Ventil Verlag needs a flexible organizational tool for its internal publishing processes. The diverse and small organizational tasks that cannot be meaningfully mapped in any standard software led Ventil Verlag to SeaTable.
Book publisher
1999
Mainz, Germany
10-50 employees
Ventil Verlag is a classic niche publisher like there are hundreds of others in Germany. For over 20 years, it has been producing and publishing books beyond the mainstream, mainly in the pop and vegan nutrition sections. Among the most successful publications is the book Vegan-Klischee ade! which was published in March 2020 and became a Spiegel bestseller.
The challenges of a small publishing house are manifold. There is no huge organization with clear roles and tasks. Instead, a small team has to react flexibly to the tasks at hand and find solutions to cope with them. The core team of Ventil Verlag consists of just 6 people, who are supported by external photographers, designers, editors, press workers or other freelancers. There are no fixed processes that are mapped in a publishing software, but you need a flexible software that adapts to the changing requirements and processes.
SeaTable is super easy to understand and was immediately well received by our team. People immediately understood how to work with it.
Patrick Siegmund, Head of the Vegan Division at Ventil Verlag
Not long ago, coordination and planning was done via email attachments to the entire team. Everyone was aware that this could not be the solution, but experiments with Google Sheets, Trello or Asana simply did not bring the desired success. A solution like Trello, while self-explanatory, is not suitable for book planning in a publishing house, where the goal is to bring authors, photographers, illustrators and editors under one hat.
In SeaTable, on the other hand, this is very simple. While all information about the book including cover, graphics and images can be recorded in one table, the necessary work steps up to publication are coordinated among the participants in another table. Through the simple linking of tables, the information can be clearly structured and presented in SeaTable.
In addition, all of the publisher's books are recorded in SeaTable. No other solution can so naturally capture a wide variety of information such as title, subtitle, author, category, edition of the program, project management, status of the manuscript, date of publication, number of pages, price, ISBN number, and the URL in the shop, all of which can be easily edited at the same time. In addition, employees can easily filter out the titles that have already been published or sort them by "projects still in progress".
The publisher receives exposés almost daily, which have to be sifted through and evaluated. A small publisher doesn't have the capacity to produce everything that sounds interesting. Instead, you have to develop a feeling for what interests the readers and what can be produced well. In the meantime, submitted synopses are managed in SeaTable, where they are given a status visible to everyone on the team. If a text is interesting, the author is contacted and work begins. If the script is not suitable, it is archived accordingly and not pursued further.
Since the introduction of SeaTable, coordination and communication in the team has improved significantly. Less coordination is required because everyone knows where to find the information that is relevant to them. This allows everyone in the team to concentrate more on their own topics.
"In the past, we tried Trello and Google Sheets, but it just wasn't a good fit. Trello limited us too much, and with Google Sheets we often lacked context. With SeaTable, we always have the perfect overview."
Patrick Siegmund, Head of the Vegan Division at Ventil Verlag
