Last Saturday, I attended my very first conference, the annual conference of the Society of Young Publishers, in London. Basically, there was everything a soon-to-be publisher's heart desires: Inspiring talks, amazing people, food and free books.
We were greeted by the lovely team of the SYP and had time to browse the stellar programme while enjoying a cup of tea and pastry. The SYP had put together such an amazing programme that it was very hard to decide to which talks to go to.
The conference was opened by a great and encouraging talk by Ursula Mackenzie, CEO at Little, Brown. She strengthened the role of the publisher who has to help the customer find the right books, something the internet is not yet able to offer. In this context she emphasised that publishers "have to be better than ever before."
The first session I attended was titled Can I have your attention, please? Marketing campaigns in publishing. First, Laura di Giuseppe (HarperCollins) presented the marketing campaign for the The Monogram Murders. Next on was Bethan Ferguson (Quercus) who gave as an insight into the marketing campaign for Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes. Last was Mark Rusher (Orion) who presented the marketing campaign for Gone Girl.
It was especially interesting to see what a huge role social media play nowadays. Still, Mark Rusher showed that it is possible to produce a highly successful book without them. All speakers emphasised that the most important thing is to understand the target market.
The second session was titled What is Consumer Insight and what do we do with it? The speakers were Jo Henry (Nielsen Book consumer insight) Kate Jevis (Penguin Random House) and Damian Horner (Hachette).
Consumer insight and how to gain it is one of the biggest topics in publishing at the moment. Getting the right data helps to spend marketing and publicity budgets in the right way. This becomes more and more important as the market is shifting from a business to business model to a business to consumer model, as Kate Jevis pointed out. Damian Horner stressed that the most important thing is to think about the user first and than about the product, something that is not as easy to do as it sounds.
After the lunch break I decided to switch streams and went to a session about entrepreneurs in publishing. Even though the talks by Anne C. Perry (Hodder & Stoughton) and Tom Chalmers were interesting I could not take that much out of it. This is probably due to the fact that I am not planning on starting my own business in the future.
The conference terminated with an extremely enjoyable final panel that ended in a heated discussion about the one and only Amazon. The panel was chaired by Alastair Horne. The speakers were Jonathan Glasspool (Bloomsbury Academic and Professional), Gareth Howard (Authoright) and Sara O'Connor (Hot Key Books). All speakers were again stressing the importance of consumer insight and data. Publishers have to get more engaged with their readers to get to know them and create consumer orientated products. Also, publishers look increasingly for people who have a background in science and have an understanding for computer science.
The most important words of the day definitely were consumer insight and use of data. I am curious where this is leading to and hope that publishers will be able to improve in these areas. Also, I think I have to learn how to code.
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