Baptism by Fire: PubFighting with BNC Staffers

The first impression:

When I started my internship at BookNet, I just nodded nervously whenever someone mentioned the elusive Pubfight. As a former Ryerson Publishing student, the word had floated in and out of my consciousness for over a year. I wasn’t sure how it worked, but I knew people got excited about it. Then again, it could have easily turned out to be a poorly-hidden basement-of-a-library fight club for publishers. I was confused but intrigued.

The prep:

I gained some clarity when Sam Francis asked me to collect catalogues for PubFight’s master list. I googled my heart out; I bothered my publishing friends for catalogues; I almost broke my computer with fancy pdfs. It was good times. Seriously speaking though, I learned a ton from this task. I gained an understanding of publishing trends for the year, house objectives and interests, and lots of insight into what people are reading and what to pay attention to in the upcoming season.

The strategy:

 Auction time was fast approaching. Seeing as how I’d racked up numerous Kobo reading awards and spent an embarrassing amount of money and time at bookstores, I thought it would be a breeze to pick smashing titles for this year’s PubFight. Then my rational editorial side kicked in. There were questions to be answered: Should I pick titles I’d personally read? Should I pick titles I’d never read but that would certainly sell? Should I take a chance on new authors, or go vintage? I decided to do some research, explore SalesData, and look at the bestsellers from last year.

The auction:

When auction day came around, our boardroom was a whirl of anticipation, shameless tweeting, beer-sipping and free pizza. It was a good day to be an intern.

The auction started off innocently enough, but soon transformed into a roundtable of boasting, empty threats, side-eyes, questionable risks, self-destructive spending, and heckling. My BookNet colleagues are fierce under their tough metadata armour, it seems. By the end of it, everyone had pulled together impressive, slightly quirky lists, and I’d had a thoroughly engaging afternoon.

The outcome:

I came away with a list that combined personal preference and a mass audience scope, and both celebrated authors and up-and-comers – a mixed bag of literary goodness that I called Fancy Nerd Press (taken from one of the many jests overheard during auction). There’s new Murakami, Atwood and R.A. Salvatore in there, alongside bright young things like Maggie Stiefvater, Pittacus Lore and Larry Doyle.

The reason (for the season):

Pubfight gives me another way to pay attention to the publishing world, get excited about new releases, attend events and launches, blog about books more often and get to know authors I don’t know. It engages and connects publishing professionals and students alike, and provides a fun overview of trends and topics that are relevant right now.  

Now I’m busy figuring out print runs with the help of SalesData and advice from seasoned Pubfighters, and I can’t wait for the real battle to begin. It all starts next week!

 Bring it, bookworms!

-peach

Check out what PubFight is all about here.  

(x-posted to BookNet Canada's Blog) 

Thanks to Sam Francis for the title and the edits. 

Book Summit: Chekov, E-Reading, and Transmedia

BookNet Canada was at the 10th Book Summit in June to witness a collective train of thought that included biodiversity, Chekov, video games, and fan fiction. How, you ask? Well, listen up:

“From Scrolls to Scrolling”

The day was kicked off by Lev Grossman, the technology writer and book reviewer for Time Magazine, who posed a tough early morning question:

“What do we give up by reading an e-book?”

He spoke of the print book or ‘codex’ as an example of information technology that is undergoing its first major format change since the time of tablets and scrolls. Grossman’s argument was a daring one. He posited that e-books signal a change in what we read, how we read and what we expect from reading.

Even the most futuristic techie couldn’t ignore his over-arching point: e-books lend the reader a different kind of — and sometimes less — control over their texts.

Grossman posited that while e-readers (and e-book files) are more compact and portable than the traditional print book, we sacrifice the literal searchability of paper books. While paper books encourage us to read non-linearly, with a personal connection to the text, and to continue “reading” long after we’ve put down a book; e-readers and e-books may signal a different type of reading — something impermanent (more throwaway), less personal, more distracted, and ultimately less meditative.

He played the cautious devil’s advocate in rapidly changing times. He encouraged his audience to stop and ask “Why?” amongst the sea of perpetual “Why not?” that surrounds technological innovation. Grossman concluded that this format change will “give way to biodiversity”: both the p-book and e-book with strengths and weaknesses. They will coexist, albeit in a complex way.

“The Reading of Narrative” Panel

The panelists in this session shared their findings on the psychology behind the act of reading. Their study is based on the definition of stories as model worlds that allow the reader to be both themselves and someone else at once. They compared the experiences of reading Chekov in his original form and re-written in plain language to find out whether content or literary quality causes both social- and self-transformation.

The panel worked at pinpointing why literary quality (and not content) makes the mind more malleable, leading to transformations in personality and emotion. This quality is elusive, of course. To bring it all back to technology, the panel ended by posing the question: “How are new technologies changing they way we experience self-transformation through narrative?”

Check out archived research, studies and papers about “The Reading of Narrative” at www.onfiction.ca.

“Transmedia: What It Means”

I admit that I knew almost nothing about transmedia before this workshop. Keith Clayton, the Director of Publishing and Creative Content at Random House Worlds in the US, led this workshop. He generated an enlightening discussion about storytelling across multiple media platforms (and Star Wars).

Clayton told us how Random House Worlds has partnered with a video game company, and together they create transmedia products alongside the development of Random House titles. The attitude of transmedia grounds itself far away from anything that resembles spin-offs, tie-ins or merchandise. Clayton explained that Random House Worlds aims to use the specific strengths of each media platform (blogs, fan fiction, fan communities, video games, comics, movies, events) to tell a larger story. This means that readers can use different entry points into the story world. In successful transmedia, the story and characters remain at the centre of all endeavors, and the whole is more satisfying than the parts.

While Clayton hailed transmedia efforts, he also laid bare the challenges that it introduces with regard to rights, intellectual property, and the ever-present struggle to get the material in front of readers. Transmedia expands the book world from the personal to the interactive, from individual authorship to collective creativity.

Check out transmedia at RH.

Book Summit 2011 was about tackling the changes that digital content brings to publishing. How does it change what we want to read, how we read, and what we expect from a story?

In the closing panel, the discussion came down to this: Reading is individual; readers should be able to access the story world with choice in order to get what they want out of the experience. And, as panelist Keith Clayton concluded, “The walls are down between different mediums.” What will happen next?

-peach

 (x-posted to BookNet Canada's Blog)