2012 has been a time of upheaval at AVA.
Following our acquisition by Bloomsbury in July there have been many changes. From being an office of 12, we are suddenly part of a company of 350. From a little town by the sea we will need to adapt to the bright lights (and crowded transport) of working in the UK’s capital city. From having to explain (frequently) that it is not Ava but A.V.A. (an abbreviation for Applied Visual Arts), thanks in large part to Harry Potter we will be working for an internationally recognised publishing house. All of our existing structures have changed. There are completely different workflows and systems and procedures and getting to grips with it all has been, at times, pretty overwhelming. In the last week alone two of our colleagues have left and they are going to be hugely missed – just how much hasn’t completely sunk in just yet as at the moment it feels like they are just leaving for the Christmas break.
But we have somehow made it to December, and in a few weeks will be leaving our Worthing office forever…and there is some difference in opinion about whether or not this is a cause for regret! (There has been a rather unpleasant leak recently which we won’t be sad to swap for the rather lovely Bloomsbury Bedford Square offices). Some of us will be making the commute up to London and one of us has already moved.
But though it is a time of change for us, it is also a time of change in publishing in general. And in these circumstances, it is reassuring to find people who believe in developing innovative solutions to the challenges publishers are facing to ensure we continue to be able to do what good publishers should do – be instrumental in the creation and presentation of valuable content, facilitate the effective distribution of that content, be the experts at promoting that content so it can be discovered by relevant audiences, and be constantly on the look out for more innovative ways to make that content more desirable, more findable and more widely available. In a time of such great progress, where technology is transforming the landscape around us, publishers need to take note of what Steve Jobs understood so well – that knowing what your audience will want next before they know it themselves is invaluable.
With this in mind, we would like to say thank you to all our new colleagues at Bloomsbury Academic who have been welcoming and supportive, and who have made the process of integration as pain-free as possible. We would also like to thank them for their enthusiasm about the content that we, and our authors and designers, have worked so hard to create. We continue to be very proud of everything we have achieved at AVA. We are very positive about what the future holds for AVA and the visual arts at Bloomsbury – now arguably the largest visual arts publisher in the world – which is quite a claim! In 2013 we intend to build on our previous success, for example by creating additional academic resources and improving our delivery methods for all of our content, thus bringing our titles to a larger audience of students, instructors and practitioners than ever before. We will also be working more closely with our new US colleagues over at Fairchild Books so stay tuned!
We hope your 2013 will be full of exciting new beginnings as ours will be. And happy Christmas! We thought we’d leave you with our attempts at a creative Christmas card…
Attempt 1 – we were going for a snowflake or a star…:
Attempt 2 – a sadly wonky snowflake:
Attempt 3 – a Christmas star! With a bit of help from Instagram :) :
Have a wonderful holiday!
-from everyone at AVA
Please note our change of address. From 21st January you can find us at:
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP
Tel: +44(0)20 7631 5600. The Worthing office will close on 18th January 2013.
