Sales Support | Maverick Publishing Specialists

Martin Marlow

Principal and President

Martin Marlow is the President and Principal of Maverick Publishing Specialists. He coordinates the Associate teams alongside working as the lead analyst on a number of key assignments. With over 30 years senior management experience in publishing and electronic information, Martin specializes in strategic and operational sales and marketing; product development and management; and publisher/partner relations.

He has delivered and supported a wide range of services including e-journal and e-book aggregation platforms; cross format e-content retrieval systems and numerous online datasets and communities. His customer and market development activities have been deliberately crafted across all main content types, market sectors and steps in the supply chain.

Martin has been a frequent speaker at Industry events in Europe, the United States and Asia Pacific and is a regular reviewer and contributor in the industry press – commenting on sales, marketing and market development strategies, new product innovation and developing industry trends. He was viewed as one of 5 “key thought leaders” in the information industry in the UKSG’s E-Resources Management Handbook on the future of electronic publishing, where he was asked to provide his views and opinions

Prior to launching Maverick, Martin was Vice President of Publisher Business Development + Marketing for Ingram Digital (the digital media arm of the Ingram Content Group) where he was responsible for overseeing the worldwide sales and marketing activities of Ingram Digital solutions to publishers from all sectors, as well as conceiving and directing all their solution and corporate brand marketing. Previous to that, Martin was Vice President for Sales and Marketing for the e-content system development and hosting company, Atypon Systems Inc. Other past positions also include Director of Strategic Marketing for ProQuest Information and Learning, Director of E-Commerce for Blackwell Ltd and Sales and Marketing Director (Academic Division) for SilverPlatter Information.

Kate Wood

Senior Associate, Head of Marketing & Market Research

Kate Wood joins Maverick with over 20 years in publishing with experience spanning academic, STM and trade as well as business-to-business magazine publishing. She has held a number of senior roles as a Director of Publicity for Robson Books, followed by positions as Group PR Director and Director of Marketing at Chrysalis Books Group. Kate was an Associate Marketing Director in STM at Wiley, where she led global teams and ran high impact campaigns resulting in product launches generating seven figure revenues, top 10 bestselling titles and high double-digit revenue growth for portfolios across digital STM products. While at Wiley, she was awarded the prestigious Pacesetter award for her work on digital product launch. After leaving Wiley, she was a finalist in the LEAP Entrepreneur of the Year award 2017. With nearly 10 years’ experience in trade and over 10 years’ experience in academic publishing, she is a true publishing all-rounder.

Her wide background in publishing began with publishing research reports in the civil service, moving to Chadwyck-Healey where she worked as an editor on some of the first digital products to go to market, this was followed by 2 years in magazine publishing and by 20 years as a publicity and marketing specialist. The skills Kate brings to Maverick range from marketing strategy and market research, competitor analysis and audits to the nuts and bolts of marketing communications such as campaign management and planning, copywriting, digital and social media marketing, content creation, PR and publicity campaigns and modern marketing methods such as email automation and CRM systems. She has considerable expertise in all sides of product marketing for a wide range of content – books, journals, references and data and workflow tools – and in product launches. At Wiley, she was a marketing specialist in chemistry, molecular life sciences, physical sciences and pharma. Her wide experience of many different parts of the industry allows her to see across discipline and from trade to academic and vice versa.

Kate is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and a fully qualified CIM marketer. She speaks four languages at various levels of fluency.

Michael Geelan

Senior Associate

Michael is an experienced Executive Chairman, CEO and Managing Director with over 45 years’ book industry experience, primarily in the academic, scholarly and STM sectors.

With an early career in marketing at Pergamon Press, working across scholarly monographs and journals, textbooks, reference books and professional medical publications, Michael is best known as Chairman of the Board and majority shareholder at Eurospan Group, where he oversaw its transformation from a specialist sales agency, focussing primarily on UK and Europe, into a class-leading global sales, marketing and distribution agency. During this expansion, Michael established branch offices in India, Singapore and Australia, each backed by sales agents, local stockholding and country-specific marketing, which were further enhanced by later regional entities in both Latin and North America.

