BookExpoCast

Curl with a good book lately? Competing for the time and attention of today’s consumer is an ever increasing challenge in a world gone made with ever increasing audio, video, gaming and gadget options.

This podcast episode provide insights on consumer media use and book reading and purchase trends from the recently published 2008 Bowker Consumer and Book Production Annual.

Insightful and passionate, this intimate editorial exchange will provide you with the insiders perspective on some of the Fall’s new YA discoveries and potential breakouts.

This panel featured Arthur Levine of Arthur A. Levine Books, with Laini Taylor‘s Lips Touch; Ari Lewin of Disney/Hyperion, who discussed Sarwat Chadda‘s The Devil’s Kiss; Krista Marino of Delacorte Press for Young Readers, previewing James Dashner‘s The Maze Runner; Mark Siegel of First Second Books, talking about Danica Novgorodoff‘s Refresh, Refresh; Liz Szabla of Feiwel & Friends, who discussed Jill S. Alexander‘s The Sweetheart of Prosper County; and Tara Weikum of HarperCollins Children’s Books, previewing Adriana Trigiani‘s Viola in Reel Life.

This panel was moderated by David Levithan, VP & Editorial Director at Scholastic Trade Publishing.

From Author Stores to Search-Inside-the-Book, Amazon offers a broad variety of innovative and proven tools to help ensure maximum exposure for your titles. Listen in to this podcast episode for a brief tour of these resources and programs, and how they can help you reach your audience.

Social media is no doubt transforming the publishing world, which can summed up by three “S” principles of Segmentation, Scale, and Simplicity.

To take advantage of these new tools, publishers, authors, and marketers need to segment who their audience is, and how and where they engage with social media online. Once niche platforms are identified, whether it’s through Facebook, iPhone or Twitter, content needs to be properly scaled for those mediums to engage with the people who spend hours each day sharing and reviewing their favorite books. Lastly, delivering a simple message through the right vehicles will lead to explosive viral growth among book-lovers, generating increased web traffic, and ultimately move the needle with sales.

In this podcast episode Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO & Co-founder of LivingSocial discusses popular authors who have succeeded in growing a community and fan base they can leverage and engage with online.

New and radical innovation has accompanied each recession for the past four decades. And though the financial meltdown is historic in its roiling of hedge and mutual funds, there is still a substantial amount of uninvested money that will be invested soon. Couple this with the impact of new broadband and mobile media applications changing consumer behavior, and publishers are left with a future of media influence uncertainty.

That is, unless you are talking with a major player who is directing investments into new media. Listen in to this discussion between Wired Editor in Chief and FREE author Chris Anderson and Softbank Capital Managing Partner Eric Hippeau as they dig into the detail of what’s hot and where the VC dollars are flowing.

BEA’s original and ultimate transfer of tastemaking is back! Insightful and passionate, this intimate editorial exchange provides you with the insiders perspective on some of the Fall’s new discoveries and potential breakouts.

Hosted by John Freeman, US Editor of Granta, this panel featured Paul Elie of FSG, who talked about Michael Sandel‘s Justice; Deb Futter of Grand Central Publishing, discussing Leila Meacham‘s Roses; Alexis Gargagliano of Scribner, who previews Alex Lemon‘s Happy; Harriet McDonald of Tor Books, who discusses Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson‘s A Memory of Light; Ben Sevier of Dutton, speaking about Jonathan Tropper‘s This Is Where I Leave You; and Robert Weil of WW Norton, who previews David Small‘s Stitches.

Social media is not just for kids anymore; it’s the #1 activity on the Internet.

From the Kindle to Facebook and Twitter, what does this all mean? How do publishers and retailers avoid making the same mistakes as the music and television industries?

Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and do Business tells us why it’s imperative to harness the power of the social graph, rather than be crushed by it.

Co-hosted by Google and The Association of American Publishers (AAP), this session was a a non-legal conversation, moderated by Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, for those publishers interested in direct access with those who represented them during the negotiations, and a review of the multiple business opportunities for publishers unlocked by the settlement.

Cader was joined by Tom Turvey, director of Google’s Book Search Partnership Program, John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, and Richard Sarnoff, Co-Chairman of Bertelsmann, Inc.

As Rolling Stone observed in its 2007 series on the music industry’s decline: “it all could have been different.”

In the coming years, will those words also haunt publishers? This panel starts from an (almost) undisputed point of view: at the turn of the millennium, a handshake away from a landmark deal with pioneering P2P music-sharing site Napster that would have kept the service’s 40-million users downloading, the record industry blew it. Of course, it’s not quite that simple.

“The record companies needed to jump off a cliff,” Hilary Rosen, then CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, told Rolling Stone of that seminal moment in the industry’s history, “and they couldn’t bring themselves to jump.”

Panelists address whether a similar cliff may be looming for publishers, what lessons we can take away from the music industry experience, and how, in the age of Google, YouTube, iPhones, Blackberries and social networks, publishers and authors can better position themselves to take advantage of—rather than be overtaken by—the power of the Internet.

Moderated by Andrew Richard Albanese, New Features Editor at Publishers Weekly, this panel featured Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, and author of Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price; Jared Friedman, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer for upstart social publisher Scribd; and Nick Bilton, Design Integration Editor and User Interface Specialist at the New York Times.

Richard Nash ran Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, from 2001 to 2007 and ran the imprint on behalf of Counterpoint until early 2009. He’s now consulting for authors and publishers on how to reach readers.

Richard was the final speaker at the 7x20x21 event at BookExpo America 2009.

Matt Supko is a former bookseller and the web developer for ABA/IndieBound.org. Matt is featured in the sixth BEA 2009 7x20x21 video podcast episode.

Jeffrey Yamaguchi is the Director of Online Marketing for Knopf Doubleday Pubilshing Group, and the author of 52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity and Working for the Man: Inspiring and Subversive Projects for Residents of Cubicle Land. He has directed online marketing campaigns for books by John Grisham, Artie Lange, and Chuck Palahniuk.

Jeff is featured in the fifth of seven videos from the BEA 2009 7x20x21 session.

Debbie Stier, the middle speaker during the BEA 2009 7x20x21 event, is a Senior Vice President and Associate Publisher at HarperStudio.