After the BookCamp #bcvan09

I have a lot of ideas brimming in my head and I wish I could just type them in coherent sentences, but I think we’re going to be reduced to bullet point form. Before anything else, I want to thank the organizing team of BookCamp Vancouver, as per the BookCamp wiki. BookCamp was an amazing event with lots of really valuable and interesting discussions around the book publishing industry. You can read my live-tweetage here.

I was just amazed at the fact that, while I have published books before (in Spanish, my English-language books are forthcoming), I have never been really involved in this industry. My reasons behind wanting to have a book published appear to be different to those of, you know, fiction writers, etc. This is an industry that I really haven’t studied either.

Overall, participating in BookCamp was interesting from the academic viewpoint and from the vantage point of someone who has written research that can/should/will be published in book format in one way or another. But first, let me thank those who made BookCamp happen:

BookCamp Vancouver 2009 organizing team:

Sean Cranbury, Books on the Radio

Monique Trottier, Boxcar Marketing

Crissy Campbell, Boxcar Marketing

Morgan Cowie, BookNet Canada

Nick Bouton, Taunt Media, Protagonize.com

John Maxwell, SFU Masters of Publishing Program

Suzanne Norman, SFU Summer Publishing Workshops

Five Seventeen, PicaPica

Teresa Bubela, Empress of Asia

Now back to the meat of my post. There were overall themes that came through and a few questions that were unanswered in my head.

- There was no discussion of libre-vs-gratis content production – I proposed to have it and nobody wanted to talk about it. Is it just me or is this a discussion that needs to happen and maybe I just didn’t find the way to make it exciting? How can we make money in an industry where content is produced and e-books are written and published, yet nobody pays for them? Remember that the question I am asking is about gratis (content produced, but unpaid for, reproduced freely) vs libre (content produced AND paid for, reproduction free of charge). Hat tips to Paul for providing the Wikipedia difference.

- What makes people want to pay for things? The theme that resonated with me was that print media (books) has a revenue problem, not a readership problem. This is a similar problem to the one that the newspaper industry is facing. Paul quoted Kirk LaPointe saying that “You are paying us for curation, editing, presentation of content”. As someone who consumes so much online content, does my information really need curating, editing, presenting and would I pay for someone to do that? This is totally related to my post on the economics of free – with so many free e-books out there, do people really want to pay for the printed, physical copy?

- Different strokes for different folks. Nobody seems to recognize the heterogeneity of each population (authors, publishers, marketers). The reasons behind why I want to publish a book are 100% different to the reasons to why a novelist would want to publish a book. I was really getting anxious at the discussions where everybody talked about publishers, authors and marketers as though each one of these were uniform and homogeneous. A consultant, for example, writes a book to demonstrate expertise. It becomes a marketing tool. I am an expert at something because I wrote a book. Obviously, this is debatable, but the general assumption is that this is the reason why speakers become authors, to establish authority. For a tenure-stream assistant professor, a book is the vehicle to disseminate research findings (with, obviously, the reward being tenure or at least, the promise of tenure). And the list goes on.

- The business model conversation comes along with the discussion on production. I found it interesting that notions of income streams and revenue streams were touched on – barely - I would have had a full day with discussions on business models. Morgan Cowie from BookNet was really good in her talk on this topic.

- The only drawback that I perceived was the obscene amount of jargon and acronyms thrown around. For a non-specialist in the field of book publishing, it was daunting. And I am not someone who gets easily scared! I do hope that by the next BookCamp I will be able to speak publishing-ese.

Awesome work by everybody. As in, seriously – BookCamp rocked. Great coordination. Fantastic to see friends of mine with whom I am close personally, like Monique Trottier, in a different capacity. I had never had the chance to work or participate in an activity where I saw Monique in her element. I suppose the same could be said about me if or when the folks from the social media crowd see me speak or coordinate a conference on environmental studies.

I learned lots, picked up some tips for when Isabella Mori and I organize Mental Health Camp 2010 (yeah, we’re already thinking about it) and thoroughly enjoyed my time. It was very much worth attending BookCamp Vancouver ’09 – thanks to the sponsors, it was 100% free and the lunch was simply outstanding (by Out to Lunch). Hopefully we’ll be able to score some funding for MHC ’10 so we can offer such amazing stuff.

Related posts:

1. Happy birthday Monique Trottier @SoMisguided
2. LiveTweetage from BookCamp Vancouver ’09 #bcvan09
3. BookCamp Vancouver 2009
4. Monique Trottier on “Old Publishers Have to Think”, The Shebeen Club
5. Arsenal Pulp books and the Dictionary of Homophobia