Wednesday 24 April 2013

London Book Fair - What I learnt Part 3

Here is the final part of this blog, and it will be much shorter.

After lunch I went to another talk, this one by Daniel Cooper of Amazon KDP Europe. Most of the talk was about what they do for indie authors and what I basically knew. He gave stats for KDP in UK and Germany last year. UK - 15 of top 100 were self-publishers, whereas in Germany it was 2 of the top 100. It was during this talk that I noticed another RNA author standing listening, Freda Lightfoot. I knew she was going to be at the fair and had been looking out for her. After this first talk I went up to her and we sat next to each other and chatted about being an indie author, and Freda told me something interesting. She told me that her ebooks were paying her more than her trad pubbed books. I then mentioned to that she is prob an APE: Author, Publisher and Entrepeneur. Which was new to her.
Then came another talk by Libre Digital about digital chain supplies for ebooks. I quickly managed to write down a few lists: metadata, discovery, sales, automated distribution, control, it is what selling it.
Another one: alerts, details, confirmation, persuasion, inspiration and accuracy. All are important. The slides were moving too quick to get more info, but after the talk I went up to one of the speakers, gave him my card and asked if he could email me the presentation. He took my card, wrote a note on it and said yes he would. I await it.

After that, I visited Amazon KDP stand and asked if they were likely to do an annual report of royalties as well as monthly. No, they're not as they don't have the technology. I picked up a sample of their Createspace books. Then I went to the Kobo stand. I asked the director if an author doesn't earn enough money to be paid automatically (you have to earn $100 to do this) when they will get paid. He told me six months and it would be this month and I would get confirmation from them beforehand. Just what I thought. Then I went to Overdrive stand and picked up some leaflets about them, which I have yet to read. Then I went home, tired but happy I went.

I look forward to going again next year, when I will look for talks in the Digital Zone again.

2 comments:

Deborah Carr said...

Thanks for telling us about LBF. I've only ever attended a masterclass there, several years ago, so it's very informative to read your posts.

Julie Day said...

Thanks, Deborah. It's my pleasure to pass on to others what I learn.