Young LBF Attendees Flock to Hear Byng and Company's Canon Tales
By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 4/22/2009 4:53:00 AM
Tuesday’s Society of Young Publishers (SYP) event, Canon Tales: Chapter 2: Promoting Creativity in Publishing, drew a mostly under-35 crowd of London Book Fair attendees. A star-studded line-up of presenters—including Canongate’s Jamie Byng and Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow—was probably what brought many of the international young attendees to the event, although the unusual format (and bar set up in the back of the room) probably didn’t hurt.
The event, which started at LBF last year, was a kind of hip Power Point presentation, wherein publishing professionals had seven minutes to explain who they are, what they’ve done, and how they’re promoting creativity in publishing. But they didn’t just get seven minutes to stand in front of a podium. Each speaker was allowed to show 20 slides, and a strict 21-second-per-slide rule was enforced. After 21 seconds, with the blip of a computer click, the slide changed, and the speaker was forced to move on. Event organizers Jon Slack and Doug Wallace said the format takes its cue from a Tokyo event called “Pecha Kucha” (Japanese for “chit chat”), in which architects and designers use a similar rapid-fire format as a way to introduce and exchange ideas with their peers “without anyone hogging the limelight.”
Peter Collingridge, managing director of Apt Studio, kicked things off by framing his career in publishing as a series of failures (his efforts to work in advertising, the Web and a number of other careers all flopped). Yet Collingridge found success after all, and now runs Apt, a digital consultancy specializing in publishing. Jamie Byng, editor of Canongate, was “firing on all cylinders” (said one Twitterer) as he talked about the house’s record year in ’08, aided by its publication of Barack Obama and The Mighty Book of Boosh. Peggy Vance, category publisher of Dorling Kindersley, spent her seven minutes on All This Makes Life Worth Living, a compendium of what DK’s editors deemed the “most significant, extraordinary and poignant objects in the world.” Vance flew through her seven minutes and ended by asking the audience to yell out things they thought made life worth living, and flung candy toward the most vocal contributors.
Other participants included Cory Doctorow, author and journalist and co-editor of Boing Boing, who talked about copyright; Helen Conford, editorial director at Penguin, who was shortlisted for Young Publishing Entrepreneur of the Year last year; Rebecca Lee, a junior desk editor in nonfiction at Scholastic Children’s Books; Jon Gray, cover designer; Reg Wright, director of Hothouse Fiction; Hannah Griffiths, director of paperbacks at Faber and Faber; Roger Bratchell, marketing director at Random House; Alison Baverstock, senior lecturer at Kingston’s University M.A. in publishing program; and Joe Dunthorne, poet and author.
SYP has posted a video podcast of the event here.
For more LBF coverage, click here.