A seasoned publishing professional, and skilled in sales and marketing, leadership, business strategy / development and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), for publishers looking to expand internationally, Michael’s extensive knowledge of the processes and pitfalls in doing so is second to none. His experience in identifying and working with regional sales agents and representatives, local customer engagement and marketing techniques, alongside pricing and stock availability, is invaluable to those he assists.

His M&A expertise is in no small part enhanced by the prominent part he played in the acquisition by Eurospan of Electronica Books & Media Ltd, Turpin Distribution Services Ltd and, most recently, Transatlantic Publishers Group Ltd. Subsequently, he was also lead negotiator on the sale of first Turpin, then Eurospan, to United Independent Distributors (UID) in 2020 (whom he then joined as Vice-Chair and Non-Executive Director to support the Board and the Chairman during the transition).

Michael brings to Maverick not just a safe pair of hands in marketing and sales, but also solid experience at planning and delivering profitable revenue growth in international markets.

George Farina

Senior Associate (USA)

George Farina has demonstrated his business development and leadership acumen across executive level positions of substantial scope and responsibility both for major global STM publishers as well as distributors. His corporate experience includes senior level sales/marketing and business development positions with iGroup (Asia Pacific) Ltd (marketing and distribution to academic libraries throughout Asia, E-book licensing, US start-up publishing operations and finance support); Joint Commission Resources (healthcare accreditation and patient safety publishing, e-learning and training); Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (clinical medicine/nursing publishing); Thomson International Publishing (university textbooks/professional reference publishing) as well as eight years living in Tokyo and working with Longman/Pearson (ELT publishing).

With a keen understanding of key market and business drivers, George has risen to the level of complete P&L responsibility for business units in excess of $100 million. He is skilled in strategic planning and in developing and executing growth strategies yielding significant increases in revenues and profits.

He has extensive global experience, is well versed in the details of international expansion, distributor networks and global partnering, and is recognized for cost-effective sales expansion into new markets, restructuring and building sales organizations that achieve targets, hands-on development of senior level, high profile customer relationships and excellence in customer service.

Rick Naylor

Senior Associate (USA)

Rick brings to Maverick product and brand marketing knowledge and expertise acquired from over two decades of helping companies in several industries achieve ambitious business goals by building successful marketing organizations from the ground up. With a creative flair and passion for innovative initiatives that push the creative envelope, he has held senior-level marketing roles ranging from start-ups to multibillion-dollar entities.

In Academic Publishing, he managed the marketing of hundreds of electronic, reference databases serving libraries, physicians and the legal profession.

In other sectors, his in-depth marketing expertise also includes software, financial technology, consumer apps and digital entertainment.

In the rapidly changing financial technology sector, Rick renamed and re-positioned a digital payments company, establishing them as an industry thought leader and contributing to record growth. And in digital entertainment publishing, he was responsible for managing many well-known global brands with his dynamic, integrated campaigns resulting in some of the highest grossing industry product launches of all time.

Having served on green-light committees for product development, Rick knows that research, testing, and feedback are critical to successful product marketing. His strengths in messaging, publicity, scripting, content, digital, CRM, advertising, social media and other tactics make for consistently robust and cohesive marketing plans and “high-return” campaign execution.

Rachael McDiarmid

Affiliate Senior Associate (ANZ)

Rachael McDiarmid has been in the book industry for over 30 years in a variety of product, sales, marketing and senior management roles. She has spent time on both sides of the fence — working primarily in academic and professional publishing, as well as a long stint in library supply where she managed publisher relations for the print, digital and multimedia supply chain as well as a trade distribution business. Rachael was the face of the James Bennett/Nielsen Bookdata joint venture for many years in the mid-2000s and has worked with Blackwell Book Services and Baker & Taylor/YBP on their retail and digital projects in the ANZ region.

Rachael now provides outsourcing solutions for publishers (predominantly in sales and marketing), as well as consulting services for publishers (including university presses, small presses and multinational organisations), distributors and library vendors locally and internationally. Through her business, she is also the ANZ contact for publishers for ProQuest’s Ebook Central.

