IBPA Publishing University 2010
by Perry Donham, June 2010

Transformational. If I were to choose a single word to describe the 2010 IBPA Publishing University, it would be transformational. It was also inspirational, educational, informative, and exhausting! Pub-U is two intense days of everything publishing, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

I’m new to publishing. I launched my company eighteen months ago, and I’ve been learning as I go, making mistakes, trying promising ideas, and watching what others do. Growth has been steady, but I’ve come to the point where I need to make major decisions about my market, strategy, and process. I went to New York with a lot of questions, and what I got after two days was clarity about what my company is, where it it’s going, and how to get it there. One thing that I discovered is that my business is not what I thought it was!

The PubU format is ideal for this sort of discovery; large sessions that provide insight into problems and opportunities that affect the majority of us, followed by smaller, more focused sessions on single topics. Finally, the chance to meet one-on-one with industry experts provided the chance to get answers to very specific questions. The promotional literature describes PubU as two days of personal consultation, and that’s exactly what it is.

The Big Picture

The large sessions focused primarily on the future of publishing, and the topic on everyone’s lips was e-book and what they mean for our industry. Apparently that crashing noise we’ve been hearing is the sound of brick-and-mortar bookstores crumbling under the onslaught of the Kindle, the iPad, the Nook, and other platforms. Keynoters Dominique Raccah and Seth Godin both placed heavy emphasis on transforming the relationship that readers have with authors by creating more consumer-driven models for publishing that are driven from the bottom up rather than from the top down. For example, a traditional publisher markets a title in order to entice readers to buy it. In the consumer-driven market, readers would tell the publisher what they wanted to buy.

Godin’s approach to this is to build communities around specific areas of interests. He calls these tribes, and he provided several examples of tribes both large and small that create their own need for content, in some cases even creating the content and relying on the publisher to manage and distribute it. As Sam Bowers puts it, “We are moving from a world where things are sold to a world where things are bought.” Raccah is working on transforming the content itself from a passive collection of words to an interactive but unobtrusive rich reading experience. Both understand that the traditional publishing model is undergoing change and are taking separate but convergent paths to the future. Raccah summarized her work by saying, “It isn’t the death of the book, it’s the redefinition of what a book is.”

Small Sessions

There was a fascinating shift back to the present in most of the breakout sessions. IBPA created three tracks for this year’s PubU, each of which provided training in areas of interest to new publishers, established businesses, and those seeking to grow. I chose a few from each, saddened that I was missing a session that ran concurrently. Fortunately each session was recorded and is available through IBPA.

The sessions that I attended were almost exclusively geared toward traditional publishing models. All provided very specific advice. For example, Mitch Muncy in his presentation of “Four Mistakes Publishers Make” pointed out that many publishers use average numbers when planning, when they really should be using the median. It might sound like a small point, but for me it was a real slap-in-the-head moment when I realized that, sure enough, I’d been making that mistake. Mitch also presented some fascinating insight into how he uses BookScan point-of-sale data from Nielsen to structure royalty arrangements and estimate print runs for new titles.

Another excellent session included Tom Woll, author of “Publishing for Profit”. Like many of us I had structured my own business on Tom’s advice, and his presentation, along with attorney John Tandler’s, gave me several action items to take care of once I got back to the office.

Do you know what the difference is between a wholesaler and a distributor? I thought I did. Hearing what representatives from Ingram, National Book Network, and the Independent Publisher’s Group ad to say about what they do and why changed my mind. It was an invaluable 90 minutes with three experts, and most of the time was spent answering questions from the floor.

The intimacy of these breakout tracks…usually twenty or thirty attendees…allows for a lot of give and take, and every question was answered with equal seriousness. There are no dumb questions at PubU!

Speed Dating

As intimate as the small breakout sessions were, they were overshadowed by two opportunities for “speed dating”. In this format, industry experts provide ten to fifteen minutes of one-on-one consultation about whatever you want to discuss. I used these sessions to get answers to specific questions (“How can I account for this variable cost when budgeting projects?”) as well as general strategic advice (“How can I reduce the time it takes to lay out a book interior?”). I brought marketing material, books, spreadsheets…things from every phase of my business. And I received advice that I would have paid thousands for in individual consultation contracts.

Networking

As important and informative as the formal sessions were, equally valuable were the any opportunities to sit and talk with fellow publishers over lunch, dinner, coffee, in the hall, in the elevator… We are all doing such different things in publishing, yet we face a common set of problems. I lost count of the times someone said to me, “Oh, you should talk to…” and “Have you thought about…”. IBPA embraces an incredible diversity of individuals, from one-book self-publishing authors to large independent publishing houses. What a great opportunity to share our experiences with each other! It was also wonderful to finally meet many of the IBPA and IPNE staff that I only knew by name, and I’d like to particularly thank Terry Nathan for hosting this year’s scholarship winners, and to IPNE for sponsoring me.

Coming Home

After PubU, of course, was BEA. If you haven’t been, it is a massive celebration of the book, and just breathing in the scent of all of that paper will excite and inspire you. I’d heard it was a big show but I wasn’t ready for just how incredibly big it really is. Amid all of the hubbub, though, I kept running into folks I’d met at PubU, and what a wonderful feeling it was to share that connection and love of our industry with them.

I said that PubU was transformational. From an industry point of view it provided insight into where we are going and why…the transformation of publishing itself. From a personal point of view, what I learned at PubU changed the way that I think about my own business. I realize now that some things that I thought were important aren’t, and that there are things that I need to change right now in order to grow my company at the pace that I want. PubU literally transformed my business.

If you’ve been to PubU, you’re nodding your head and smiling right now. If you haven’t been yet, I can tell you that everything IBPA says about it is true. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to attend this year’s University; if you have the chance to attend next year, don’t pass it up. It will transform you.

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Perry Donham is President of KidPub Press, specializing in books written by children (http://books.kidpub.com)