For the last two days, I have been at the Publishing University, a seminar series that happens every year right before BEA. You may have heard it called PMA-U, or this year, IBPA-U.
I expected that this year attendance and the quality of the presentations would be worse than they have been in the past. After all the gloom and doom about BEA and the industry’s changes it seemed logical.
I’m happy to report that it was, instead, busy and productive, with a lot of positive energy surging around.
I started Wednesday by giving an Ask the Expert session from 7 a.m. to 8:15. Given that a lot of the people attending had traveled from the West Coast, and felt like it was 4 a.m., I was stunned at the number of people in the room. And none of them appeared to be zombies. The free coffee may have helped.
By 10:30, I had launched into one of my favorite courses: Building a Better Budget. It is part of my mission in life to help people understand exactly what that mass of numbers means, and how to USE one as the powerful strategic tool it is, rather than the dusty and intimidating mass of numbers that ends up sitting in a file somewhere. Again, the energy was wonderful (people were even laughing at my jokes! Without being paid to do so!)
Lunch brought a presentation by one of Google’s minions executives. Obviously, questions about the Settlement were not allowed, as it’s still in litigation, but he did lay out quite clearly how Google wants publishers to see its plans for our part of the information ecology.
I was more than a little skeptical of the frequent protestations that Google’s headlong rush to secure the ability to index all of our content was likely to be the best thing ever to happen to us, and the assertion that Google wants all of its revenue to be from ads, and isn’t interested in ever selling our books in any format.
Today, I attended a marketing course where the presenters were all senior folks who emphasized evaluating your efforts for profit potential, including the COGS for any sales generated, before you decide to engage in that kind of promotion. Loved it — 3 guys all speaking my language. I also had the marvelous experience of hearing someone lavish praise upon the list moderators of the Yahoo Self-Publishing group, and upon the group as a whole. That’s wonderful because I’m one of those moderators, and she had no idea I was in the back of the room at the time. Always nice to be appreciated! (Thanks Norma!)
The lunch time presentation on ebooks had the potential to be exciting, but I’m afraid I thought it to be a bit of a re-hash of stuff we’re all already well aware of.
What else was notable there? What did you like, if you were there?