David Saracco

Affiliate Senior Associate (USA)

David started his career in publishing as the first hire at Harcourt Health Sciences (now Elsevier) to help W.B Saunders, Churchill Livingstone, and Mosby medical publishing imprints to strategize and implement their transformation from a print-centric to an electronically focused publishing group. David worked with editors and authors to conceptualize, design, and implement electronic programs including shepherding them through production. At Elsevier, David built a team of 40 producers, product managers, and technologists who were responsible for the global development of over 500 new electronic publishing products per year across all main segments including medicine, medical research, nursing, and allied health. These products included all types of electronic assessment programs, educational interactive CD/DVD ROM programs, websites, custom portals and platforms, Learning Management Systems courseware, PDA and eBooks, PowerPoint presentations, and a multitude of custom-built programs.

After Elsevier, David switched sides of the table to focus on the vendor side of publishing. David joined a start-up company, Impelsys, which helped publishers outsource their electronic development to a group of engineers, content experts, and production teams based in Bangalore, India. David was responsible for global publishing relationships, strategy, sales, and client services to publishers across the entire publishing industry including STM, Trade, PreK-12, Higher Education, and Reference.

Through the years David has set company and product strategy, helped develop and sell a multitude of electronic platforms including Artificial Intelligence for Publishers, white-labelled, SaaS eBook platforms, Digital Asset Management and Distribution systems and Component Content Management Systems for publishers. David has held senior and vice president positions with such publishing vendor companies as Impelsys, CodeMantra, RSI Publishing Solutions, and Vantage Labs AI. Prior to starting his publishing career, David was co-owner of a successful multimedia start-up called Target Media, Inc. Target Media built electronic profiles of high technology companies such as Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP, Cognos and more and distributed those creative CD-ROM programs throughout the Big Six consulting firms of Anderson Consulting, PriceWaterhouse, Deloitte Touche, etc.

Gary Bowman

Senior Associate

Gary has over 30 years’ experience working in the publishing industry. He originally started his career at Butterworths (now part of Reed Elsevier) and subsequently had a variety of senior management roles including Customer Service Director, Development Director, and Implementation Services Director. Before joining up with Maverick, alongside establishing his own consultancy company, Gary’s his most recent roles were with Vista/Ingenta, where he progressed through various senior positions during his time with the company.

Gary is an accomplished Project & Team Manager, with practical experience of many system implementations across different publishing sectors in both the UK and Europe, as well as North America. He has extensive knowledge of Order Management, WMS, Rights & Royalty, CRM, Product Manager, Production and Permission systems – and he was also directly responsible for leading the team that built and implemented the original, widely used, global PubEasy system over 20 years ago.

Equally happy working as part of a team, or directly managing teams or people, Gary’s significant and wide-ranging knowledge and expertise enables him to provide business consultancy and project management across a variety of areas. These include system implementations and upgrades; business process and operational reviews; business system requirements; definition and design; system integrations; and data migration projects.

John Lavender

Affiliate Senior Associate (USA)

John has over 40 years’ experience in STM publishing, mainly at senior executive level. He lives in the USA having moved from the UK in 2001. His experience of working in both major English language publishing markets and his career covering almost all the major roles in publishing gives him an unrivalled view of the industry.

His corporate experience includes senior vice president of publishing (books and journals), online development, marketing, web development and international sales with Taylor & Francis and director of marketing, international sales and business development and electronic publishing with the Thomson Corporation. John was an early adopter of electronic publishing, creating the first journal to use PDFs to distribute content in 1997 and the first virtual e-book library in 1999.

John specializes in marketing strategy and internet marketing; market research and creating advisory panels; publishing strategy for books and journals; list development; online platforms and packaging of content online; selling online products; and international sales expansion. He has a keen understanding of the financial needs of a business and how to ensure that financial goals are met. He has also had wide experience in the acquisition of both publishing companies and lists, having handled over 20 successful acquisitions during his career. He can assist with any size of acquisition at any or all stages: from planning and developing an acquisition proposal, negotiating the acquisition and valuation, through to integration once acquired.

Joe Schick

Affiliate Senior Associate

Joe is a business development and marketing executive in the global publishing and educational technology industries. He specializes in turning complex initiatives into successful partnerships and complicated ideas into straightforward messages and content.

