Publishing Business Conference & Expo Day One

PUBLISHING BUSINESS CONFERENCE & EXPO: DAY ONE Revised on March 12th with formatting and links! Well, right here I am with a view of Times Square out my hotel window. I’ve flown in from an unseasonably sunny Seattle to an unseasonably sunny New York for the Publishing Business Conference & Expoâ€"my first time at this event. As I promised last week, right here’s a particular Monday weblog publish with a run-down of my first day’s actions. The trip began out on a low-notice after I arrived at Sea-Tac airport in Seattle just after 6:00 am on Sunday, dropped off by my spouse, who was hardly delighted about getting up at 5:15 on a Sunday morning, and the first thing that greeted me on the airline ticket counter was a handwritten signal saying my 8:05 flight to JFK was rescheduled to 12:forty five. A four-hour, forty-minute delay thanks to the need for a replacement half on one of many airplane’s landing gear. So there I sat, within the airport, for what appeared like countless hours, solely to spend countless hours more on th e cross-country flight. Arrived in New York at about 9:00 pm Eastern Time, or a strong twelve hours after being dropped off at Sea-Tac. This is my third journey to New York, and irrespective of what number of times I blithely slide into a taxi here I neglect how totally dying-defying an experience it is going to be. I’m undecided what the land speed document is for JFK to Times Square, however this man’s no less than a contender for the highest three. I’m fairly positive he was going sooner than the 757 from Seattle. Okay, that aside, a pleasant room in the reliably nice however uncharacteristically house-age Marriott Marquis (should you endure from vertigo, don't stay right here), and I was so exhausted from the lengthy travel day I fell asleep early and was awakened at 7:00 am by the alarm clockâ€"I solely kinda felt as thought it was actually 4:00 am. It was sunny exteriorâ€"that helped. Obligatory resort lobby Starbucks for breakfast then proper into my first seminar of th e day: Navigating the E-Publishing Terrain: Sales, Marketing & Distribution (9:00) Moderated by Joshua Tallent of eBook Architects, the small panel consisted of Jeffrey Yamaguchi of Knopf Doubleday, Pablo Defendini of Tor.com, and Cynthia Cleto of Springer Science & Business Media. I assume the entire seminar was summed up by Yamaguchi, who stated, “digital merchandising is something we’re all going to need to study.” That actually ended up summing up most likely the whole first day of the conference where few folks had been speaking about anything but e-books. This panel was fascinating and the members educated and generous with their knowledgeable opinions. I significantly appreciated Pablo Defendini’s reader-centered comments and I share his want to take a look at e-books from a reader’s perspective and never confine conversations within the book trade. Ultimately all three elements of the e-book product cycle: publishers, software and hardware providers, and shoppers a re all studying/making it up as we goâ€"all attempting to determine what we want, the way to do it, the place to promote it, and so forth. A good start to the day. The Point of No Returns: Following a Different Path (10:00) John Oakes of OR Books told the story of his unique small press that's redefining the publishing business from the ground up, however on a really small scale. Oakes was free with his criticism of some of the business’s most influential gamers, but he was such a likeable guyâ€"slightly goofy, humorous, sincerely curmudgeonly (and I don’t use the word “curmudgeonly” lightly)â€"that I assume he can get away with it. Anyway, Amazon didn’t have any goons meet him on the door. He was the primary individual I’ve ever heard say publicly what everyone I know in this business has known for years: The publishing enterprise isâ€"with eyes wide openâ€"hurtling toward imminent disaster. Everyone is aware of it’s awful, why it’s awful, how awful it’s been all along, and how much more awful it’s going to get, however nobody is prepared to do something about it. According to Oakes, “the â€"ism of alternative (in the publishing enterprise) is fatalism.” I found him to be unnecessarily anti-bookstore, however he’s got some ideas that every small press writer should look very intently at. For greater trade publishers, his M.O. would require an enormous, top-to-backside reorganization of each aspect of the commerce book publishing enterprise. I can solely be part of him in dreaming the unimaginable dream. Hey, Broadway is starting to rub off on me . . . Keynote Event: A Q&A with Steve Forbes (eleven:00) This one was held in “the big room” and we were packed in like sardines to hearken to Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger lob up some political, economic, and publishing biz questions at two-time Republican Presidential hopeful and Forbes Media CEO Steve Forbes. First impression? I felt underneath-dressed. For a city that prides i tself on being ahead of each curve, New York appears to have missed the memo on the demise of the business swimsuit. Even the women were trussed up in severe angled horrors. The clothes for both genders came in considered one of two colors: black or gentle black. Liberals can be identified by their bow ties. I saw only one different guy in jeansâ€"a 60-one thing obvious ex-hippy, but he added the professorial tweed jacket. There’s one in every crowd. The room was noisy with false