Page 24 - ELITE PLUS MAGAZINE VOL4

NEW WAVE EXECUTIVE‘For our school clients we can’t just sell books; we have to educate teachers on how to use books to organize other types of activities’the new business model?Our company is expanding, and obviously we need new skill sets. Now we have to train our editors to localize digital content, to do project manage- ment, and it’s not just editing and proofreading any more. For our sales and marketing team, who worked with catalogues and traditional books, they now have to sell science experiment curricula. We’re learning advisers who go into schools and help them. They have to know their content and science knowledge a little bit. We have many training programmes for our team.Recently you opened a new book shop.Yes, at Wankaew Children’s Bookshop we’re a strategic partner with children’s and young adult publishers. There’s no place for children’s books in the everyday market. What we do at the bookshop is create a domain that welcomes children’s and young adult books from every publisher in Thailand and around the world.What have been the biggest obstacles and challenges for you so far?The business model that we’re doing now is so new. When schools or government agencies buy products they see budgets that go to tangible things like books and furniture. So when we say we’re selling curricula or online services that need to be renewed every year, they don’t understand because the infrastructure isn’t there. Nanmeebooks has to lay the ground- work. In many developed countries the market for this is already mature.How is it working closely with teachers?Teachers have aspirations to learn, and when we introduce them to new things they’re sponges that absorbThere are already a lot of tutorial andcramschoolsinThailand,butmost of them focus on test-taking skills, which is something we disagree with. We want to provide options for parents to find extra curricula for their children, and they can come to our Go Genius School. They can do science experiments or Maths-Whizz and there are also activities and picture books for children of kindergarten age. This is how we’ve evolved and differentiated ourselves.People seem to read less and less. How do you entice them to read?Now that reading has become something people place a low priorityon, we have to add value to reading. At Nanmeebooks we have 3,500 titles, and 70 percent of that is content for children and young adults. We’re trying to publish more novelty books. We work with Osborne Publishing in the UK to create flip-flap books and books that children can play games with – it’s not just reading. For our school clients we can’t just sell books; we have to educate teachers on how to use books to organize other types of activities. Now we have a project called Kiddy Center, and schools invest in educational toys and lesson plans that we teach teachers how to use.How does your staff keep up with22 Elite+