Joe began his publishing career in 2001 at Pearson, where he managed a rights-acquisition team before moving into business development. There, he managed digital content licensing partnerships and negotiated new relationships with retail and library platforms in the nascent world of eBooks and digital audiobooks. In 2008, Joe moved to the Ingram Content Group, where he worked primarily with educational publishers who were beginning to create digital textbooks. He then successfully acquired multilingual eBook and audiobook content from the major trade and academic publishers in the UK, Europe, Canada, ANZ, and beyond for Baker & Taylor. He expanded his work into product development at library technology provider Bibliotheca, where he led the design and launch of the Opus eBook lending platform.

Since 2016, Joe has been working as an independent consultant to technology companies and nonprofits, including Stockholm-based Plotagon, where he launched and ran their animation software product for corporate and academic e-learning. Today, he is the Principal & Co-Founder of Schick Creative, a boutique marketing agency for businesses and nonprofits, where he combines his business development experience with creative content creation. Joe holds a B.A. in History from Brandeis University and lives in the Boston area.

Dr Neeraj Mehta

Affiliate Senior Associate

Dr Neeraj Mehta is a Publishing and Life Sciences solution expert, having over 17 years of cumulative experience at various levels in Consulting, Solution Selling in Pharma & Publishing, Market Research, Teaching, Drug Discovery and Preclinical Evaluation, Pharmaceutical Research and Development. He has served organizations such as WILEY, SmartAnalyst, Panjab University, Punjab Technical University, Council of Scientific an Industrial Research, University Grants Commission and Panacea Biotech. Neeraj has been involved in leading strategy development, delivering profitable outcomes, incorporation of rationalizing, cost saving initiatives and resolving of significant operational matters. He has built highly profitable businesses from scratch by creating high performance collaborative sales & project teams. He is currently engaged in global consulting assignments related to discoverability enhancement solutions for publishers/societies/associations, while also acting as advisor to companies offering technology solutions to life sciences companies.

Neeraj is M.Pharm., Ph.D. in Drug Discovery and PGDM in Marketing and International Business. He has been an Author with Elsevier & Springer, and, Reviewer with Bentham Sciences He has 6 Patents, 4 Research Papers in International Journals, 3 Poster Presentations in International Conferences and 35+ Poster Presentations in National Conferences (including 4 Best Poster Awards) to his credit. He is a “foodie”, who loves to travel, cook and play chess in his free time!!

Marie Hooper

Affiliate Senior Associate

Marie has over 20 years’ experience in academic and professional STM publishing and information analytics as well as non-profit and consulting tenure. During her time at Elsevier, she held international leadership roles across book acquisitions, project management, strategy, and operations. Most recently, as VP of Health Customer Services at Elsevier, Marie drove effective cross-matrix collaboration to implement a SaaS customer experience / customer success model.

Marie’s skills range from: customer experience / success; operations management; strategy planning; project management; change management; process, workflow and organisational analysis and redesign; data driven problem solving; continuous improvement; book acquisitions; coaching, mentoring and team leadership.

A passionate problem solver, self-starter, and “best practice” advocate, Marie has a particular keenness for data driven decision making and process improvement to deliver impact and insight. Via a “can-do”, results driven attitude combined with a collaborative approach, she specialises in improving operational efficiency and embedding a customer experience focus across organisations.

Marie is a driven and impassioned customer-focused consultant available for project level consulting and interim management. She is energised by resolving complex issues and delivering measurable impact to drive profitable service improvement and sustainable customer success.

Rachel Middlewick

Affiliate Senior Associate

Rachel has worked in publishing since 2000. After initially specialising in subscriptions marketing and international trade marketing at Haymarket Media Group, she moved into central publishing roles, eventually running a portfolio of B2C and B2B brands in the outdoor leisure market. In 2018 she was responsible for driving a digital product development strategy to improve relevance for new audiences and to deliver new revenue streams.

Alongside the path in owned media Rachel has also spent 10 years in content marketing running and retaining high value accounts and delivering multimedia content strategies for brands across the retail, sport, automotive, education and membership body sectors. She developed go to market positioning and marketing strategy for a leading Agency and focused on future proofing and optimising agency services, alongside driving new business, in her position as Strategy Director.