jocularity and desperate, almost shrill “networking.” I must be too used to SF and gaming conventions. I felt like Mr. Deeds. The stage was slightly too low, so tall as I am it was onerous to see Forbes and Granger, who sat in purple armchairs maybe chosen as a result of they matched Forbes’s tie. Forbes was surprisingly humorousâ€"at least I was stunned. I’ll admit I have a tendency to assume that Republicans are humorless, but turns out that’s not true. He did fall into some of that MBA commun icate I detest, with all the best buzzwords, like “brand” and “value added” and he and Granger, each from the magazine sphere, used a term I hadn’t heard but: “Advertising Recession.” I guess it’s as bad as they say in the periodical biz. Forbes got here out as a fan of the Kindle, and in support of the $9.99 worth level. It was darkly humorous when this multi-millionaire stated he wouldn’t pay $14.99 for an e-book because it was too costly. I surprise if he thought they meant $14.ninety nine million? The Sales Spectrum: From Discoverability to Pricing (1:15) Back to the too-small room and tragically uncomfortable chairsâ€"although at least the curtains were open providing a view of the Lion King/Minskoff Theatre marquee. Forgive my bad notice taking on this one. I’m lacking the name of the guy from Google who described their upcoming (June) Google Editions programâ€"what sounded to me like a full on takeover of the whole e-book coding and distribution system. Th at’s one to keep a pointy eye on. Michael Tamblyn of Kobo was humorous and went past a gross sales pitch and into an summary of the e-guide panorama that alone was worth the price of admission. Both he and the less charismatic but no much less articulate John Ingram of, sure, you guessed it, Ingram are of the opinion that the changes e-books and POD are bringing to the e-book enterprise isn't an both/or proposition however what Ingram known as “either/and.” The topic of bundling came up right here, and that’s something I think the publishing enterprise ought to considerâ€"the identical method I now purchase DVDs with a second disc containing a digital copy for my iPod (I watched my digital Watchmen on the flight out). This supplies maximum mobility in what Tamblyn referred to as a device agnostic or “multi-modal” setting. I made a note here that, particularly within the Q&A and never simply on this one seminar but pretty much all of them, there’s this underlying dislik e of Amazon. People make off-hand digs at them, one guy insisted on calling them “Seattle,” which offended me on behalf of both Amazon and Seattle. There’s a weird anti-Amazon undercurrent right here that’s catty, bitter . . . and I assume pointless. Beyond the Price Wars: What’s Really Happening in Book and E-Book Retailing (2:45) Michael Norris of Simba Information, a gaggle that surveys the publishing business introduced another grim Power Point prognosis of the business’s terminal condition, which he referred to as the “Post-Potter Depression.” Turns on the market was this big peak in e-book sales with the release of the seventh Harry Potter e-book and it’s all been downhill since then. Wait: We’ll just get J.K. Rowling to start out writing once more. Problem solved! Norris confirmed one slide I thought was just weird. It tracked the variety of bodily retailer locations of retailers with one line on the underside arising from the left to right charting the gr owth of Target, which stopped proper about precisely at the finish of the subsequent line, which charted the collective downward spiral of B&N, Borders, and other specialty book retailers. And that line began with a variety of places roughly equal to the number of Wal-Marts, which in fact took off up and to the properâ€"so the whole impact was what seemed like an S, with guide shops falling down the center. That did not cheer me up. The New Requirements for Effective Digital Marketing (4:00) Ted Hill of THA Consulting outlined a number of the new skills that e-book advertising people are going to have to select up on as advertising efforts migrate increasingly more into the digital sphere. This might need been the only seminar of the day that wasn’t totally focused on e-guide manufacturing, distribution, and pricing. The core assertion at the start of Hill’s presentation was that “traditional e-book marketing is dying,” and that new advertising efforts will require new infra structure (agile, worth-added new on-line content), new practices (patiently constructing online communities), and new (or “renewed”) individuals who perceive the changing calls for of guide customers. This seminar gave me one actually great concept that I hope to convey back to Wizards of the Coast, however that’s my secret for nowâ€"and hey, let’s face it, you’re currently reading my attempt to patiently build an online group in assist of the July launch of The Guide to Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction. Hopefully, it’s working. Gasp! And that was “it.” An exhausting day, however I can honestly say that it was neither time nor cash wasted. I’m smarter for having come right here, and I still have another day and a half of data to absorb. Come back tomorrow to share in a few of that informationâ€"but it might be posted even later. I scored a ticket to A Behanding in Spokane starring Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell for Tuesday night time! â€"Philip Athans About Philip Athans thanks for sharing Fill in your details under or click an icon to log in: