18th April 2010
Kate and Deb spent yesterday at the London Book Fair digital conference. Kate was on a panel on maximising commercial opportunities in the digital environment.
Several good sessions. Issues covered included the challenge of large-scale organisations working through processes and politics in order to come up with good digital stuff; the fact that publishers haven’t had to link up to consumers seriously before; the sheer variety of digital projects, both marketing and product; and the importance of the smartphone.
Nosy Crow was saying that it was excellent to be a new start-up in this digital environment: we don’t have a big, legacy infrastructure to feed and an established business model to transform from. We don’t even have backlist books that it’s tempting to spend time trying to squash onto a phone. We have freedom to make our own, new business model and we have a small integrated team. We said that, while we’ll be doing more standard digital products (straight ebook novels, eg), we have clearly defined our core digital audience – techno mum of children under 7 (so, in UK terms, pre-school and Key Stage 1) and will deliver exceptional products that have been commissioned for the device – in our case, iTouch, iPhone and iPad at this point – using the capabilities of the device including interaction, sound, animation, text and pictures.
Lots of people – judging by the retweets and the people who wanted to talk to us afterwards – seemed to like this approach.
So now it’s off to the London Book Fair.
19th April 2010
Today was the first day of the London Book Fair.
Kate had expected to see tumbleweed rolling in the aisles, but in fact it wasn’t like that, at least for Nosy Crow. A lot of our meetings were with UK people – agents, retailers and others – and we had huge trouble keeping up with our schedule. We were constantly on the move from place to place, as we only have a share of a table on the IPG stand (all we could get when we tried to book just after our 22 February 2010 launch). Here (with apologies for another terrible photo) are Deb and Imogen on the stand.
We went to a couple of seminars this morning, of which the first, about creativity in relation to content for children in the digital world, was really good. Chaired by Chris Meade and with Naomi Alderman, Amanda Wood and Neal Hoskins, it was an intelligent look at different ways that children’s reading experience might be affected by the technological devices that are available.
The second, which was about how bricks bookshops might evolve in a digital era was either reassuring or scary, depending on how you look at it. Clever Jonathan Douglas asked trenchant questions of John Newman and Simon Mackay of Westfield’s Foyles, who were resoundingly chipper in the face of digital developments. Nosy Crow loves an independent bookshop, and really hopes that their focus on community, hand-selling, recommendation, connection to schools and children’s events is the way they’ll keep thriving into a future in which Mike Shatzkin estimates that 50% of books will be sold online in 2012 (in the US).
20th April 2010
Though there were a number of people we didn’t manage to meet up with at the fair, there were others who had managed to get here, and one of our best meetings was with Gallimard (Hedwige Pasquet and Christine Baker pictured here with Deb and Kate on the cool French stand where you can get tiny cups of lethally strong French coffee).
Gallimard was pretty chipper, because Antoine Gallimard (and the clue is in the surname) had won a lifetime achievement award. Axel Scheffler, who’s published by Gallimard, was at the select gathering that was the prize-giving.
Another highlight was that Kate went to her first tweetup (meeting of twitter-folk, or tweeple) yesterday evening, an event so thrilling and so fuelled with white wine that she left her LBF badge on yesterday’s jacket.
She met Jon Slack there for the first time. She’s doing a thing called CANONtales that he organises to “promote creativity in publishing” (if you have trouble accessing the webpage then just refresh – works for Kate every time). It’s tomorrow evening at 7.00pm with 11 other speakers doing what sounds frighteningly like powerpoint karaoke: 20 slides each up for 21 seconds. Come along to the Free Word Centre and laugh at her, if you’d like to.
21st April 2010
In the absence of many foreign publishers (who were detained in their own countries by the ashes), this was a fair for seminars, like the one on children’s books in translation that Axel Scheffler spoke on and that Kate tweeted today, and for seeing agents for Nosy Crow.
Seeing lots of agents was a great opportunity to show off our apps demos, sometimes to people who hadn’t seen apps in action.
Seeing lots of agents was also a good and salutory reminder of some of the manuscripts that have been languishing in the office, awaiting reading (it’s really hard to keep up with them), and so Kate’s spent a bit of time this evening reading and replying. Nosy Crow has a small list and we have to be very selective, and Kate’s sad to say that nothing she read this evening seemed quite to hit the spot. But there’s lots to look forward to on the basis of conversations with agents, and we are happy to look at material direct from authors, illustrators and other creatives, from apps coders to paper engineers
22nd April 2010
Thursday was a day in which to recover from the London Book Fair; catch up with email and manuscripts; and, for Kate, to bake cakes for a children’s TV expert, Alison Warner of Cookie Jar, to whom cakes – and really good cakes at that – had been promised.
Kate then procrastinated like crazy to avoid thinking about the no-safety-net trapeze act that is CANONtales: a pecha kucha -style session with twelve speakers, each with 20 slides and each slide up for 21 seconds. It was a great evening. Kate was amazed by the courage and youth of the people there who were all experimenting in bold and clever ways with bringing reading and creativity and readers together, whether they were the brilliantly funny Ramy Habeeb of Kotobarabia from Cairo, or the attempts to make words into pictures described by Stephanie Posavec (pictured, doing her CANONtales thing). It was an evening to make you think that the book, and reading, had a future in the hands of a passionate, capable and committed generation.
– Kate
