I spotted this lovely collection of illustrated envelopes on the Guardian website…
“During his 30-year career as a children’s book publisher, Klaus Flugge received almost 100 beautifully illustrated envelopes by artists including Posy Simmonds, Tony Ross and Axel Scheffler. Here he introduces some of his favourites”.
Yesterday I attended an excellent seminar at Cambridge Wordfest, called ‘The Edge of the Abyss, or a New Golden Age of Publishing?’. It was chaired by Rachel Calder, Director of the Sayle Literary Agency, and the panel included Alex Bowler, senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Isobel Dixon, a director of the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency and Ailah Ahmed, a senior editor at Canongate.
Here are some of my notes of the main points that arose from the lively and interesting discussion:
- Publishers seemed pretty upbeat prior to the London Book Fair, despite the worst retail month since records began 16 years ago. What could be fueling publishers optimism is ebooks, which are starting to become a real revenue stream, following a ‘Kindle Christmas’.
- Ebooks have now become the bestelling format in the US, albeit with a possible massaging of the figures.
- Publishers have to be thinking about strategy in new ways. Ebooks may drive a resurgence of the novella, which has always been a really hard format to sell in the UK, but which sells well in France. Publishers may have to change the way they think about formats.
- The hardback format may become more specialised, with lavish titles being produced in order to justify the price, and to some extent this could already be happening. There was a reference to ‘The Death of Bunny Monro’, by Nick Cave, which was published as a special edition hardback of 500 copies, all signed and numbered by the author. As ebooks make a certain kind of reading more accessible and cheaper, will people still want a hardback as a kind of souvenir of the reading experience, or to give that hardback experience as a gift?
- The hardback could become a rarer format, due to the costs of production. Maybe standard hardbacks and paperbacks will continue to exist, but with lower sales expectations.
- Publishers now have much better statistics on who is buying their books and why. Ebooks could give publishers the opportunity to monitor the reading experience as it happens. This could be quite scary, but it could be used benevolently to build communities of like-minded people.
- Social media can be useful in order to group people around certain events, and to drive interest in physical events, but you can’t really use it to sell. Physical events such as festivals and reading groups may become more and more important for sales.
- As people begin to consume books digitally, they won’t go to a physical newspaper to start talking about it. This week the Guardian website relaunched their books site, with a much greater emphasis on communities. This could be risky though, as you’re sending your book out there to an online community who might hate it!
- A reliance on social media creates new responsibilities for the authors, in that they have to find the time to participate. Some authors don’t like visiting festivals, and they might hate social media, and this means that they could vanish within the marketplace.
- It’s easier for authors who already have a cult following, such as Nick Cave and Stephen Fry, to be produced in a wide range of digital formats. The majority of ebooks produced will be in the basic format, because it’s so expensive to produce enhanced ebooks and apps. It has to be a very special subject, or a very special author, to go to all the trouble and the expense of the enhancement.
- Publishers in the digital age have to keep it simple. They have to understand that what they do best is finding authors, editing the books and then finding readers. As soon as they start thinking about apps, they’re not dealing with books, but a hybrid form that has not previously existed.
- Readers consuming books on a tablet can be tempted away from the book by email, the web or a movie, and thus the immersive experience is broken. As soon as publishers start producing books as apps, they’re putting themselves into a marketplace with the rest of the entertainment industry, with organisations that have huge budgets.
- Buyers are very price sensitive, they want apps and ebooks to be cheap. But books are not cheap to produce – it costs a lot in time and overheads to go through the publishing process. Printed books are beginning to look expensive compared to the rest of the market, because most other forms of entertainment are getting cheaper.
- There can be a problem getting the backlist into an ebook format, and ebooks present an opportunity to cheaply drive sales to the frontlist titles. If the author has an out-of-print backlist that the publisher doesn’t want to publish, they can go straight to Amazon and get 70% of the revenue.
- The digital marketplace is an infinite universe – there are millions of books out there, and it can be difficult for people to find them. Amazon is useful as an established sales avenue for printed books, and may be comforting for people making the transition to digital.
