Live BEA Live

I enjoy word play for my blog post titles, but should avoid ones that need an explanation.  The risk of today's post title is people not knowing the intended semantic of the word 'live' as you are reading it - it should read Live (rhyming with give) BEA Live (rhyming with Jive).  


What I am talking about is that for the first time ever BEA is going to live stream the Book & Author Breakfasts, the Buzz Panels and the majority of the programming from the main Author Stage.  We are finalizing the details with Live Stream, who is the service provider.  I mention them specifically because they have technology that is going to allow BEA to provide access anyone that wants host the live feed from a blog or website.  The really cool feature is that people will be able to live chat as events are happening.  We area also planning to take questions from our virtual attendees for the authors.  I am beyond excited about the possibilities this brings to BEA for engaging consumers directly, giving  a peak behind the curtain of the goings on at BEA.  We already know there is a huge appetite for these programs.  BEA has long offered audio of our conference sessions and the last couple of years captured the breakfasts and some other author events on video that we posted weeks after the fact.  To give a sense of the scale of these viewing numbers - there were 168,000+ unique visitors to our BookExpoCast.com site, 1,000,000+ page views and 400,000+ downloads.  While these are not staggering numbers in terms of web traffic, they are when you consider that the BookExpoCast.com site is very utilitarian (as that is all we have needed) and that there is almost no promotion at all for the site or the content.  Still 168,000 unique people found it on their own and were moved to download 400,000+ events from BEA 2011!!!!


More details will come as we finalize our plans.  It will be much more exciting to be at BEA in person, but if you can't be there then Live BEA Live baby!!!!

The BEA Road Show

I am heading out on a trip to meet with a group of German publishers in Munich followed by a stop in Paris to do the same with a group of French publishers.  I am extremely grateful to several organizations for their help in putting this opportunity together.  The biggest thanks go out to the AAP & BISG for allowing me to use data from the recent BookStats report that was completed in November.  It is chock full of market data and intelligence that has not been available before they collaborated on this project.  It is critical in providing real market data in the US that has never been available to this extent - at least in accuracy and in scope.  Without the BookStat data I would not have had compelling information that would have been worth the time to present to these key European publishers.  An equal thanks goes to buchreport, the German trade magazine for helping promote and organize this meeting.  The same for Hebdo Livres, the French trade pub for their enthusiastic support.


While this trip sounds exciting - going to Munich and Paris, I leave on an overnight flight tonight and will spend about 24 hours in each destination.  I wish I had the luxury to extend my stay, but that is not in the cards.


The purpose is to share key market data and trends from the US publishing market.  BEA's goal is to build stronger and more direct relationships with publishers in these 2 key European publishing markets while highlighting the opportunities that are available in the US for international publishers.  The US is years ahead in e-book adoption, transition and integration as part of the publishing ecosystem, especially in comparison to any other developed publishing markets.  There are critical learning to be had from the information BEA will be presenting with the hopes of delivering a genuine value for those taking time to meet with the BEA team.  Thanks also goes out to Dr. Ruediger Wischenbart, BEA's Director of International Affairs.  He had the vision to put this program together that will benefit all the participants in some way and that is the ultimate goal, delivering value for your partners.  I look forward to posting some jet lagged thoughts along the way. 

The Future is Here and it is in Jet Packs!!!

I was fortunate enough to attend the TOC Executive Roundtable held at Random House today (thank you to Cevin Bryerman of Publishers Weekly and Kat Meyer from TOC).   There were a lot of publishing people you would expect from execs to people on the tech side, but a good mix from the big NYC houses and a variety of publishers, packagers, niche publishers along with a number of related tech companies.  


The featured speaker was Eric Reis, author of the best selling The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Business.  Eric got the discussion going by stating that one of the inherent problems, not necessarily with publishing, but businesses today as whole, is we are efficiently building the wrong things.  Instead we need to efficiently figure out what to build in 1st place.   In other words, people are more engaged in the process and not the outcome.  They build a great product without a market for it.   There was a lot of spirited talk about the 'things' that were wrong with publishing or pondering what the 'solution' is for publishing and the dangers of complacency, hanging onto old models, etc....  Needless to say a lot of there was a good amount of debate and opinions being being shared.


Before I get too far, I want to state I normally abide by the advice of Mark Twain that it is better to keep one's mouth shut and let people think you are idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.  Not heeding my normal reservations & acknowledging I am closer to a carny than a publisher as I run an event and I am not in the trenches of publishing - I will risk sticking my foot in my mouth to share my opinion from the conversation today.


I could go on endlessly (and some people did) about  the context of the challenges publishing is facing, but that is better left to real publishers.  What was so confounding was all the talk about revenue models, literacy challenges, platform delivery etc...trying to identify what is the 'real' issue publishing is facing.  To me it seemed as plain as could be - everything that was discussed today was a sales and marketing issue - nothing more and nothing less.   It is not as fundamental and complicated as people are making the challenges out to be.  People are trying to guess if the future is jet packs or if we are going to be teleporting things so everyone can place the right bet on which technology is THE one.  People are still going to go from point A to point B - it can be cars, trains, jet packs or a transporter just like people are going to read, it just so happens that it will be on a variety of devices, delivered by multiple methods as well as through good old fashioned paper books.  Technology is not the problem.  Good books have a market, they just have to be built efficiently, everything else is white noise.