Multimedia Storytelling

I hope my time as an intern here has been a little different than most. One of the launch titles, Maggot Moon, was in need of some accompanying video content to enhance the digital edition, and with my background in video editing and graphics I hoped that over the next few days I could rise to the occasion.

I first got into the graphics side of things when my love of books evolved to include film. I feel the two go hand in hand, both telling stories in different ways, but both utilising the written word: books for prose and films for scripts. First off were some videos to do with the general mood of the book. Montages of images and videos setting the scene and bringing the words to life…

To many of you, this will be sacrilege, but I believe that there is a big opportunity to enhance the book reading experience with the melding of multimedia into a book. Small videos can act like mood boards, setting the tone of the next chapter or bringing the emotion of a scene to life. In the same way, could background music to a book catch on? With more and more people electing to read on an iPad or tablet, why listen to your own music when you could be adding to the atmosphere of the novel? Imagine reading about a thrilling chase with a soundtrack of film scored music! Or a love scene where the pages turn pink, the screen steams up and petals fall behind the text! Digital distribution brings a lot of potential to a relatively unchanged market.

About four or five years ago, I began to dabble with Photoshop. A novice at first, thousands of videos and several books later I felt I had relatively mastered the basics and could progress to After Effects… sort of a ‘Photoshop for videos’. Short animations for clients on YouTube gave me access to quite a large, if unforgiving audience. Animations in After Effects then began to feel out dated, what with 3D becoming more and more prevalent, so in August of 2011 I began to move onto completely new territory for me: Cinema 4D.

Cinema 4D is a relatively easy to use 3D modelling and animation platform that allowed me to start to get to grips with the strange concept of manipulating a 3 dimensional model on a 2 dimensional computer screen. To start with, I was out of my depth. It was hard going but I stuck with it, trying to push myself to try new ways of creating content. Even now, almost a year later, I still can only just barely model a convincing object. My forte is in the animation and rendering side of things; making things move and look realistic.

Anyway, I’m waffling. Maggot Moon is set in a time rich with 1950s culture and the project allowed me to really get to grips with the background material of the book. I’ve somehow managed to convince the team here to let me put my passion to work and make a book trailer and short video for one of the more touching moments in the book (which I cant reveal to you yet!) and trying to tie it in with the wonderfully unique art style the design team here created for the book… lets hope this works!

So, I’ve told you all my thoughts on an enhanced digital reading experience and to my mind the benefits of a mixed entertainment experience and I’ll try to keep you updated with any progress I make between moving house and school. The question now is, do you agree with me? Or are books the last remaining breakwater between us and a deluge of digital information? Feel free to sound off in the comments below!

-Charlie Smith

@chazodude   charlieharrysmith.tumblr.com   www.youtube.com/chazodude

We Love Data

The past seven days have been pretty data intensive at Hot Key Books. We set up our first titles on Biblio Lite, which is the core database of all the information about all of our books.

Biblio is our library catalogue. Our store inventory. It’s our scheduling tool, as well, and how we generate the main documents that we use to sell our books.

Here comes a hot topic word: meta data. Biblio is the hub for all of our meta data: who wrote the book, what it’s called, when it’s publishing, how much it costs. And also… who the agent is, who the editors on it are, where the book is located, what rights we’ve bought for it, what age groups it’s aimed at. (Are you sleeping yet?)

By the end of the year, it will also hold all our royalty information, sales information, where rights in the books have been sold and basically anything and everything to do with the book.

It’s what feeds Amazon and Waterstones and even our own website (being built right now!) with all of that information, plus it houses reviews, book summaries, author biographies. Everything, everything, everything. It’s an enormously powerful database tool that helps us keep track of our business — and so it has to be precise and accurate, all the time.

Now, I must confess, that when I say “we set up” really I mean our tireless editorial assistants, Naomi and Becca set it up (with help from Cait in marketing, too). While we don’t have a huge number of books, those two spent hours painstakingly inputting every detail of all the books we’ve bought in the past six months.

And we’re doing this so that people can find our books. Someone will search for “books about the Spanish Civil War” and the gorgeous A WORLD BETWEEN US will pop up in their browsers.

People will say, “I want a book under £10 published in the year 2012 for a nine year old with a minitaure boy who faces off with an angry squirrell”, and up will pop SHRUNK! by F R Hitchcock in whatever place they are looking, because Biblio will have pushed out that information.