Most recently she has focused on business transformation. First at PA Media as Chief Commercial Officer where she led a £30m portfolio and developed and implemented an end to end data strategy which allowed the business to understand the different trading conditions and behaviour of each customer segment for the first time. She restructured sales teams accordingly, aligned marketing strategy – auditing and refreshing the customer journey and launching new go to market positioning – delivering budget busting revenues along the way.

She is currently working as a consultant including a project to support the largest East African news media publisher integrate its TV, print and digital newsrooms and adopt digital-first working practices. She has used her organisational design and leadership experience to full capacity!

Rebecca Erskine

Associate

Rebecca has over 20 years of experience in the digital funding world, having started her career at Grantfinder Ltd and further developing her career at global software and publishing group Idox Software Ltd. Her final role at Idox was as Director of the Grants business unit where she led a team of 40 people in the UK and mainland Europe to develop and deliver highly profitable grants & policy products and services. This included leading new research funding product RESEARCHconnect through inception to delivery and international growth.

Rebecca is well versed in orchestrating activity across multiple business functions including Commercial, Content, Product Development and Marketing. Her expertise spans a number of key areas including go-to-market strategies for the academic sector in mainland Europe and beyond, strategic planning, delivery of focus groups, end-to-end marketing campaigns, content writing, client workshop delivery, development of bid writing courses and sales recruitment.

In her spare time she writes for a regional lifestyle magazine on topics ranging from industrial heritage to restaurant reviews.

Simon Bewick

Affiliate Senior Associate

Simon Bewick has over 25 years’ experience in the educational publishing sector. While working at Oxford University Press, Simon held a range of Sales and Marketing roles including ten years as Direct Marketing Manager and another ten as Global Head of Digital Marketing.

Over his career Simon has developed extensive knowledge of Strategic Planning and Analysis and has global experience of delivering fully integrated campaigns utilising Digital and Direct Marketing methodologies.

A highly experienced people and project manager, Simon has led high profile projects including large-scale CRM Strategic Development and Implementations, Web Vision creation and delivery, and over a hundred global projects in a wide range of sales and marketing specialisms including Brand Management, Thought Leadership, People Management and Development, Customer Acquisition and Retention. He is a highly experienced presenter, public speaker and facilitator having given lectures, workshops and seminars on a wide range Sales, Direct and Digital Marketing topics in more than 30 countries.

Away from OUP Simon has provided consulting services for a wide range of companies inside and outside of the publishing industry including Educational Service providers, Tech companies, Thought Leadership teams, Entertainment and Music companies, various start-ups and media companies. Simon is an alumni of Reading University and Oxford University where he graduated in Strategy and Innovation from the world-renowned Said Business School, as well as qualifications from the Institute of Direct Marketing and CiM, and is Vice Chair on the Trustees Board of the SMART Multi Academy Trust in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Manish Singh

Affiliate Senior Associate, India + South Asia

Manish is a respected sales and marketing professional with over 18 years’ experience in the publishing industry and an in-depth knowledge of the South Asian market. He started his career in 2002 at Informatics, Bangalore, where he headed the Wolters Kluwer- Ovid and ProQuest business for South Asia when Informatics was their exclusive distributor. He also managed Informatics’ own products business lines alongside all other international publisher partners for Delhi and the adjoining NCR (National Capital Region). In his role, Manish led all key national level consortia agreements for e-resources in India, whilst working with the who’s who of the state/provincial and central/federal government departments/ministries/academic and research institutes across most of the subject disciplines.Over 7 years at Informatics, Manish and his team achieved a multi-million-dollar business – initially in Bangalore and later (for the larger part) in Delhi.

Subsequently, Manish joined CABI’s publishing division to establish their sales office and direct sales operations for the South Asia region. Over 11 years at CABI, he not only recruited and mentored a result-oriented team of sales & marketing professionals, but also substantially grew the CABI business and client base for both e-products/eBooks/databases as well as printed books. In his role as General Manager – Sales for South Asia, Manish introduced CABI’s flagship database to the ICAR’s (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) CeRA (Consortium for e-Resources in Agriculture), resulting in the highest ever value deal for 102 Research Institutes/Universities alongside the biggest ever deal for printed books. Manish has an undergraduate degree in Physics with honours from the University of Delhi and an MBA from SYMBIOSIS in Pune, a top 10 Indian B’School.

