Publishers Weekly - May 18, 2015

Best of Both Worlds

This year’s uPublishU encourages self-published authors to gain insight from both indie and traditional publishing B; A;;; P;;;;;

Sally Dedecker
Mark Coker
Chris Kenneally
Jane Friedman

The line between tradi- tional and self-pub- lishing is blurring, and this is good news for authors willing to seize a new opportunity. That is one of the major themes of this year’s uPublishU at BookExpo America, the indie publishing show held at New York City’s Javits Center on Saturday, May 30.

Given the success of last year’s structure, this year’s show will follow the same mulitrack approach. It offers a schedule of workshops for three distinct self-publishing audiences: newbies publishing their first book, those focused on marketing and attracting readers, and more experienced authors working on their third or fourth (or 15th) book.

“We have some attendees who are basi-
cally on book one, or about to start, and
on the other end of the spectrum, we have
authors who are on book seven, eight,
nine,” says Sally Dedecker, who is educa-
tion director for BEA and is organizing
uPublishU. “Then there are authors who
we could put the label ‘hybrid’ on—
they’ve been traditional, and they’re
starting to look at self-publishing.”
These hybrid authors are a particular
focus for this year’s show. As self-pub-
lishing has become more sophisticated
and traditional publishers have moved to
embrace indie authors, the distinction
between these two worlds has become
less distinct—making it easier for au-
thors to move between the two models.

With that in mind, this year’s opening session is titled “The Rise of the Hybrid Author,” which delves into the opportunities on either side of the publishing equation, and why it can benefit an author to move between the two.

Chris Kenneally, director of business development for the Copyright Clearance Center, who will be moderating the opening panel, describes this as a change in perspective for authors. Rather than viewing traditional and self-publishing as mutually exclusive options, authors are seeking out revenue from both sides, signing with major publishers for some projects, and going indie for others, depending on their goals for each project and their lon-ger-term career aims.

Kenneally sees this as a marked shift from the sense of “triumphalism” that the success of the self-publishing industry has fostered—the view that “authors, at long last, were set to roll over traditional publishers” and help indie publishing dominate, and perhaps replace, the traditional system. Instead, publishers have moved to embrace self-publishing, with their own indie imprints and more flexible terms for authors who have established themselves outside the traditional model.

Market Smarts
Attendees at uPublishU will also
learn how to apply the marketing
strategies and data analysis used by
larger publishing houses to their own
self-publishing efforts. Workshops
such as “Book Marketing Best Prac-
tices” and “Sell More E-Books: Tips
& Tricks Based on Actual Data” will
help authors consider how they
promote and sell their books.
“Looking at purchasing informa-
tion has always been part of what
traditional publishers do, and indie
authors have to start doing the same
thing,” Dedecker says. Her examples
include tracking data about what
genre is trending up or down, or what
styles of cover art are selling well. “This
is all part of what indie authors have to
consider.”
In another session, titled “The New
Publishing Timeline,” authors discuss
how to make the biggest impact ahead of
the release of a book and e-book. This
panel will walk attendees through creat-
ing early buzz, generating preorders, and
being proactive long before the book is
actually released.

To this end, Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, will be leading a workshop on how authors can hit the e-book bestseller list by making preorders more central to a book’s promotional strategy.