The Book Industry Conference

Hello

Well, this is my first attempt at blogging, I'm not sure how it will go but John from The Acorn Gallery told me months ago to start a blog and after a particularly inspiring Book Industry Conference this week I felt the need to share!

Every year the Booksellers Association hold an annual conference for everyone in the book industry, mainly retailers and publishers but there are other bookish people there too.

This years focus, unsurprisingly, was how to survive the recession. It was really good. On the first day we were given 10 minute presentations from a variety of people with tips about selling, marketing, making use of the Internet, cutting costs and all sorts of things. I came away with loads of ideas for things to implement immediately in the shop.

The next day we were split into groups to discuss a certain topic, my groups topic was Taking Risks and Finding Talent (!) I was quite terrified as I was in a very small group with some very big wigs from the publishing world, a lovely man who runs London Book Fair and a man from a company who provides a invoicing system for the book industry ( I won't go in to than, it's quite complicated) anyway, they were all really nice and I had a really interesting time, once I got over the shock & terror of the group leader saying "what I'd like to do is go round the table and we can all share a story about a time when we've taken a risk" I must not have disguised my look of horror as he very kindly said, when it came to my turn, "you don't have to if you don't want."

So I took a deep breath and told everyone about the decision to move to a bigger shop despite the fact that we couldn't afford it based on the sales we made at our old shop. It was a sort of do or die risk but it paid off and they all seemed interested.

The biggest thing about the conference was the unavailing of the new industry wide initiative. Basically the industry as a whole wants to work together to get everyone to buy more books. A sort of UK wide marketing campaign to get the country reading.

A fabulous marketing guy called Damien Horner who was chairing the conference, gave the presentation. After a long time talking about the problems of such a massive marketing campaign (no money being a major one) and talking about the ideas that were good but not quite right he revealed the "Concept" To be honest I can't really do it justice here, you kind of need the presentation but basically it's "Bookaholism" the idea that books are addictive but in a good way. You can "get hooked on a book" There are loads of possible strap lines - although a logo is going to be a challenge.

I personally don't like the word "Bookaholism" it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and it does immediately bring images of alcoholism to mind. However a bookaholic concept is great and I'll be able to have a lot of fun with it in the shop.

Maybe I can convince the Pocklington Post to have me write a column - "Confessions of a bookaholic" I can have monthly Bookaholic Anonymous meetings where all the book addicts out there come and talk about why they love books so much.

Not sure when it's all going to officially launch but I think it's a really exciting prospect and can't wait to see where it goes from here.