Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, project lead for the Panorama Project, will be speaking on a keynote panel at PubWest 2020 on Friday, February 21, 2020 in Portland, Oregon.
Ensuring a More Literate Future for All
Access to and engagement with literature is critical to inspiring creativity, fostering literacy, and strengthening communities. Join three of today’s leading literary advocates and find out how they are helping shape a more literate future for readers, writers, and publishers. This lively, moderated talk will address how diversity, inclusion, and community engagement play critical roles in nurturing new readers and writers, while expanding the current—and future—audience for books.
Gonzalez will be joined by Andrew Proctor, Executive Director, Literary Arts, Laura Brief, CEO, 826 National, and a moderator TBA.
The conference's theme for 2020 is "Publishing in the Clouds: Practical Solutions for Big Ideas," and the robust program includes a few other notable sessions of interest to followers of the Panorama Project:
Relationships with Libraries
Libraries and librarians are a lifeline to new readers and are important customers, partners, and advocates for publishers and authors. Many small-to-medium-sized publishers spend a lot of time and energy cultivating key business relationships with libraries as well as developing special library book editions for the market. Other publishers do not pay enough attention to their library relationships, relying only on sales garnered through their reps. This informative session will detail how working directly with your libraries is essential to your publishing success.
Finance & Management: We Need to Talk
Macmillan and libraries are not getting along. Macmillan states that they are losing money by selling to libraries and planned to implement an embargo in November 2019 that will only allow one copy of each eBook to be purchased by any library for the first eight weeks of a book’s release. What is at heart with this decision? And, how do small-to-medium-sized publishers need to react to selling eBooks to libraries? In this session we’ll discuss this issue and talk about how to ensure that libraries get enough eBooks for their readers—and how publishers can get paid by libraries.
Keynote: Charlotte Abbott: Reader Engagement
Reader engagement is critically important for publishers who want to increase book discovery and sales conversions in today’s competitive digital marketplace, especially now, when more than a million books are published each year and are competing for the chance to appear in physical bookstores. Luckily, there are more accessible and affordable tools for building relationships with readers than ever—and also more proven strategies and benefits for publishers. This keynote will present specific examples of publishers who are creating compelling new stories around their brands, building loyal and supportive communities, and leveraging their relationships with authors and business partners in ways that keep them increasingly vital and relevant.
PubWest is a vibrant, dynamic trade association of small- and medium-sized book publishers, printers, editors, proofreaders, graphic designers, binderies, and related editorial and service companies, and produces industry-leading professional development programs through its regional BookLores and annual Conference.