Making Publishing Fun Again

Digital Book World’s 7×20x21 at the Bowery Poetry Club last Wednesday gave seven industry professionals 21 seconds to show 20 slides. The evening was all about optimism: audience members were rewarded with free books if they shared a reason why their publishing glass was half full. In an industry increasingly overshadowed by doubt, the refreshing presentations featured humor, free drinks, and the occasional basketball metaphor. The festivities, hosted by Ami Greko and the charismatic Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, all boiled down to the following message: make publishing fun again, and we might just be able to save it.

Stephanie Anderson, manager of WORD Brooklyn, got the night rolling with her autobiographical tale of a bookstore manager turned founder of a literary basketball league. Basketball if full of literary metaphors, she reasoned: there is “go big or go home” and a success is a “slam dunk,” so why not create a basketball league fusing her two passions? As Stephanie spoke, photos of sweaty but satisfied bookworms boasting team names like the “Virginia Wolves,” “Oranges of Wrath,” “Updike’s Wasps,” “Mrs. Balloway,” and yes, “A Tree Dunks in Brooklyn,” brightened the background. The league was all the rage that season, and Anderson managed to double WORD Brooklyn’s press coverage, increase her number of regular customers by 100, and even raised and extra $500 for the Greenpoint Food Pantry, “All for the cost of a whistle and a stopwatch and a little bit of time. And occasionally my sanity.” The moral of the story for those focused only on the bottom line?

“What will save us is fun,” Anderson said. “What can save us in our jobs are things that make us happy.”

Click here to see the full-length video of Anderson’s chat.

Ryan Chapman, Internet marketing manager at FSG, started off with a history lesson, regaling the crowd with a tale of PR maven from the past Edward Bernays, whose plan for revitalizing the publishing industry in the early 20^th century included stigmatizing the borrowing books and encouraging the building of bookshelves, a sort of “if you build it, they will buy” mentality.

Chapman wasn’t urging the audience to build shelves, but to nurture new platforms and modes of thinking about books. He citied Richard Nash’s Cursor, Quirk Books, and Harper Studio as creators of quality content not afraid to think outside the shelf.

See the original slides here, edited video here.

Pablo Defendini, web producer for Tor.com, likened the battle for the hearts of readers between print and digital platforms to an image of Godzilla with a book and Buddha with a cookie: “I will defeat you with this cookie, or you can just take my lunch.” Defendini talked up the beauty of books as art objects, physical containers of information among many possible containers: it is ultimately the content that matters.

You can listen to Defendini’s full talk here.

Joshua Simpson of Joshua Blake Photography spoke of his experience photographing MFA students in their natural habitats—as well as individuals from “The Society for Creative Anachronisms” and subjects posing as Jedi knights in New York. It was refreshing to see a pre-author photo, not a photo of an author’s idea of what an author’s photo should look like.

Ward Sutton of Sutton Impact Studio is a more extreme example of melding personal passions to create his dream career: he is paid to write illustrated book reviews. A gig creating a cartoon review of  a Phillip Roth novel for The Village Voice led to an interview with Jason Boog from Galleycat. Within hours of posting the review, Barnes & noble called Sutton and offered him a job reviewing books for their site.

Sutton’s latest project is” Father Knows Books,” where the father of one takes children books and, drawing himself as a character in the review, talks about books for kids that he finds to be engaging.

Last but certainly not least was Debbie Stier, associate publisher at HarperStudio. Her talk was shockingly honest and personal. “I am an eternal optimist,” she said as the slide behind her flashed a picture of a sinking Titanic. She described her career mid-life crisis after almost 23 years in the business, even admitting to taking an online quiz to find out “should I stay in my current job?” All signs pointed to yes, and now Stier’s glad she stayed, re-affirmed in her chance to take the helm at a time of change, and having fun reading some damn good books while doing it.

Slides available here. Warning! Feature funny pictures of cats.

So there you have it: while publishing can seem like a scary place right now, this time of flux can also be seem as a time of opportunity if everyone remembers why they fought so hard to get their hard-to-score book gig in the first place: books can be serious fun.

Now go out there and find your happy place!

Tags: digital books, Innovation, Saving publishing

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 12:50 am and is filed under Literary Events, State of the Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.