Any tiny piece of information that we can put out into the world, we’ll do it. That’s basically what everyone is talking about when they talk about “metadata”.

We’re even making up our own categories, as you’ve seen yesterday with Kate’s Hot Key Ring. Those ingredients are going out as part of our books’ descriptions, as part of our descriptive data feeds.

Biblio will also help us report on our publishing in the future. All the categories we are assigning will be collatable into analysis of any number of things — production costs, number of reviews, even things like artist’s medium or number of Polish print runs.

So, while data might be a little fiddly, rigid and intensive, it is a hugely powerful tool when done right. And we plan on doing it right, from day one.

(Wake up! The data blogging is over!)

Who’s Got Da Skillz? Libraries, that’s who!

Yesterday, Sarah B and I attended the opening session of the Digital Skills Sharing initiative, put together by The Reading Agency and The Publisher Association.

My favourite line of the day was from Miranda McKearney, CEO of The Reading Agency: “This project brings together the powerful networks that librarians and publishers represent.”

And it’s so true! Libraries and publishers are the foundation for networks of readers, networks of people who love books — and groups of book lovers are so powerful. They can change someone’s life just by talking about a favourite book; they can spur on political movements; they can steer the course of cultural development and artistic expression. It was so wonderful to be surrounded by people that are passionate about getting people to read — and it’s so exciting to work with libraries on digital strategy, where there are so many opportunities to reach more readers and help bring people together over books.

Before the event kicked off, there was a huge buzz in the room, which turned into the sound of people writing and tapping out nuggets of wisdom from the inspirational speakers like:

Matt Locke from @storythings, who told everyone, very sensibly, not to stress about the technology. It’s much more about people’s patterns of behaviour. Think about how are people are changing, not how is technology changing. New patterns of behaviour, new patterns of the way people “pay attention”: are things like live broadcasts Million Pound Drop, Lambing Live, Planet Earth Live (can’t WAIT for this one!). There is also binge watching lots of a show at once (Mad Men box sets, recording a whole series say of Firefly), or snacking on entertainment for ten minutes while commuting via mobile devices…

@Gatesheadteens, two bright young women, showed us a brilliant and hilarious video promo for Before I Go to Sleep, (Watch it here: http://bit.ly/JALTIo) which they put together as part of the @MyVoice program. http://www.gatesheadlibraries.com. They did the filming, the soundtrack, the graphics all themselves as part of a contest. They didn’t win, but everyone was so impressed with their video and it was clear that people like these ladies are some of the most passionate and most creative advocates for books!

Jim Thompson from Edinburgh Libraries showed what can be achieved through a forward-thinking library strategy. He presented almost a case study for other boroughs of how it can really work to drive up transactions. This is their blog http://talesofonecity.wordpress.com and a brilliant Around the World in 80 Detective Inspector’s Google Maps project that maps books to locations. We love this!

and Stewart Bain from @OrkneyLibrary had us all giggling at old book covers for books about biscuits and blown away by the fact that 25% of their population of 20,000 people are following them on Twitter! Libraries aren’t all about serious things — they tweet about The Voice and also blog about fascinating things from their archives.

Go find them on Twitter! It’s clear that libraries already have bags of digital skills that are benefitting their communities in a big way.

After the talks, our working group met. We’ll be spending the next six months or so working with lovely librarians from Nottinghamshire (@nottslibraries) and publishing colleagues from Penguin. Together, we’ll deliver one or two big projects as case studies, and we’ve already got a few good ideas for what we’re going to do…

When we were in the room it felt like we were part of something important, something that could have big impact if everyone is committed to making it work. We’ll definitely keep you posted.

In the meantime, it would be really helpful if you would share some cool things that your library does, so that we can start to get inspired!

Why Social Media? (or my LBF Children’s Innovation Zone Presentation)

On Monday and Tuesday at London Book Fair I gave a presentation on how we’re using social media at Hot Key to launch ourselves as a publisher. You can watch me run through how and why on the video below. It’s about 15 minutes, so sit back over lunch or with a cup of tea when you have time. I do make some interesting points, I promise. Unfortunately the slides don’t show on the video, and I wanted to get it up online quickly, but they are in the widget below the video (Thanks @BookBuzzrCEO) or available to download here

Lbf innovation zone

View more presentations from HotKeyBooks

For those that missed it – the Meet the Team video can be found on our About Us page!

