Branch Rickey, the fabled baseball executive who gave us racial integration, farm systems, and a host of great teams over fifty years, used to say “luck is the residue of design”. I’d like to think he was right, because we have really been lucky with our Frankfurt show for Publishers Launch, which we present in partnership with the Frankfurt Academy.
The first little lucky break was that we booked Charlie Redmayne to speak when he was CEO of Pottermore. Then earlier this summer he moved back to HarperCollins to become their UK CEO. And now his appearance at Publishers Launch Frankfurt will be his first public address since making the switch from the biggest author online play to running the UK operations for one of the industry giants.
We’d also had the idea that there were big online communities of readers that publishers could increasingly use for marketing. GoodReads had started out with the intention of being a gathering place to discuss books, but Wattpad and Scribd did not. Wattpad was a place for writers to expose their work and get critiqued by other writers; Scribd was a YouTube for documents, a place to put and find all manner of word-and-picture content online. But over time, both grew (as did GoodReads) to become large communities of word-interested people, perfect for book promotion. And when we booked them all a few months ago, both Wattpad and Scribd were well aware of the opportunity they afforded publishers.
But good luck has intervened in all three cases. GoodReads got bought by Amazon, validating (and complicating) their position as a leading gathering place for book readers. Wattpad has done a few promotional tie-ups, but a deal they did with the innovative publisher Sourcebooks that includes a line of co-published YA books and ebooks got a lot of attention. And Scribd just last week announced a new ebook subscription service, with the opening coup of landing a large number of backlist titles from HarperCollins catching everybody’s attention.
Needless to say, all three of their leaders — Otis Chandler of GoodReads, Allen Lau of Wattpad, and Trip Adler of Scribd — will have a bit more to tell our audience than we had bargained on.
We signed up Jonathan Nowell, the CEO of Nielsen Book, to talk to us about markets in transition. Nielsen has a view through both book metadata and book sales data of how markets are behaving in many countries; we wanted Jonathan to give us some clues about where we might see what has happened in the US and UK in a non-English marketplace. In the meantime, Jonathan’s company made a little fresh news too, buying the business intelligence units from Bowker in the US.
Of course, there’s a lot more at the show next Tuesday in Frankfurt. We’ll have Ken Brooks (now SVP for Global Supply Chain at McGraw-Hill) talking about how publishers should use data. We’ll have Russ Grandinetti of Amazon speaking about their view of markets in transition. Marcus Leaver of Quarto and Rebecca Smart of Osprey, two CEOs of extremely innovative global companies that are not Big Five sized, will talk about how they use being nimble and audience-focused to succeed. Micah Bowers, the CEO of Bluefire, will talk about what a DRM-free world would really be like. And Octavio Kulesz, an Argentine publisher/researcher who studies book markets in the developing world, will give us some insight into development that is quite different from what we’ve experienced in rich countries.
And we’re delighted to be hosting a panel of German publishing players about the transition in that market, which might become the first outside the English-speaking world to show real signs of disruption. It appears that this topic hasn’t even gotten as much discussion in Germany as we think it should; we’re delighted to be hosting a conversation that should be of great local interest far from where we live.
Our Frankfurt conference runs next Tuesday from 8 to 2, ending early to allow our attendees to make other meetings on what is always a busy book fair schedule.