Janice Kuta

Affiliate Associate (USA)

Janice is a highly respected STM and scholarly publishing industry executive with over 25 years experience. She has worked for both global commercial and not- profit organizations, with a proven a track record for generating profits & surplus, successful in sales, marketing, strategic planning, change management and new business development.

She has a proven ability in developing business partnerships, strategic alliances and branding initiatives, with broad experience in online, digital, web-based products and services. Janice brings a high energy, hands-on approach with excellent cross-cultural communication, team-building and problem-solving skills.

Acting as consultant, Janice was Director of Membership for the International Association of STM Publishers and Marketing & Event Director of Books for Development. She has held Executive and Senior Vice President positions at Classical International, Macmillan Online Publishing, Palgrave Macmillan, AIP Press and Blackwell Publishers. Janice also served as Chair of AAP/PSP’s Executive Committee and has participated as speaker and moderator at many industry events.

Jemma Macfadyen

Affiliate Senior Associate

Jemma has 22 years’ business management and product development experience in the B2B online information industry through senior management roles at Thomson Reuters, Gartner and LexisNexis UK and more recently, through strategic and consulting engagements for large online information and software vendors. Jemma founded Spinnaker Consulting in 2008, a small, successful and well-networked consultancy.

At Thomson Reuters, Jemma was responsible for a range of online, software and advisory services including Consult GEE, online information subscription services for the UK regulatory market. Jemma delivered a completed online product overhaul including usability testing, detailed market research and an accessibility audit. Previous to Thomson Reuters Jemma was at LexisNexis, managing and delivering a range of editorial projects then later heading up the development of online products and services. In addition, Jemma has experience of successfully setting up and delivering strategic partnerships and revenue generating initiatives.

Jemma specialises at the customer and markets end of qualitative research, delivering insight for market planning, segmentation, growth strategies, go-to-market tactics, new online product development and competitive intelligence. She excels at getting to grips with projects and markets quickly and in not just delivering PowerPoint but real, executable outcomes that drive commercial results for clients. Jemma has a first class degree and a scholarship from the University of Manchester.

Michael Ross

Affiliate Senior Associate

Michael Ross is the President/Founder of Ross & Associates LLC, an educational publishing and technology consultancy. R&A’s clients are based in the U.S., U.K., the Middle East, and Asia, and comprise nonprofits, private equity firms, publishers, content developers, universities, marketers, and corporations.

Before establishing Ross & Associates in 2017, Michael was the SVP and Education GM at Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., where he led the sales and marketing activities in North America and EMEA and ran the product development and technology teams. He led the expansion of the company’s institutional products and databases in the K-12 and higher education channels. Prior to joining Britannica in 2002, he was the EVP and Publisher of World Book, Inc. and previously held executive positions at other global publishing companies. He began his career as an editor for Time-Life Books, including three years in Tokyo.

Michael’s products and publications have had worldwide circulation, have generated substantial revenue over decades, and have won the highest industry awards, including: The Distinguished Achievement and the Golden Lamp Awards from the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP/AAP), and the Software & Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) prestigious Codie Award.

Michael has written and spoken extensively on digital publishing and educational technology. In addition to articles in textbooks, journals, and blog posts, he has authored three books, most recently Dealing with Disruption: Lessons from the Publishing Industry (2016, Routledge). He has been a keynote speaker at global conferences such as: The Licensing Executive Society; the Hammond Organization; Book Expo America; BookTech; The London Book Fair; SIIA; the Shanghai Book Fair; and the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Michael was inducted into the PrintMedia Production Executives’ Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Association of Educational Publishers’ Hall of Fame in 2009. He has served on several boards, including the Board of Directors of the Association of Educational Publishers, and one year as president.

Michael holds a B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota; an M.A. from Brandeis University; and a certificate from Stanford University’s Advanced Management College.

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