Now, as you know we take social media very seriously here at Hot Key, and rightly so in my opinion. Many people I talked too after my presentation are grappling with how to find the time to do social media, or how to work it into their marketing and PR strategy, or wondering who’s responsibility it is.  Since joining Hot Key, and to be honest, in my previous roles, I’ve had many, many people say with a sigh, ‘I’d love to have the time to blog/tweet everyday like you guys, but we’re just TOO busy‘, with almost an underlying tone of ‘clearly you don’t have anything better to do’.

It is hard, I admit. But it is also no longer just a nice idea, it’s a necessity. If you aren’t prioritizing social media into your company’s strategy, then there is a problem. You can engage instantly with far more people by spending a week on social media than you ever would with a tube poster advert. Also, many people assume it’s just the marketing or PR department’s responsibility. It shouldn’t be. If your company is serious about social media, EVERYONE should be doing it. It should be part of your day, not just part of your marketing strategy.

And finally, some simple tips if you are just starting out:

• Don’t think it’s too late if you have no social presence yet. It isn’t. You can grow followers quickly in the social world if you commit to regularly doing it.
• Don’t use it just for marketing messages, if you do people will turn off. Social Media is a conversation, you shouldn’t try to directly sell to people
• Have Twitter or Facebook open at work at all times. Yes, tell your boss I said it’s okay. You need to monitor conversations to see if you can dip in and start talking. That’s a great way to pick up new followers.
• Twitter has excellent recommendations of Who to Follow, based on your own tweets, so get out there and follow those similar to you, and all being well you might get some follow backs.
• Use bit.ly to short all your links, and then you can see if people are clicking on your content
• Encourage members of staff to have personal twitter accounts too, it’s nice for people to see a personal face behind a brand.

Those are just a few nuggets. And if you still don’t believe that you should be doing social, watch this short video below. It’s a new version of something I’ve shown before, but it’s brilliant. My favourite bit is: “The ROI of Social Media…is that your company will exist in 5 years time”.

What do you think?

Print and Digital, The Best of Both Worlds

Echoing Emily and Kate, I have to say that starting to set up the digital offerings here at Hot Key is a dream come true. I’m in the enviable position of being able to acquire wonderful authors and also to oversee the digital offerings on the entire list. It’s the best of both worlds.

And it’s only in a company like this can I throw out madcap ideas and everyone smiles and nods and says, “Sure, go for it!” We are all committed to experimenting, measuring, learning, iterating. We are not afraid to believe in something enough to try and fail.

Alongside my traditional acquiring activities, I’ve been meeting people about: digital workflow, ebook conversion, ebook distribution, website development, ecommerce, app development, audio books, social media platforms, data analysis tools… I’ve had about 40 digital-specific meetings, probably about 10 days worth of seminars and read through more boiler plate contracts than one person should ever have to.

Breaking News!
I’m thrilled to tell you all that we’ve been working with our amazing web development partners, The Public Society, for several weeks now. They are an extremely talented design firm with incredible creativity. They took our web philosophy and are putting it right at the heart of their development, and I can’t wait to tell you all alot more about what we have planned.

They have just pulled together the first draft of designs for a website that will actually have some books on it! Don’t worry, though, this blog is the soul of our company and it will remain front and centre and always updated.

Revolucion!
In all my digital wanderings, across London, New York and the international reach of Skype, there have been ups and downs. I have heard people proclaim with all certainty that they will single-handedly revolutionize publishing. I do like ambition, but in the words of the inimitable Inigo Mantoya, “That word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

According to Martin Levin over at Publishing Perspectives, “At the end of 2011, Apple had nearly $100 billion in cash on hand. The total revenue of all US book publishers in 2011 was $39 billion. Apple could buy the whole industry and have change left.” Now, THAT’S the (very humbling and frightening) stuff of revolution.

The Death of the Word
People have said that text-based stories are no longer a viable product. Seems a bit harsh when they were sitting across from people who have just started a new BOOK publishing company. A thought which, you might expect, I completely disagree with. Text-based entertainment is the cheapest and quickest to produce. Therefore, a much wider variety of stories can be brought to market which allows for a greater chance of hitting on just the right thing at the right time to produce phenomenons like Harry Potter and Twilight.

