Posted on January 19, 2012 by Dan Blank

By Porter Anderson, in collaboration with Dan Blank

Read below for details, and watch us chat through the big issues and sessions in this video:

“Measuring self-publishing activity calculates the amount of money Amazon (and others) are no longer sharing with publishers. And it’s growing.”

– From “eBook Adoption Goes Global,” an international research report for DBW by ATKearney

In case nothing else has made you fall out of bed during those pastoral dreams of traditional publishing’s dominion over the fields of literature, that line should help you find the floor fast. It’s from the Milano office of ATKearney‘s coming report at the Digital Book World Conference and Expo. Veteran publishing analyst and conference council chair for #dbw12 Mike Shatzkin has quoted the Kearney team’s arresting characterization of self-publishing in his typically incisive walkup to the conference, Show me the data!

Click on the conference’s Who’s Attending page. That’s more than 400 companies sending more than a thousand executives to what this year you might think of as The Gathering to Get a Grip.

From Amazon and Apple to Google and Ingram, from O’Reilly Media and Penguin to HarperCollins and Nickelodeon, from the New York Public Library to the Oxford University Press – 38enso to Zondervan – DBW is an annual destination for an industry that looks, as Shatzkin puts it, as if “we drive blind.”The distinctions between this F+W Media-produced event and its sibling confab, the Writer’s Digest Conference that immediately precedes it at the Sheraton, are many and easy to see.Perhaps the starkest: at WDC, the industry speaks to writers ; at DBW, the industry speaks to itself.Every chair in the room at DBW is a hot seat.

Both the accusers and the accused – in a business noisy with “you started it!” – are cheek by jowl. None here is fooled by fancy, let alone footwork. This is business. And while the wheels may not have fallen off, nobody’s getting a smooth ride anymore.

Surprises are never far away. For example, Ian Ellard at venerable publisher Faber & Faber in the UK has posted at TheFutureBook‘s lively blog with an article headlined: Why is Faber running a self-publishing course? The course, we learn, is called “Bring Your Book to Market.” It costs ₤425 ($650 US and change), and offers three days of hands-on instruction from prepping your manuscript for e-publishing to marketing and distributing it online. There’s one lovely line that sounds as if Faber still does, however, remember what’s been lost: “At the end of day one, a Faber editor will outline golden rules for authors.” Thank heavens for that.

Ellard may be closer to the thinking of other traditional publishers than we’d expect:

“Ultimately, the difference between a traditional publishing route and self-publishing is just about where the risk lies; the apparent antagonism between the two is a false one. Now more than ever, writers are able to make the choice and to assess the benefits and the pitfalls either way. If publishers are confident in their model, in the value of their knowledge and experience, then they should be encouraging people to make the choice that suits them best.”

That’s surely the highest of roads, but who’s to say it’s the right or wrong route? Many other sectors of the industry, from editors and agents to technologists, salespeople, and metadata specialists all are laboring in a pasture freshly turned and plowed by digital developments.With luck, we’ll all leave #dbw12 with a better idea of the consumer’s mind, thanks, as Shatzkin points out, to Verso Advertising’s presentation. That research, Shatzkin writes, might show us that we “have started to hit real resistance to ebooks, slowing down the digital switchover from the rates of the past few years.”Beyond data issues and presentations , here are some other highlights of the conference. The schedule is too complex and there are too many presenters to name everyone. (Remember those 30 breakout sessions, alone, in addition to plenary sessions). So what follows is a quick flyover of the #dbw12 full schedule.

Monday 23 January

Prior to the start of Digital Book World, per se, there are several events of note, including the DBW Book Marketing Summit, the Children’s Publishing Goes Digital program, and more. Key among these offerings are:

• “Measuring Content Strategy ROI” with Dan Blank, the host here at We Grow Media of this series of conference-preview articles and videos.

• Foxpath’s Anne Kostick in a presentation called “The Checklist: How a Simple System Can Radically Improve Your Process and Products.”

• Transmedia specialist and last fall’s StoryWorld Conference mastermind Alison Norrington ‘s session, “Cross-Platform: From Acquisition to Beyond the Book.”

Tuesday 24 January

Mike Shatzkin, himself, opens the program with his talk, “Remaking an Industry: What publishers should be thinking about in 2012.”  And, as he mentions in his story, the Forrester report that follows F+W’s David Blansfield and David Nussbaum will provide some grounding for the conference’s talks.

9:10a – “A CEO’s View of the Future Redux: Lessons Learned, Future Forecast” is led by Nussbaum and includes Sourcebooks’ Dominique Raccah, Ingram’s John Ingram, and Hyperion’s Ellen Archer with John Donatich of Yale University Press.

10:45a – “Barnes and Noble’s Digital Transition” will be carefully listened to, in light of the recent  doubts about the company’s commitment to the Nook. Theresa Horner, vice president for digital content, is speaking.

