Back in early October I bought a ticket for The Writer's Summit, `brought to you by The London Book Fair and Writer's Digest', held at the Coin Street conference centre, near Waterloo. Its aim was to provide new writers with the insights and advice needed about the numerous publishing options available today.
On Saturday I got up at 5 am and took a horribly early train from Cambridge, as the doors for this one day event opened at 8.45. It was an eco building, which apparently meant only two toilet cubicles existed for women on the third floor, where the summit was being held and no communal basins or mirrors. There was quite a queue at 9 am and I was transported back to school discos as a woman walked up and down said queue asking everyone if they had a mirror, as she couldn't put her makeup on blind.
The chair for the event was James Woollam, the managing director of F & W Media and Writer's Digest UK, who introduced this inaugural summit with great charm. The first speaker was Alison Flood, the book reporter for the Guardian, who was engaging and enthusiastic, but threw hundreds of statistics at us and my pen just couldn't keep up:
The good news is that print books have shown resilience in the past 18 months, whereas e book sales are the lowest since 2011. The bad news is that since 2005 five hundred independent bookshops have closed.
George Saunders, whose novel `Lincoln in the Bardo' was the winner of the Man Booker Prize 2017, was allegedly selling only one or two copies a week until he was shortlisted. I say allegedly because my pen - or maybe my ears- seemed resistant to what she was saying. I believe she stated that even once he'd won the prize, his sales were only around the 3,500 mark.
What are people reading then, if not literary fiction? Sales of thrillers, children's books and non fiction have shown a healthy increase, apparently.
Digital self publishing has really taken off, which was what this conference was addressing. Should you go the traditional route or should you self publish? Definitely not the latter, if you write literary fiction, seemed to be the consensus. You are condemned to poor sales in all corners of the market.
As opposed to the long lead time in the traditional publishing market, Kindle Direct Publishing says it takes only 5 minutes to publish a book. You can also earn up to 70% royalties in a host of countries including the UK and the US.
Alison Flood said she felt that both parts of the market were here to stay and that traditional editors were now looking at the Amazon charts, where the bestsellers were often self-published, in order to understand what the reading public wants. As a result, the snobbery of what used to be called `vanity publishing' has started to fade and many literary prizes are now open to non traditionally published books, as well. For example, `The Wake' by Paul Kingsnorth was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker prize and won the 2015 Book of the Year Award. It was published by Unbound, a crowdfunding publisher.
Tomorrow's blog will cover Sam Missingham's talk on `7 Habits of Highly Effective Authors'
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