A Man’s World?
In the vast majority of meetings, it’s been an exchange of knowledge and a lot of fun, but I’ve also been completely ignored. I definitely feel that I’ve been judged by my gender. I’m young (ish) and perhaps my general demeanour of enthusiasm makes me come across as naive. Perhaps, also, it is because I work in children’s publishing, which people outside the industry might think doesn’t count as real publishing. I have had meetings so patronising that I thought steam must actually be coming out  of my ears.

My mom (Hi, Mom!) is an architect, and when I was a teen, she ran her own residential design business. She would go out to building sites in her five inch heels and the builders would try to push her around. But she knew her blueprints inside and out and would make them re-pour foundations or move walls if they we’re trying to get one over on her.

So, thanks, Mom, for giving me the inspiration to not accidentally spill my tomato juice over that person’s suit. And though I could never fill your shoes (because they are two sizes too small for me), after 48 hours in three inch heels running back and forth between the children’s zone and the digital zone at opposite ends of London Book Fair, thanks for showing me a little of how to walk in them.

(And I’ll be keeping a glass of tomato juice at the ready, just in case I’m lucky enough to have another meeting with that person who must not be named.)

More to come
In the same way that we’re showing you all the pieces of setting up a publisher, we’ll be blogging about our digital projects as they develop, with some sneak peeks. And we’re hoping that if you like it, you’ll tell us, but if you hate it, you’ll tell us too! I promise, I won’t break out the tomato juice.

On Reading Books in School

One of the best things about twitter is its ability to start a conversation. A passing comment can spark discussion that you didn’t see coming, perhaps with people you’ve never met. And that’s kind of a great thing, to be a sentence away from millions of different opinions, passions, and facts.

So yesterday, in case you missed it, Nina (@serifinaxxx) tweeted about how she was forced to read Skellig in school and hated it.  We were shocked! We love David Almond (some more than other, *cough* Sara OC *cough*)! How could reading one book in school have put someone off the author for LIFE? Then @lovereadingx named Animal Farm as a hated school text- what was it about reading books in school?!

Next thing we knew, there were outcries from readers, authors and bloggers alike naming books that have been forever tainted by their presence on a school reading list – Lord of the Flies, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Sunset Song, Birdsong, The Color Purple… and some that were objects of pure hate until after that dreaded exam (see @samarnold_28‘s experience of Hamlet). From this one comment, we were talking about our worst teachers, our top five Shakespeare plays and being spat on by Macbeth (unfortunately for @JaneHoward), amazing teachers (@SweetBookshelf, we all wanted to be in your English class) and even running over a copy of The Great Gatsby (we’re looking at you @rachnmi).

This is immensely cool. Especially since we’re still talking about it – Meg had to study Macbeth three times in three different schools which is pretty crazy! (luckily this hasn’t spoiled the play for her, it just means she’s rather good at quoting Lady Macbeth ).

So, have you been forced to read a book in school that you now hate? Is there an author that you avoid because you can’t bear the memories of reading his or her words aloud in school? Join the conversation here or on Twitter!

On Buying Beautiful Books

What makes a beautiful book?

Well, I suppose that’s subjective. Perhaps you like the feel of a hardback with thick pages, or relish the purchase of a smooth paperback that embodies the ‘page-turner’ promised within. Are uncoated paper covers are your thing, or are you sold by a beautiful jacket image that tells the story as you imagined it? Maybe you now exclusively buy books digitally or borrow them from a library, later scouring bookshops and the internet tirelessly for first editions of stories you’ve stumbled upon, fallen madly in love with and subsequently obsessed over physically owning a copy you can cherish and pass on to your friends and family.

I guess that’s the whole point – choice. Today we have more choice than ever before. Like it or not, the old phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ has taken on a whole new meaning as we consume stories in different ways. Physical books have become more than their content; they are expressions of our preferences, symbols of our continued love of reading and essentially whole shelves stuffed with personality (though let’s be honest, we all wish we had the space to have a library like this, or the one in The Beauty and the Beast).

For me, although my kindle is great for travelling, it is beautiful hardbacks all the way – I love the weight, the satisfaction of turning the final pages (and the heartache when that shelf built with the help of a YouTube tutorial collapses after inadvisable double-stacking). Not to mention the history that a hardback can hold- my Grandparent’s collections of leather-bound Thomas Hardys and Collection of Welsh Fairy Tales are family treasures, and have been passed down through three generations.

