Breaking Down the Book Expo - Get Elastic Vidcast #3
As the Book Expo of America tradeshow in NYC winds down, Elastic Path’s ‘Away Team’ of Mark, Ryan and Dave O recap what they’ve learned about the book publishing industry in the midst of period of transition including the challenge of establishing new distribution methods without cannibalizing existing channels - plus random celebrity spotting and show banter.
Music “That’s no Dream” by Derek K. Miller of Penmachine
Bonus Snapshots After the Break
Author/Actor Chris Elliott Signing Books
Matt marketing his Mom’s book at Book Expo
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Wow, impressive contempt for the “middle-aged women” reading the “crap” written by their “favorite female authors”. Maybe you missed the fact that romance accounts for more than half the paperbacks sold (and paperbacks are 80% of the book market)? I’m disappointed - “what [the all-male team] learned about the book publishing industry” doesn’t seem to be all that much.
If you’re looking for innovation in publishing distribution models, you could do a lot worse for an example than Ellora’s Cave, long an e-publisher of erotic romances and now moving gradually into print. They were mentioned in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal last month, according to their website.
Sorry if this sounds grouchy, but I wasn’t expecting you to gratuitiously slam your potential customers. There are more of us than you think - I’m not middle-aged, I don’t like cowboys, but I’m a female web-geek who reads romance novels on a regular basis.
Indeed, middle-aged males like us aren’t in the romance novel demographic (though when my Grandma ran a used book store in a small town, I learned that many romance novel readers are male too) and as such, underestimate the massive reach of niche markets like the markets which draws hordes to meet muscle-bound protagonists and their writers.
In fact, I’ll suggest that our surprise and befuddlement about the pervasiveness of the romance book industry was a key part of our overall learning experience.
But it wasn’t just the romance segement i found surprising … I was just as surprised about the huge scale of the religious bookpublishers and large number of micro-publishers as well as the lack of real honest-to-goodness literature (can of worms word but I’ll spare us all my references to The Beatles’ Paperback Writer and leave interpretation of “literature” to the individual).
I was also surprised that the big e-sellers (amazon etc) were not there (did i miss them?) and web-based self-publishing companies like lulu.com and cafepress.com skipped as well as i thought there was massive opportunity with the many bootstrap writers/publishers looking to get their word out.
In general, I think we found that the industry is in transition and distribution chains are changing. Some imprints are moving from electronic to print, while others are moving in the other direction, but anyway you slice it, there is a tremendous amount of flux in this industry.
I’ll disagree that we didn’t learn much - we did - but surely we could learn more. I.e. How do we reach out to companies like Ellora’s Cave? (Besides not slagging them ;-))
We spoke to many people in all stages of the distribution chain (one of use personally visited each and every booth) and we handed out educational materials but, in general, we found a general lack of knowledge (and some cases, tension and confusion) about the use of the web as a sales channel.
Bear in mind … of the thousands of exhibitors at Book Expo, there was ONE ecommerce software company there - us - and we came with a “let’s chat” attitude.
If my/our comments came off as flippant, that wasn’t our intent, just talking about what we saw while still fresh in our minds - including the surprising bits like a mob of women lining up around a shrink-wrapped bus.