Just ahead of the London Book Fair comes The Publishing for Digital Minds Conference. There are a few of these ‘digital’ conferences about publishing and to be fair the question was asked, ‘When will we stop doing a specific digital conference?’ – surely it’s already now an integral part of publishing. Perhaps it will be renamed ‘The Innovation for Publishing Conference’ next year?
Hosts were John Mitchinson and Sam Missingham and they brought us an interesting mix of author and publisher updates.
Sarah Lloyd of Macmillan chaired the session on ‘New Trends: Marketing; Tech; Social’. More and more segmentation of audiences means you can cleverly decode when and who to target. You need to know your audience – which is changing. We need to change our marketing methods with them. We don’t necessarily need a Snapchat strategy but need to be aware of it.
Very much in the news recently is the idea of subscriptions and there was an interesting (if slightly too European with a pinch of US) session ‘Busting the myths’. Good to hear what’s happening with Mofibo in Denmark and Sweden but I’d like to know what UK publishers are thinking. I did like Justine Solomon of Bytethebook’s question that people can only deal with 7 subscriptions – so is this a viable option.
We had an unusually ‘Objective Case Study’ on Amazon from Charles Arthur, a journalist. He told us that habits are changing and we need to remember this to get an objective overview. Amazon is plateauing in terms of sales; the Kindle uptake has stalled; they’re ambitious in sales of hardware so people will buy the content but sales of the Fire phone bombed – they’re not very good at hardware. He questioned their cashflow and whether they can continue not making profit. He called Kindle self-publishing ‘the world’s biggest slush pile’ where publishers can pick up the occasional gem.
Well done LBF for a session not on Trade/Consumer publishing. ‘Edtech: Lessons to be Learnt’ was a great insight into what’s going in traditional and new, digital only content and there’s a healthy competition!
Steve Connolly of Hodder Education feels technology is a means to an end and we shouldn’t over complicate things. Teachers know how to assess a book quickly, if they can’t assess a digital product in a few minutes, it isn’t going to work. If you can do 20 things highlight the top 3. Understand that analytics are at the top of everything.
Michael McGarvey of Cambridge University Press advises publishers to be realistic about what you can do on your own – CUP has worked with an exam board and raspberry pi on a new MOOK. Publishers are uncomfortable with iteration but need to see you can’t now have perfect product to take to market – you need to take ideas out and see how they work, then improve.
Jim Riley from Tutor2U was a controversial voice with clout – they have engaged an audience of 30 million. He advised it’s more important to have customers then users as they pay the bills.
It was good to hear from the Digital Innovation Awards Finalists as they did a set 7 minute spiel for the audience vote.
The highlight for me was the Digital Minds Question Time chaired by Richard Mollet, Publishers Association with Charlie Redmayne, HarperCollins; Mandy Hill, Cambridge University Press; Andrew Barker, Liverpool University; and Dan Kieran, Unbound.
Questions included:
- Which department has been the slowest to change?
- How far along are you in diversifying away from reproduced text?
- Can you get people in a company to think digitally?
- What has the greatest red herring been?
- Amazon having problems – is this good news or bad?
- How many more years will publishers need a conference on digital?
Next will be a blog on the London Book Fair from our perspective…