Now, it doesn’t get more beautiful than clothbound classics designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. The graphic interpretation of original covers (see Lady Chatterley’s Lover)! The mouth-watering colours and ribbon page marker! The wonderfully lustrous white pages! Serious love. Avid collectors will know that Madam Bovary and Crime and Punishment are the ultimate prizes (they are virtually impossible to get hold of), while The Arabian Nights collection remains my favourite (I originally read a dog-eared university library copy until investing in these editions). Not to mention the gorgeous twenties-inspired dust jackets for the F. Scott Fitzgerald hardbacks. Book lust.

Check out Tara Books too, they make the most wonderful screen-printed, hand-made books.

They are SO gorgeous, I for one have never been more interested in trees (or peacocks, or matches, or sealife). Not to mention recent editions of Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls or The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

So to all the great designers and production teams out there who are working hard to create gorgeous books that reflect the wonderful stories they contain, a massive ‘well done, thank you and please continue’. Let’s celebrate wonderful stories and get more people to invest in beautiful books – and if anyone would like to offer shelf-building guidance, I have a feeling I’m going to need it.

Digital days in East London

Yesterday, Cait Davies and I trekked over to Excel to attend the free seminar part of the Digital London Summit to see what nuggets of digital inspiration we could take back to Hot Key.

Now, firstly (and as an aside), how big is Excel? Cait and I likened it to a huge airport hanger crossed with a Vegas Hotel. It was VAST. And packed with other (highly secure) conferences. We were tempted to try to sneak into InterSpill 2012 – which was an international conf on the ‘spills’ industry – oil and chemicals apparently (who knew that was a thing?) – but sadly it was policed with lanyard checking staff, so we stuck to Digital.

Digital London was quite tech-focused but there were some fantastic threads of seminars on socialising the workplace, and digital innovation – which is what we focused on. Excitingly, on entering, we were presented with three ‘free’ passes each to various paid-for seminars, which we absolutely made the most of. It’s impossible to sum up an entire day conference in one blog post, but I’ll try to bring up the main themes of the day in a not too baffling way (and, er, maybe grab a snack before you carry on).

Here are some words that were mentioned a lot throughout various presentations:

SOCIAL, TRANSPARENT, THE CLOUD, BIG DATA, NEW BUSINESS MODELS , SO-LO-MO*

*social-local-mobile / my new favourite word

In terms of social, obviously EVERYONE is going SOCIAL. And every big organization is struggling with the same things. How do I operate professionally? When is it right to enter the conversation? What should we say? How can we measure the ROI of social media? Do we have the tools?

Neil Morgan at B.T. captured it well when he said they realized about 3 years ago that on social tools you have the ability to turn an unhappy customer into a happy customer, right there in public, mostly by saying “We’re sorry, how can we help?” He also said three important things about social:

1. Enter the social world with a social mindset – you can’t be private in a public world and you have to be okay with that

2. Get your company behind you – it’s very important that everyone understands the difference between a formal press releases and real time messages sent over 140 characters

3. Be Brave. Try different things and learn from them.

Which brings me nicely on to being TRANSPARENT – in a social world, people don’t respond to corporate speak or control. It’s like the notion of FLAWESOME which Sara O’Connor mentioned on here before. You have to be okay with people seeing the good and the bad.

THE CLOUD – it sounds so dystopic doesn’t it? But really it’s not that scary. It’s become the fancy word for internet storage via wi-fi. Basically, the great thing is anything on THE CLOUD is accessible all the time, wherever you are. Store stuff online people! But make sure it’s secure.

BIG DATA – Facebook, Google, Twitter etc – they are DATA companies really. You don’t realise it but they have more information about you and your movements/health preferences than the government.  Ray Wang, from Constellation Research Group, spoke brilliantly about how all these companies are essentially trading off your data. These companies are constantly analysing data based on your internet behaviour and conversations. Imagine a day when you could be refused Health Insurance based on the fact that Facebook knows how many times you got drunk last year. Scary.

