Ep. 1994 Hermione Ireland featuring Académie du Vin Library | IWP Book Club With Richard Hough

The Italian Wine Podcast is the community driven platform for Italian wine geeks around the world. Support the show by donating at italianwinepodcast.com. Donate 5 or more euros, and we'll send you a copy of our latest book, My Italian Grape Geek Journal, absolutely free. To get your free copy of My Italian Grape Geek Journal, click support us at italianwinepodcast.com or wherever you get your pods. Welcome to the Italian wine podcast book club. Each month, we select the great wine book to share. We chat to the author and get your opinions. Stay tuned as we read Between the Vines with The Italian Wine Podcast. Hello, and welcome to book club with The Italian Wine Podcast. This is the fifth episode of a new show focusing on the world of wine writing. Each month, we choose a book, chat to the author, listen to some extracts, and explore the story behind the book. This month, our guest is slightly different because she is a publisher rather than a writer. It's a real pleasure to welcome Hermione Ireland, the managing director of Academie du Vin Library, specialist publishing house behind some of the best wine writing past and present. Welcome, Hermione. How are you? I'm very well, Richard. Thank you for inviting me on the show. It's lovely to be here. Great. Now you have extensive experience in the world of publishing, working for some of the biggest and most influential publishing houses in The UK and beyond. But before speaking about your work as a publisher, I'd like to explore what first drew you to the world of books, the world of publishing. And I understand that, like some of our previous guests, you studied English literature at university. Can you tell us a bit about that experience? They still say when you're looking at, applying to university now, and I have a a post university child and one who's there, choose something that you'll you love because you will do best in it. And I was passionate about reading. English literature was was an obvious thing. I mean, I you know, I'm older than you, Richard, but we were very lucky back in the day. We didn't have to work that hard at university. But just going and spending three years, you know, reading books and talking about them in a in a seminar was sort of a dream come true. But I think it does set you up well for a job in publishing. There are quite a lot of people in publishing who have done other degrees like history and classics. I think it's really important for most people, if you're going to be an editor or a marketing or PR person particularly, to have done done an essay subject. But I think English, studying literature, just makes you very, very author centric. It makes you very focused on the writing itself, but it also makes you, I think, concentrate on the reader because you've been a reader. You know, you anybody who works in publishing is a reader. You continue to be that person. So I think at the end of the day, if you're in publishing, the reader is the most important part of the whole ecosystem. You know, therefore, studying English as a as a degree is a is a great, preparation for that, I would say. Okay. Yeah. Great. And I I completely agree with the advice that you should choose something you love. I I studied history at university, and that was basically the the rationale the subject I was most interested in. And I think, in fact, the the skills that I learned at at university, I don't know if this is the same for you, Hermione, but I I use them every day in terms of research, in terms of creating an argument, in terms of bringing together different sources and trying to to come to a evidence based conclusion. Yes. I think that's true. I think for me, a lot of it was quick thinking. It was being in seminars and needing to, as you say, place put an argument together, but, you know, be able to talk coherently and confidently in front of other people about ideas you had. I think that was that was probably one of the most important skills, as well as what you said about research and, you know, thinking and and writing well. I think that was another important bit for me. Yeah. So you you moved more or less from university from English literature into the world of publishing, and you spent a significant part of your career with Darling Kindersley Limited, the the British multinational publishing company that specializes in illustrated reference books for adults and children. I think many of our listeners will be familiar with some of those books. I certainly recognize the Super Readers and the Eyewitness books and even the Star Wars and and Marvel. Yeah. It was a it was a great place to work. I mean, Peter Kindersley was definitely a vision visionary within the publishing industry. He very much believed I I think he may have been dyslexic, and he very much believed that, you know, a picture tells a thousand words. So he came up with this design that he called lexigraphics or this concept, I should say, of highly illustrated books that got an awful lot of information across. And they were originally it was particularly in the children's list that was true, but the eyewitness travel guides have, you know, been world bestsellers for I should know. I think they were started in the mid nineties. I think '97 or '8, '98. It was a wonderful place to work. I went into publishing because, you know, if you love the written work, then what else would you do almost? I I thought about being a journalist, but it was very, very competitive. And, my family quite some of my family already worked in publishing, and it was it was something I knew. D k, as we came to call it, because nobody could ever pronounce it. People were always calling the switchboard and asking for Doreen Kingsley and stuff like that. Mhmm. We focused a lot on niche, audiences and and communities, and that was particularly true, in the February. When I first went there in '97, I think that was perhaps a little bit less the case. And the brand, was very important to my role as the marketing and publicity director. Most publishers' brands are not a very important part of the transaction, the interaction with consumers. You know, you're buying an author brand rather than a publisher brand, which is as it should be. But that wasn't true for DK because we we believe that if you liked a DK book, then you would like that approach to lots of different subjects or possibly to just to several other books in the same subject, you know, whether that was gardening or parenting or children's books on dinosaurs. So we were very focused on building a a community of DK brand lovers, but then also working with, you know, communities of gardeners or, you know, we have some wine books on and cooks or people interested in natural history. From a marketing perspective, that was a it was a very interesting place to work. It was there was a lot of meat on the bone as well of going into work every day. Yeah. A very interesting period also to be working in publishing. I imagine one of the things that struck me reading about your career in publishing was that it straddles the advent of the Internet age. You're involved in the publication of these eyewitness travel guides. Also, I think your career involved the rough guide series of pocket guide books. Yes. And I remember backpacking in Eastern Europe and and South America with my indispensable copy of Rough Guide in my back pocket. But I wonder now with Google Maps and social media and the Internet, how did that impact the publishing industry? And how did did you personally and the industry more generally transition from traditional publishing to digital marketing, digital publishing, and ecommerce? Well, it it's an interesting question, and there's quite a lot of different elements to it. So I'm gonna pick them apart. I mean, I think in terms of content and whether or not people are buying them in, you know, book format versus just on the Internet these days, the industry is in remarkably good shape. B