Book Fair Virgins (Useful Stuff for Publishers)

How To Survive, Stay Alive and Perhaps Even Thrive at Your First Book Fair

So What Did I Learn?

Debbie Jenkins in Spanish Embassy in London with Shirley

1. That the Spanish Ambassador is watching The Pirates of The Caribbean DVD.
2. That 3 bottles of Spanish Embassy champagne on top of a concoction of painkillers isn’t good for you.
3. That Al Murray (the Pub Landlord) is married.

Seriously, here are a few specific things I learnt at the 2009 London Book Fair, that might help you…

E-Books

Whilst the sale of e-books is a growth area – not many small publishers  (nor some of the larger ones!) know very much about them!

We’ve been selling our books in PDF format for the last 5 years (as I proudly demonstrated on my Sony e-reader) but our knowledge was out of date and we were missing lots of tricks!

Prior to the London Book Fair I had investigated the different formats and processes, and my meeting with the Waterstones.com buyer helped clarify what I needed to do next.

Yvonne Barlow (www.booklinethinker.com) sums the process up really well:

“From our pdf – we have to convert the file to xml so that it streams through an e-reader without breaking pages. Several companies do this conversion – I liked Aptara who offer to convert text-only pages for 0.15p per page (although, I understand that there are companies in India that do this much cheaper).

“Pages with illustrations are much more expensive. The xml converts the file to ebook style – as in epub – or mobipocket for US markets. Overdrive are the distributors of ebooks – so I guess they are the people who ensure territorial rights are maintained. Large UK retailers will only use Overdrive as the distributor.”

Waterstones.com use Overdrive.com as their supplier of e-books. However, Overdrive appear to be very busy (at least a 6 week wait for approval)!
If you’re not keen to wait you can use someone like www.smashwords.com to get you started. Their reach is smaller, but at least you can start selling your e-books, whilst waiting for Overdrive to get back to you!

Marketing

This seems to be one area where all publishers are looking to learn more. Using resources like www.ipg.uk.com and www.PublishingAcademy.com we can share best practice, try out ideas and learn from the success (or otherwise) of others.

Materials

Emma Barnes (www.snowbooks.com) has developed software that “automagically” makes your catalogue from data in ONIX format. They’re certainly worth investigating. BooksoniX (www.booksonix.com) also offer a complete datafeed solution based on the ONIX standard. We’ve just signed up and will be taking advantage of all thier features, watch this space.

Bookshops

Big chains have rules and procedures. Read them. Follow them. I don’t know how many times I counted people who didn’t sign NDAs with the big bookstores before their meeting. All this meant was that most of their 15 minutes was spent filling in paper work!

Right’s Agents

Well this is a big bag of worms! I had quite a few meetings with rights agents. None of those meetings were arranged through the London Book Fair site (as no one responded to me through that). I contacted people individually prior to the event and had meetings on the IPG stand (you need to book the tables in advance).

Selling foreign and co-edition rights is something we’ve not pursued in the past (probably due to naivety), so this area was all new to me but I had some positive meetings. So, watch this space for progress!

Publishing Industry Suppliers

It’s easy to fall into a false sense of security and stick with the same ways of working, your usual suppliers and the same methods of publishing. This can be dangerous for your business, leading to stagnation (not innovating), over-reliance on one supplier (what if they go out of business?), missed opportunities and ignorance. The London Book Fair offers a great way of seeing all the new innovations, checking methodology and meeting alternative suppliers.

So, would I go to the London Book Fair again? I’ll tell you in my next post and share some useful planning tools and checklists to make it easier for you.

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