Quest Publishing was born out of requests over several years from professionals in corporate security, public safety and law enforcement for a way to pass on their hard-earned experience and knowledge to the newcomers and for the upcoming leadership of this profession. Unlike traditional publishers, QP focuses on risk and safety issues of organizations and the public at large, through contributors in academia and the public and private sectors.
In this issue we interview the founder of QP, Jacques R. Island, to get a sense of how Quest Publishing came to be and what is anticipated for the future.
QP: Can you discuss what led to establishing Quest Publishing?
JRI: To start with, Quest Publishing is a division of the Inquesta Corporation, a risk and crisis management company that I founded in 2003, after I retired from the F.B.I. [Federal Bureau of Investigation]. Inquesta started as a private investigations and security consulting firm, and we engaged increasingly in security contracting opportunities that frequently required detailed proposals. Proposals for state and federal opportunities were and are especially lengthy, and it’s not uncommon for those proposals to be over a hundred pages long, and more. I mean, some are practically books. Also, the deliverables of our consulting engagements usually include new or rewritten policies and procedures, some of which are book length manuals. So, we felt a need to develop in-house publishing skills to make the internal production of such documents quicker and more professional. That led to our acquiring the necessary publishing tools and knowledge. Once we had that, and with several years more of practice at publishing, we decided to formalize it as a publishing division. Then, as we worked our projects with partners and independent consultants, we started to get requests and suggestions from them to help them with books they wanted to write. And our own people, me included, also wanted a channel for passing what we know about our professions to others. So, we opened up the publishing division to others outside our company and called it Quest Publishing. And that was before the publishing industry grew to what it is today, what with print-on-demand and the explosion of self-published books that are now on the market.
QP: It sounds like you started the publishing business line from scratch after leaving the F.B.I. Did you pick up that knowledge and experience on your own after the F.B.I.?
JRI: Yes and no. No because that I had some prior experience before leaving the F.B.I., and yes because what publishing I did do before leaving the F.B.I. was limited to editing a lot of intelligence reports and programming an early computer system into a desktop publishing station—and I had a lot to learn about the business side of publishing, like dealing with ISBNs and copyrights, and all that. And then there are royalties and suppliers and all the other company management tasks to deal with in real publishing.
QP: Can you talk a little about your publishing experience before founding Inquesta and Quest Publishing?
JRI: Sure. My experience before Inquesta and Quest Publishing was as an F.B.I. agent. In my early days there I was assigned to a regional drug intelligence task force even before the advent of the Internet with Netscape. I mean, there really wasn’t a public Internet in those days. It was still something only geeks would use in academia and research centers. Big computers and clunky databases were the tools to get then, and the king of desktop publishing was a program then called Xerox Ventura Publisher. There was also Quark Express, but Ventura was king. And that was the software that the F.B.I. required our task force to use when we insisted on producing a thousand-page paperback encyclopedia of several volumes about all the major drug groups of the time. Well, I took the time to learn Ventura and D-Base, gathered intelligence reports from agencies at all levels, got a lot of contributors to analyze and massage the information, and dumped all that into the database with Ventura Publisher to churn out several volumes of intelligence estimates. That was an old-fashioned multi-book product. We did everything except but marketing and sales. Obviously, we didn’t need to do that because it was for the drug enforcement community. After almost three years of very focused work, we churned out 500 copies and they went out in one day to a waiting list of agents and agencies. After that first run, the project was transferred to a new unit in Washington, D.C. that was staffed by several federal agencies on a national level. I learned a good deal about book production from that but nothing about the business side of publishing, which is at least as time consuming as book production.
QP: A thousand pages over several volumes?
JRI: Yes. Well, nearly a thousand pages between the several tomes that made up the intelligence estimate. One volume was made up of narrative chapters about the different major drug cartels, descriptions about the drug manufacturing processes for the drugs of the times, the various transportation routes, narco-terrorism, and many other topics of interest. Another volume was a compendium of all the known major drug trafficking groups describing their methods, names of leaders and members, their positions and functions in the groups, criminal histories, and all that. A third volume was a compendium of all the photos of known drug suspects and personalities, identified only by a number, that were keyed to the second volume where the suspect’s biography and group affiliation was. The last two volumes were very much the product of the database’s reporting algorithms that exported and formatted the data with Ventura’s styles. The idea of that was to give drug investigators an unclassified tool—the “photo album”—they could have cooperating subjects breeze through to point out to investigators the suspects they knew or had operated with. Investigators could then debrief the witness for what they knew about the photographed suspects without divulging any information from the first two volumes. With that they added to the growing body of knowledge and evidence. I can talk about it now because nearly three decades have passed. Things have changed and intelligence is now literally at the investigators’ fingertips, what with today’s communications devices. But back then it was still a paper-based publishing system.
QP: How was that different from today’s publishing process?
JRI: I can talk from our experience as a small boutique publisher. I don’t know how the big publishing houses operate. The biggest differences between us as a boutique publisher and large publishers are two: First, they typically print a variety of book genres. They’re not limited to one area of interest like we are. The second difference is that large publishers have a big overhead burden, and we don’t. And that includes expensive, large marketing departments. The result of that is that they can pay their authors very small royalties. Our authors get royalties that are probably from three to ten times larger than the royalties big publishers would pay. We can do that because our administrative costs are lean and controlled. But we do need to ramp up marketing more but in a smart way and with few fixed costs.
QP: Can you elaborate on that? The ramping up of marketing, I mean?
JRI: As you know, we’re relatively new to the business side of publishing and we are learning new tricks every day. And we are also finding newer and better tools for marketing and sales. Right now we’re working on customizing our CRM system; that is, our customer relationships management system to work better with not just customers but also with our authors and suppliers, and to ramp up sales campaigns. The best book in the world won’t sell if no one knows about it, so marketing and advertising are absolutely necessary to achieve strong sales. So, we’re looking to improve our marketing activities, but I’d rather not get into too much detail about that since we’re in the middle of improving our infrastructure. I could talk about that sometime in the future when we’re further along this path. What I can say is that we have some very knowledgeable and qualified authors working with us to produce truly useful literature about risk and crisis management and public safety. Now we have the challenge of making sure our intended audience is made aware of their work.
End of interview.
