By 2002, Carlong was generating annual revenue of $274 million, of which roughly 60 per cent was from books published by Pearsons, and the other 40 per cent representing those from its own titles. By 2007, that balance reversed, with over $520 million or two thirds of Carlong's $770 million gross revenue attributed to local titles.
The impact on the Jamaican market of this publisher goes beyond the cold numbers. For, in its role as the region's largest publisher of educational material, Carlong has its tentacles deeply embedded into Jamaica's intellectual, cultural and social foundation.
Along all stages in the long process of book development, the company plays a vital role, not only as the ultimate risk taker, but a virtual husbandry of a wide range of skills and talents that are crucial to sustain a credible publishing industry. Where these skills are deficient in quality or numbers, Carlong creates them through its ongoing training programme.
To begin with, to move from concept to product, the publisher is the primary risk taker. Carlong begins this journey by undertaking a market survey to estimate the potential sales, and to establish pricing models for the books. Once a detailed profile of each proposed publication is developed, the company has to find authors who are commissioned to write the books. The next stage in this process is evaluation and testing of the manuscript, followed by copyediting.
Carlong is also responsible for the physical appearance of the book from the cover design, format, layout of pages, to selection of typeface to the placement of illustrations. The production phase involves a range of issues from paper selection, to selection of printer and quality assurance.
This is followed by marketing, which is done through a wide range of channels from promotional literature, news releases, to book reviews, and personal visits to schools, and workshops.
Sales and distribution staff also have to be in place to ensure availability and delivery of the books to customers. One of the vexatious aspects of the industry that local publishers like Carlong have had to face is dissatisfaction among printers with the minimal volume of work that they are able to secure from publishers.
Carlong itself prints most of its locally developed books in the Far East, a decision which Shirley says is driven by economics.
"Our printers never secured the incentives to be able to invest in digital technology to keep up with the large printing jurisdictions like Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and China," she says. "We have a three-month turnaround from those countries, and despite the shipping cost they are 30 per cent below local printers and the quality is superior."
Shirley concedes that only a few simple black and white publications are printed locally.
Importantly, by remaining in the background as the partner with the steady hands that guide critical areas of finance, distribution, receivable management and sales, Carl has given Shirley, space to immerse herself in the regions wider publishing industry. For example, in 1989, she spearheaded the formation of the Book Industry Association of Jamaica created to improve the standard of service offered to the public by this industry. She was the founding president. She later assisted with the formation of a similar organisation in Trinidad & Tobago. The year before, she helped to create, and was founding chairman of the Jamaica Copyright Licensing Agency (JAMCOPY), to manage reprographic reproduction rights of creators of intellectual property. Again, she later helped to replicate a similar institution in T&T.
In 2005, Shirley was elected chairman of the Regional Steering Committee for the establishment of a Caribbean network of reproduction rights organisation.
Additionally, she has, since 1992, been a board member of the National Book Development Council of Jamaica, and was, between 1998 and 2006, a board member of the National Library of Jamaica. Since the 2000 formation of the Caribbean Publishers Network she has actively represented Carlong, and has been working through this vehicle, to develop a vibrant region-wide publishing industry.
Last year October, Shirley was invested with the Order of Distinction for her contribution to publishing and literacy development.
She has also found time to be involved in other endeavours within and outside the reach of her industry. These include:
. Board member of the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office since 2003;
. Chairman of Excelsior Primary School;
. Board member of the United Theological College of the West Indies;
. Board member of Women Business Owners Jamaica;
and
. Member of the National Gender Advisory Committee from 2004 to 2006.
Carl and Shirley have two children: Jason, a 22-year-old final year accounting student at UWI, Mona, and part-time worker at Carlong; and 17- year-old Candice, a student at Campion College.
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