London Book Fair Show Report April 2015

PODG / SBPRA / AMI

Robert Fletcher, CEO

Executive Summary: As predicted, growth is in international, children’s, and non-fiction. Certain sectors like romance remain strong. PODG/SBPRA is spot-on with our publishing and distribution services and global focus.

The following information was gleaned from attendance at the London Book Fair Show, April 14-16, 2015. The report compiles personal observations from over 5 years attendance, plus curation of pertinent articles written by Publisher’s Weekly/Show Daily, The Bookseller Daily, and Publishing Perspectives. All of these fine resources offer newsletters that independent authors and small publishers might subscribe to. Subjects Covered and Tags: Publishing Industry, International Mindedness, Groupon, Romance, Academic, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Children’s Books, YA, Education, Cloud Libraries, 7 Figure Advances for Self-published bestsellers, Author Education, Non-Fiction, Spanish Market, DRM, Inquiry Education, Ebooks, Subscription Models, Publishing Business Models, POD, Audiobooks, Poetry, Author-Illustrator… and a lot of information, statistics and advice for independently published authors.

CEO Robert Fletcher

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Publishing… Ebooks and Print Books Working Together:

Overall, a main “theme” running throughout the media and show, is that Ebooks adoption is leveling off. The percentage of ebooks versus print books is more stable now. There is a renewed thought process for publishers that once again emphasizes great content versus great technology. I believe this is because most people have “declared” which they like, either print, or ebook, and that is what they want, and continue to buy.

The “take home” to you, the author, is to cover all platforms and be sure your product is delivered in the way the buyer wants it.

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Towards a More “Fluid” Publishing Industry:

Great quote… “Authors can choose to self-publish; agents can be publishers; publishers can be booksellers; the whole industry has become much more fluid”. (Bookseller Magazine).

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Continued Recognition of the Importance of International Markets:

Harper Collins announces new offices in Holland, Japan, Nordic (Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark), Japan, Polaka (Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia). As you may be aware, SBPRA and PODG have been aggressively courting these markets and others for our authors. You are already there.

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Jasinda Wilder and AG Riddle, Self-Published Authors Gets 7 Figure Advances: Big Girls Do It paved the way for Ms. Wilder and Falling Into You hit #1 on Amazon and #4 on the New York Times, the offers started pouring in. Mr. Riddle sold his book rights to Fox for a movie before getting the publishing offer. Of course this is what we all want at SBPRA for our authors.

Robert with author John Berry. 6 /

Author Education at LBF is Very Strong Each of the global book fairs has a unique “flavor”. London is one of the few that has a very strong educational program for authors in their “Author HQ” section. Authors are connected with Literary Agents and attend seminars on copyright, marketing, cover design and more. If you can make the show easily, it is a great place to gain further education.

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Romance Writing Contest by Kobo and WHSmith – Deadline to Enter 13 July

Mills and Boon will publish the winners. If you have a Romance book, please enter. We like the combination of the three companies and as you know, we strongly encourage our authors to enter all contests. http://kobowritinglife.com/2015/04/14/calling-all-romance-authors/ http://authormarketingideas.com/site/contests/ 8 /

Fantastic sales growth is being repeated across most global markets according to Nielsen. Children’s book sales have grown from 24% in 2004 to 35% in 2014, a huge increase over 10 years. Reading is the number one pastime for children aged 0-10 years, sixth (behind television, gaming, social media.. etc) for children aged 11-13 and almost negligible for ages 14+.

Spotlight: Children’s Print Book Sales Buck the Trends, Especially for 0-10 Year Olds.

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Mark Coker of Smashwords Offers 5 Tips for Self-Publishing Authors: Maximize Distribution (Interesting this is number one). Take Advantage of Preorders Good Writing is not good enough.. get to WOW! Spend on Editing before Marketing Hire Professional Cover Design. Robert with author

Derek Morgan and his wife.

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Spanish Market Coming On Fast and Strong Mexico was the Guest of Honor this year at LBF and Great Britain will be the Guest of Honor at the Guadalajara Book Show this October. As you know, PODG and SBPRA are regulars at the Guadalajara Book fair. Why? Here are some statistics on the Spanish market. Spanish is the third most spoken language in the world behind English and Chinese. There are 550 million Spanish speakers, and over 50 MM in the US alone. Internet penetration is at 50+ % and growing 13% per year. The number of ebooks as a percentage of all titles will surpass 25% next year. Many Spain publishers see 25-50% of their sales now from Latin America

PODG and SBPRA will make sure that your books are there and also be selling rights to Spanish language buyers.