11a – I’m glad to see Raelene Gorlinsky, publisher with Ellora’s Cave, on the panel “What publishing can learn from the romance genre.” EC is represented, as are All Romance eBooks, William Morrow/Harper Voyager/Avon Books, and Carina Press.

1:30p—A breakout session, “New ePublishing Initiatives: Digital-first (and digital only) publishing comes of age,” features Jane Friedman – not the industry analyst and University of Cincinnati media professor but the CEO and co-founder of Open Road Media. That panel also features Scott Waxman,  Richard Curtis, and Liate Stehlikof Harper paperbacks.

2:30p –Another breakout, “Publishers LaunchPad,” features Richard Nash of Small Demons, Linda Holliday (Semi-Linear), Jason Ojalvo (Audible.com), Rochelle Grayson (Bookriff), Matthew Cavnar (Vook).

4p –Those of us watching debate around the agent-publisher concept will be interested in the breakout panel “Agents Evolving: New developments in business models and publisher relations. The panel features agent and AAR board member Brian DeFiore, Ginger Clark of Curtis Brown, and Liza Dawson (Liza Dawson Agency).

Wednesday 25 January

9:10a — Easily one of the speakers we most want to hear from, Russ Grandinetti, vice president for Kindle Content at Amazon, speaks on “A Kindle New Year: Looking Back and Looking Forward.”

9:45a – The ATKearney research referred to above is on tap in “eBook Adoption Goes Global: A review of device penetration, ebook adoption, and app sales around the world.”

10:30a – For my money, the draw among the breakouts at this hour is “Changing Author-Publisher Relationships” with Perseus’ Joseph Mangan, RandomHouse‘s Madeline McIntosh, Writers’ House‘s Simon Lipskar, Harper Collins‘ Carolyn Pittis, Hachette‘s Michael Pietsch, and Simon & Schuster‘s Sue Fleming.

1:30p – Two of five breakouts in this hour are the “Understanding Metadata” session (one of the most-requested in pre-registration of all 30 breakouts) with Firebrand’s Fran Toolan and Avalon Travel’s Bill Newlin – and “Doing It on Their Own: Self-publishing authors find success” with authors Bella Andre, Bob Mayer, and  Tony Van Veen of Bookbaby.In closing sessions, we hear, among others, from Caroline Marks about Bookish, from Verso Advertising, as mentioned above, expected to come in with research indications that the ebook “explosion” may be slowing somewhat, and in sum, a panel on “Where we are, where we’re going.”The one under-represented group in the industry at DBW is writers. They’re all sent packing on Sunday afternoon as WDC closes. Back to the National Kitchen Table. Or maybe to a “Bring Your Book To Market” course like Faber’s?”

The gulf between “industry” and its “writers” may not be all industry’s fault, and certainly not DBW’s (though recruiting membership among authors hasn’t seemed a top priority for the company). The author camp has bitterly resisted the added workload (and it is that) of self-marketing – the dreaded “author platform” – that comes with new authorial independence and digital capabilities.

On the other hand, though, it’s a shame that we don’t see more ways for writers to benefit from their industry’s discussions in the DBW arena. At the very least, engaged authors might get a better look at why their jobs have changed, ostensibly for the better but with such speed and force that many if not most are rattled into grabbing the 99-cents version of a book sale. That, for too many, may be what passes for riding the digital wave today.

Time will tell, both for the industry and for its far-flung content generators, those authors. At the very least, that “where we’re going” closer should offer the kind of fodder for fond entertainment the business loves to share on Twitter.

See you there.

My site – PorterAnderson.com – will be displaying my concentrated live-tweet coverage of select sessions, top to bottom, on the home page, along with hashtagged tweets from others, as well. You can monitor the progress of sessions there (the page will auto-refresh) without tying up your own Twitter stream. And you’ll be able to join in on Twitter with hashtag #dbw12 and #dbwsum during Monday’s Marketing Summit sessions.

Check out the previous posts in this series:

• How To Get The Most Out Of A Conference
• Your Guide to Writing & Publishing Conferences, 2012
• Preview: Writer’s Digest Conference 2012 (Jan 20-22, New York City)

Porter Anderson ( @Porter_Anderson )  BA, MA, MFA, is a Fellow with the National Critics Institute and a journalist formerly with three networks of CNN, The Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, Dallas Observer, and other media. His weekly column on publishing, Writing on the Ether, is seen on Thursdays at JaneFriedman.com . He also writes on social media and the industry as a regular contributor with Writer Unboxed. He will be live-tweeting complete sessions of the Writers Digest Conference (#WDC12), the Digital Book World Conference & Expo (#DBW12), the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Conference (#AWP12) and other confabs in 2012.

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