London Book Fair 2016

The past few days I spent at the London Book Fair. I was there
for the first time and had no idea what to expect. Overall it was
a really nice experience and I finally met few people I had
interviewed before, so it was super cool.


It was nice to meet in person Mark Dawson, Joanna Penn, Ricardo
Fayet from Reedsy and Dan Wood from Draft2Digital.


And of course I met new people and as a result you will be having
new interviews with very interesting guests coming up, so if you
haven’t done so already please make sure you subscribe to my
podcast on iTunes or Stitcher not to miss any of the upcoming
cool content.


I wanted to make today’s episode about the London Book Fair and
share my impressions, observations and takeaways from the time
spent there.


So this will be a bunch of different thoughts in not so
structured format, but hopefully you’ll like it nevertheless.


What is the London book Fair?


The London Book Fair this year celebrated its 45th anniversary.
It is the world’s leading publishing event: the global
marketplace for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution
of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels. It
had 25,000 publishing professionals from over 124 countries.


Impression Number 1 - Self publishing’s place


The London Book Fair was held at Olympia, which was built at
1886. The stunning buildings have unique atmospheres and create
unforgettable settings for events, exhibitions and conferences.


The place was huge - so huge that you may get overwhelmed and
have no clue where to go. I even lost the cloak room at the end
of the day and I was risking going back home without my coat. It
took me about 25 minutes to finally find the place and get it.
The funny thing - well it was a minute away from the place I
started the search.


Anyway I think you’ll be more interested in self-publishing than
in my coat.


So on the fair I realized how self publishing was perceived in
the industry. As I said that place was huge, but vast majority of
exhibitors were from the traditional publishing industry.


So all self-publishing related boots (when I say all I mean only
3 - Amazon, Kobo and Draft2Digital) were put in the furthest
possible corner - at the very end of the floor - completely
isolated from the main hall. That fact itself illustrated that
self publishing was still not considered as serious player in the
publishing industry and is completely ignored by the traditional
publishers.


In fact the whole place was centered on printed books and the
digital solutions were not highlighted at all. Besides that by
walking through few boots and asking few questions I realized
that the traditional publishers have been ignoring the existence
of the self publishing solutions so much that they did not even
have basic knowledge about those.


But I’d love to see what will be the situation at the same London
Book Fair in 5 or 10 years.


Impression Number 2 - Books


Being a book lover it was amazing seeing so many different books
at one...