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Oxford University Press Announces they will “Self-Publish” Technical Monographs and Professional Journals.

For approximately $9000 USD, you too can get your scientific writing self-published by Oxford. If that isn’t validation of the self-published market, we aren’t sure what is. Publishers are coming to grips with “open access” meaning that publicly funded research and writing should be open for all and that they are shifting to more of a “pay to publish” model. Welcome aboard Oxford.

We visited the town of Oxford on this trip. Quite old and impressive.

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Chinese Books Will Now Be Charted by Nielsen.

Openbook charts Chinese book sales and that data will now be available to the West. We have been watching Chinese best seller lists for four years now, so you are in good hands. China is always present now, and we have many friends at these booths.

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Groupon Announces that They Will Sell Books & Ebooks:

Starting in June, this “flash sale” site will sell titles, mainly career education from a sister company. This further shows the importance of education and non-fiction on a global basis.

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3M Expands Cloud Library

3M will expand to the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. PODG/SBPRA is already providing ebooks to the 3M Cloud Library, so this is further good news for our authors that are in our ebook distribution program.

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Non-Fiction Publishing.. How Many Ways Can You Syndicate Your Content? We are seeing quite a few new models where non-fiction is “chunked” and portions are sold and delivered by partner and affiliate websites around the world. One of our sales channel and distribution relationships is a tablet magazine seller, Magzter. They have asked us to provide books that “match” the magazines that sell best on their tablets and we are aggressively working on providing them that list. If your book is in our database and it matches their best sellers, you will be hearing from us.

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DRM (Copy Protection) Continues to be Debated Does the publisher really benefit from strong DRM? What about the inevitable technology break downs that plague the consumer-reader? There continues to be a strong debate on this issue. We believe that unless you are a global best seller, it is better for your book to gain more widespread distribution, and hence advertising for your writing, than to ”lock it down” to the detriment of more sales. Statistics prove that many consumers like to trial the book digitally and then buy the print edition.

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Inquiry Based Education Is the New Buzzword: “Let’s move from rote learning to concept based learning” says Ranjan Kaul, Managing Director Oxford University Press, India. PODG is now one year into launching a “special digital collection” designed for inquiry education in international schools such as International Baccalaureate. We will be premiering the collection at the IB tradeshow in July.

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Sell Your Mainstream Book on Amazon: Keep Specials, and Bundles on Your Website: Chris Robson, the CEO of Propagator pointed out a good way for authors to make more direct money. Yes, put your book on Amazon, but keep the specials on your site. Also, build community around your site. 19 /

Poetry Section Debuts at LBF: It is hard to believe, but there has never been a poetry section at LBF until this year. Inpress is the company that is managing the section and they have a great marketing and distribution program for poetry. We are contacting Inpress on behalf of our poetry authors. This is another of the benefits of attending these shows.

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Wednesday 11–11:20 a.m. Exeter’s Collaboration Suite: Ravi Venkataramani April 15 A Cloud-Based Publishing Solution Wednesday 11:30–11:50 a.m. The Emerging Digital Demand within Martin Biron April 15 Vocational Republishing Wednesday noon–12:20 p.m. Top Publishing Trends of 2015 Steve Odart April 15 Wednesday 12:30–12:50 p.m. From E-books to Smart Adaptive Content: Sameer Shariff April 15 The Story So Far Wednesday 1–1:30 p.m. Gorilla Fighting Technology Alex M. Dare April 15 Wednesday 1:30-1:50 p.m. High-Quality XML from Microsoft Word Pradeep Jain April 15 Manuscripts: Session for Book and Journal Publishers Wednesday 2–2:20 p.m. Maximizing the Value of Academic and Borislav Popov April 15 Scientific Publications Wednesday 2:30–2:50 p.m. The Benefits of E-book Watermarking and Huub van de Pol April 15 Personalization over DRM Wednesday 3–3:20 p.m. Audiobooks Are the Future. Ivan Sabo, Michal Koci April 15 The Future Is Already Now Wednesday 3:30–3:50 p.m. The Future of Content Media Beni E. Rachmnaov

Sample List of Speeches and Seminars: There is a tremendous amount of information to be had at these shows. Here is a list of seminars in just 1/2 a day.

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Ingram adds KSI/Korea to Its Global Alliance POD Program.