- Editorial, publishing and marketing will always be crucial publishing activities, and books will still need to be highly produced. Reading is the quiet, immersive alternative within entertainment culture, and that’s a good thing. Publishers have to play to their strengths.
I’ve been going through the catalogues and brochures I brought back from the London Book Fair, and the one from GMC Book Trade really stands out. Stunning use of typography – my eye keeps getting drawn to it. 
They even made creative use of the barcode. It’s the little touches like this that make me smile.
My first visit to the London Book fair is over, and I really enjoyed it. I’m very proud to have been a part of the team that reported on the Skillset seminar ‘Will there be a ‘Talent Time Bomb’ for Publishing?‘. A big thank you to Suzanne Kavanagh and the team at Skillset for allowing me to contribute to the blog, and to my fellow students, Lauren Nicoll from Stirling University who took the photographs, and Celia Turner of City University (@celiaturner) who was live tweeting. The seminar was very interesting, with some lively debates from the panel.
Hopefully I’ll be able to attend next year, and if I do, I’ll be taking a bigger bag. Possibly two bigger bags. I’ve just weighed the amount of literature I picked up during the day, and it comes out at just under 3 kilos. All useful stuff though, and I’ve picked up a load of ideas for my MA.
And I didn’t get brainwashed by L.Ron Hubbard’s pirates.
9:30 So here I am at the London Book Fair in Earls Court. First impressions are it’s like a big international railway station, with people speaking many languages, but with no trains. I love people watching, and my current perch, supping a cappuccino and poncing about with a (borrowed) iPad, seems ideal. I’ll be blogging later for a seminar on The Talent Time Bomb, wish me luck! Right, I’m going to stop posing and go find the CUP stand. Laters!
11:06 Phew, I think I’ve gone stand-blind. There’s a curious vibe to the stands, in that they seem to have an invisible force-field around them. As you approach the carpeted area, at least one eyeball of the stand-guardian will swivel in your direction, even if they’re talking to someone else.
I’ve picked up about half a ton of literature, it’s surprising what catches your eye. So far I’m finding the large corporate stands to be impressive but bland, with the smaller publishers trying a lot harder to be different. Stands that have caught my eye so far are Haynes, who have some fun crossover titles, and Bag of Badgers, who have the best colophon so far.
I’m now upstairs in the restaurant, which appears to be deserted, and is a welcome area of calm away from the neon. On my way here I successfully avoided a wild-eyed pirate lady who was pimping for L.Ron Hubbard. She’s lurking at the bottom of the escalator – I think I’ll take the stairs.
Back into the fray. Ta-ta.
16:34 Well, that’s it, I’m sitting on the train home. Blogging for Skillset was great fun – it really focused my mind to type a report of the seminar as it happened. It was also great to meet all involved, and be a part of it. Special thanks to @sashers for the bottle of wine 
I’ll post some links to the session once it’s up on the Skillset site.
I’ve got a bag full of promotional literature, a head full of ideas, and an iPad to grudgingly return to the IT department. Thanks LBF11. Now how to plan how I can visit next year…
Interesting summary of the ebook Market from The Bookseller
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Harry-Potter-and-the-electronic.6745431.jp
So it looks as if Potter is coming to the Kindle and the iPad, and JK is about to get another shed-load of cash. £100 million in fact. Reports in The Scotsman newspaper say that this could “revolutionise the world of electronic publishing, triggering rocket sales of e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.”
But hang on, hasn’t everyone who wants to read the Potter books already read them? There must be tons of Potters in circulation, that get passed down to the younger siblings of the original readers. I’m not sure a Kindle version would be a big enough selling point to get people buying the £111 gadget. An all singing all dancing iPad version could be fun, but would it sell in huge quantities?
I reckon the tipping point for rocketing sales of e-books will come when Rowling publishes her next creation, perhaps only available on the Kindle for a limited period. I think it’ll take an event like that to really change the market. But who knows? As someone once said, “In publishing, no-one knows anything”.
