London Book Fair 2016 Brand Architect

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...