Interestingly, Robert introduced them together 2 years ago. The idea of the ability to print POD anywhere in the world is something I have been working on for years now.

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James Patterson Donates $400,000 to Indie Bookstores The second round of grants goes to bookstores in the UK and Ireland. The grants are for diverse areas including a book bus, expanding children’s reading, and more. We applaud his efforts. We are not sure that they will stem the tidal wave that small bookstores are facing.

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Devices Used for Reading (Get Your Book into Epub Format): Two-thirds of tablet users and one-half of smartphone users claim to have read at least one book on their device. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the best format for devices is ePub, not PDF because ePub is “flowable” and PDF is more fixed. We strongly suggest that this is the year you get your ebook/epub created.

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Danish Reading “Subscription” Service Doing Well: We watch subscription services like Oyster, and Kindle Unlimited very closely. The reviews are mixed. However, Mofibo in Denmark has grown from 4% to 16% of the digital market (albeit quite small) in Denmark. We think that niche subscription services will continue to grow. Our IB effort is going to be a subscription service in some markets.

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DosDoce.com Offers a Tremendous White Paper on Publishing Models: The report contains review and commentary on 15 different business models covering subscriptions, pay per read, micro-payments, bundling, app-purchases and more.. it is a great overview. http://www.dosdoce.com/upload/ficheros/noticias/201504/new_business_models_in_the_digital_age__bookmachine_special_edition.pdf Summary… publishing is a complex ecosystem and is getting more complex as the world goes global.

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Audiobooks – Expensive to Produce – Quality Concerns The verdict is still out on audiobooks for non-bestsellers. The production costs make the breakeven point higher than most books will achieve. This is leading to a drop in the quality of the production, which of course, makes sales go down too.

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Worldreader Brings Ebooks to Africa (We are giving them content too). Worldreader brings “free” content to Africa. They focus on education and areas where nothing exists. We strongly support their mission and we have already sent them a group of ebooks as a donation.

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Non-fiction is Eclipsing Literary Fiction: Large publisher rights buyers are trending away from fiction to support non-fiction. Why? Non-fiction is a less risky purchase and has a more definable return. (It is also easier to market). Non-fiction ruled the rights centre at the 39th London Book Fair according to an analysis of deals reported in The Bookseller Daily, with Hachette and HarperCollins the busier publishers. In total 36 rights deals were announced during the fair, 21 non-fiction, 15 fiction.

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European VAT Rules Causes Complete Confusion For Publishers: If you read the media, you will see tremendous confusion about VAT for ebooks. There are something like 46 different sets of rules. That’s why we like Asia better than Europe for our growth. (We let Amazon handle our sales in Europe for just this reason).

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International – What Sells In Brazil and India? According to Bookseller, In Brazil, the top sellers are legal an religious books. In Italy a surprise bestseller is written by a quantum physicist. In India, their bestselling English language author Chetan Bhugat is only behind Paulo Coelho with more sales. His books are described by critics as “massively disappointing and made for Bollywood”.. who cares what the critics say, right? In South Africa school books dominate, typically by Oxford. Non-fiction books about diet and self-help do well there

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Illustrated Publishing – The Author Illustrator.. Exemplified by the Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and with a rise in coloring books for adults, the combination of doodle illustrations is coming on strong. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that these books are most appreciated by boys over girls.

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Russia.. Nyet The climate for independent books (and thinking) continues to worsen. We are not spending any time on the Russian market now. Saudi Arabia – Yes. The Middle East is devouring English language books. (In one bookstore chain, approximately half the books are English). We recently signed an ebook distribution contract there and we will be announcing it soon. The main categories are Children’s and Young Adult. Erotic books are banned (even Danielle Steele).

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London Is a Great City! (Oxford too).

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Conclusion: PODG/SBPRA is on top of these trends. Our clients are being distributed in the markets mentioned above, plus many more. Our authors are winning awards and in the right places for discovery. Steady the course and now, we start preparing for the Book Expo in New York at the end of May. Then, we have a break until the Beijing show at the end of August which is followed by Frankfurt and Guadalajara. We hope this information has been informative and we strongly encourage every author to visit a book show like LBF if they can. Sincerely, Robert Fletcher – CEO Boca Raton, Florida April 2015

If you have comments or questions please email: Lynette Chia - Singapore

Administrative Assistant to Mr. Fletcher Lynette@PublishOnDemandGlobal.com

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