• Problem: Budgets are tightening while costs are increasing. With a long backlist and pay-per-unit pricing, you’re penalised for wanting longtail sales and keeping useful historical records. With a proliferation of modules, your budget is cheesepared away and system functionality is siloed. Consonance charges by named user, without extra costs for more functionality — £75 gives you full access. Neither do we charge extra for personal support, extracting data into ad hoc reports, project management, consultancy, scripting or custom coding, most of the time.
• Problem: There’s more to do than ever, and everyone’s working overtime. A good system is not one that provides the bare functionality you need. It’s one that also gives the countless small conveniences that lighten your workload and let your staff work efficiently. Publishers migrating to Consonance talk of the relief of having a system that’s well-designed. Good design is more than colours and fonts – it means people intuitively find what they need, when they need it. Layout matters. Accessibility matters. The usability of the app you spend every day of your working life in matters.
• Problem: We need to work our own way, not be forced into a mould. Your editorial, production, and sales and marketing workflows are unique to you. If you need to map your real-world processes to the strictures of your system, and if you need staff to document workarounds, that’s a bad smell: your current system is inflexible and hard-coded to their way of working, not yours. Consonance enables you to specify your own edition and format names, and your own task lists, and work types, and seasons, while adhering to the core vocabulary of ONIX.
• Problem: We’re hobbled by cut-down features and integrations. For any but the very largest of publishers, with in-house technical staff to manage integrations, managing data exchange between different systems for title management, programme management, contracts, royalties, production, etc, is painful. Nothing is perfectly in sync, and you can spend hours troubleshooting issues. For example, with a separate programme management system, it is difficult to synchronise tasks with your works’ earliest print product publication dates when they change because manuscripts needs extra development. A “lite”, introductory or “small and medium publisher” version of a system can mean a large invoice is in your future to unlock the features you’ll need as you grow. Consonance prices by the size of your team, not by module: you can afford to have all of its functionality from day one, and everyone has access to everything. Your account is configured to tailor access from the starting point of “everything’s available” – so you refine what you see through choice, not necessity.
• Problem: We need enterprise integrations. Large publishers seeking integrations between in-house systems and best-of-breed SaaS solutions need powerful and reliable data exchange. Consonance offers a comprehensive metadata update API through GraphQL, and for the most extreme scaling Consonance can offer bespoke integration with message queueing services, such as AWS SQS, and direct access to a dedicated PostgreSQL database for fast and reliable data extracts.
• Problem: Complete metadata can still be bad metadata. Does your system’s interface not visibly warn of Thema best practice violations? Does it convert 192 millimetres to 7.559055118110236 inches instead of 7⁹⁄₁₆? When you enter a price in a foreign currency, does it not warn you if it’s the equivalent of a tenth of your home currency price? Does it not allow you to send ONIX only when particular data quality gates are met (e.g. “must have a USD RRP library price”), which are different per recipient? Do you need foreign currency pricing set automatically, and updated on a monthly basis according to custom rules? Poor discoverability and poor product presentation lead to public embarrassment and schedule-threatening rework, and the hidden cost of errors from a system that runs with a lack of publishing intelligence is more than the cost of switching systems.
• Problem: the industry is changing, and we’re held back. Perhaps audiobooks, or even ebooks, feel like a second class citizen in your metadata. Perhaps you need to be adopting Open Access, but your partners need that in ONIX. Regulations on product safety, accessibility, and deforestation are potentially high maintenance issues with the potential to stop products sales in their tracks. Do you have a system that is committed to staying up to date with emerging requirements, and supporting new metadata workflows in an intelligent way?

Migration myth-buster

When you have low confidence in the likelihood of your current system supporting you into the future, the cost of staying starts to feel greater than the effort of moving. But how great is that effort?

• Myth: a new system means expensive consultants. Consultants love new system migrations, where they can become a permanent intermediary between you and your system vendor. At Consonance, our motivation is to get you up and running on a system you understand as soon as possible, establishing a direct relationship between your experts and ours. Migrating to Consonance does not require a consultant, and we charge very modestly (about £2500 for a small implementation) to run the whole project.
• Myth: a system migration means massive distraction for the whole team, for months. We set up a sandbox environment with your real data, and work with select experts from your team to establish data clean-up and enhancement rules. When it’s looking good, we work with you to train your team on your data. No months-long full-team-doing-day-job-plus-system-implementation nightmares.
• Myth: a system migration means mapping our data from our current system to Consonance. Consonance imports ONIX 3 data from your existing system. We have a test account set up for you within a day, populated with your full ONIX catalogue, for you to assess features and to get a sense of how your real data looks.
• Myth: My website feed would break. Maybe it would (we can’t say until we know your set-up). But if it is an ONIX feed, or fed by a compatible API, it will be uninterrupted.
• Myth: Consonance is aimed only at small publishers. Taylor and Francis trust the scalability and sophistication of Consonance to send millions of ONIX product updates. And that sophistication is available to smaller publishers, whose requirements are often no less complex. We pride ourselves on providing elegant solutions to complex problems, at any scale.
• Myth: we’d have to spend ages cleaning up our data before we could move. You don’t need to have your data completely polished before moving to Consonance (see Cleaning up data: before or after the switch?, below.)