Ever found yourself scratching your head at a publishing conference…?
Salt’s Marketing and Publicity Director, Christopher Hamilton-Emery, walks us through the key points made at last week’s IPG conference, breaking it down into layman’s terms.
Disclaimer: ‘Some items may misrepresent the true nature of expertise and/or investment opportunities.’
“I’ll share some of the weirder peculiarities of the publishing presentations at this year’s conference.
In no particular order:
It’s all about Readers and giving Readers what they want in ways no one will be able to see, ever, because what they want is actually embarrassing and possibly even seedy. It should be easy to be seedy. It’s so much about Readers that writers don’t really count. Writers get in the way of Readers because Readers want there to be a choice of eight [seedier] endings which their reading preferences can select from. More on Preferences later, i.e. Hell can wait.
What the world wants is more Diversity, which isn’t translating things into English, but translating Out Of English (OOE) into languages that might be dying out, fast. But English is so last year. Check out the dying languages and publish stuff in those Urgently. Everyone loves the Diversity thing, but no one really fesses up much on the Demand side. [P.S. ignore that the whole world is doing everything in English, wants to speak, live, earn, read, die in English.]
The growth in global literacy means that English and Europe are much less important and not a Place Of Growth, like say Brazil. But the bits that are important are only important for like over 50s white women, who, like, buy everything anyway as long as it is primarily paranormal romance. Shhh.
If you purchase three things online, you will be offered those three things forever in different disguises with no covers. There’s no escape. This is called Your Preferences, otherwise known as Hell On Earth. Online Booksellers say things like, We’ve Got Your Number. And they mean it. Mine’s 666, by the way.
People who buy serious books don’t get past page eight and tend to get distracted by Faceache, Twitster, e-male & co. I think that’s right. Oh, and they’re just pretending to be clever. If you’re male and young, you’re a loser where books are concerned, whatever.
If you are young, basically you don’t read or buy stuff like old people do. But you do it really immersively and tend to buy books massively in bookshops and love recommendations from your mates. And don’t do digital, at least not when you spend all that time not reading, er, immersively. I think. But seriously 18-24 is like the Dead Zone. Plus, you don’t get 4x4s done to you, more on this next.
Publishers are doing stuff with Big Data that means you are going to get lots of 4X4s done to you. [Christ, what on earth is a 4X4! Is this a secret plan to force us into Chelsea Cruisers?] Business Publishers seem to make trillions out of dumbass middle managers spending time on rebranding PowerPoint stacks for their next talk on Quantifiable Earning Resource Dislocators (i.e. books). P.S. this is downloadable with your first £10,000 subscription to Speak Idiot Easily Now.
Business Publishing is where all parts of your soul are replaced by a single robotic acronym producer that chops up language into a database and spews it out in 2 minute 20 second bursts of … well, of something we all feel is, er, business speakyfied, because that is the source of all Corporate Anxiety. They don’t get seedy romance here.
The future of publishing finance is getting Pledgers to over purchase The Book up front largely by selling tickets to events that don’t happen or gentrified supplementary placebos which disguise everything with migraines or wrap something in leather and pressed flowers thus turning every publisher into a Multi-Millionaire through idiots who are susceptible to charitable guff (i.e. family and friends). [Small print says, Book Gets Distributed, Too, but this Does Not Matter as we have Made all the Money from the author’s backers. Ha ha ha.]
Half your life should be spent on headlines. The headline thing is a metaphor for like, EVERYTHING. You do this Last, once The Thing is written. The Thing ought to bloody well spell out Why anyone would want The Thing in one single compelling sugar cube [Sugar Cube? Have I got that right?] so the Idiots Get It. This is the nature of all good selling.
Plus Good Selling has to include Bulking Mock-Ups so The Booksellers can see how thick books are. This along with a colour catalogue of EVERYTHING EVER ON EARTH, will make shops stock your books in vast quantities that will be returned next Tuesday in your local supermarket because The Writer Isn’t Wanted.
And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is just the beginning.”
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