However, DATA is great and useful and you should make sure you are analysing it all of the time! Post all your links to bit.ly, check your blog stats, look at your twitter interactions – and learn from them. And bear in mind, people are more savvy about data sharing than they used to be – the value in the interaction needs to be higher. I.e. if you want people to interact with you, you need to give them a very good reason to do it.

NEW BUSINESS MODELS – again (possibly my favourite speaker of the day) Ray Wang, talked a lot about the new business models in the digital world which are super-relevant for us right now. He made the great point that you need to ‘begin with the end in mind’. What are you trying to achieve? Figure that out first and then work your way back from there. He also made the point that everything is experimental at this stage so you have to build an environment in your company where you can fail fast, iterate and then keep experimenting. It’s okay to make mistakes, as long as you pick yourself up quickly and do it differently next time.

Okay, and finally SO-LO-MO – Social, Local, Mobile. Pretty much everyone we saw talked about this, it’s obviously the new buzz word, and it sticks. A prime example of this working is with something like VoucherCloud – serving you location-specific vouchers on your smart phone when you’re out shopping. And don’t think about Mobile as just your phone these days – it’s mobile devices – phones, tablets, kindles, laptops – to be honest anything that can transmit a signal…

PHEW. Are you still with me? Essentially, one major thing Cait and I came away with was a big sigh of relief. We are on the right lines. We said right from day one at Hot Key that we wanted to be open, social and transparent, and ooh, those words all came up! We’re not afraid of doing the wrong thing once in a while online, as long as eventually it helps us to get the right thing. We’re all experimenting here, but we are lucky enough that everyone is already on side – we don’t have a way of doing things before that we have to break down.

We have a long way to go, we know that. But we do have a ‘what we want to be’ goal in mind. And we’re damn well excited about the journey to get there.

Thanks Digital London and all the speakers – it was immense!

Speaking up for libraries

Recently, I was in Torquay with my writer friends (authors & editors Jasmine Richards, Karen Ball and not pictured Sara Grant), and we were taken on an Agatha Christie tour by a Blue Badge guide named Frank (far right) who was an octogenarian marathon runner and all around brilliant guide.

He walked us past a building, keeping very secretive about it, and pointed out this sign.

Above an impressive stained glass window, it says, “Read wisely, for a good book is a faithful friend. Eden Philpotts”. Frank was telling us about it because Eden was a friend of Agatha’s but all I could think about was the revelation that this building used to be the library:

While I am a firm believer that libraries should be accessible and not imposing, I can’t help but long for a time when libraries were so important that buildings like this housed them.

Tomorrow is the Speak Up for Libraries rally at Parliament and two team HKB members will be there at the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, Storey’s Gate SW1H 9NH (more info here) starting at 11.30am at Central Hall Westminster, Storey’s Gate, Westminster, London SW1H 9NH.

I’m also exercising my right as a British subject to meet with my MP (or his assistant) and speak with him about this issue. I will be meeting with David Lidlington’s assistant tomorrow during the lobby and asking him to help us speak up for libraries. I am suprised to get an appointment, nervous and excited all at once! Never done anything like this before. Comment below if there is anything you want me to say to him.

Publishers must support libraries. There is no point in supporting literacy if people won’t have access to reading material. And so must the government. Ed Vaizey has a legal duty to superintend the library service and the Speak Up for Libraries campaign wants him to “set out a clear vision, standard and framework to support local authorities to delivery high quality and sustainable library services.”

In addition to adding our voices to the crowd, Hot Key Books will be supporting libraries by pledging friction-less sales to libraries of our books. Libraries are a place of discovery, and a place where voracious readers are made. To survive as a company, we need voracious readers.

Ultimately, if giving libraries access to our ebooks free of exaggerated prices and imposed time limits means some lost sales, we are happy to consider it an investment in support of an essential service. We need people reading our books so that they can talk about our books, learn about our authors and our brand. Eventually, we are confident, these readers will become customers.

I hope to meet some of you in person at the rally. Let me know if you’re going to be there.

Hot Key Books says Don’t Lock Up Our Libraries!

TOCCON Wednesday round up

After having Friay and a whole weekend to get over my jet lag, I still haven’t. And it means that I still haven’t blogged about the Wednesday of Tools of Change.

If you’ve been interested in these posts, you should follow @toc on Twitter. It has great links to round ups and articles about the conference. You can also watch various videos. No matter who you are, I strongly suggest watching LeVar Burton’s opening keynote for inspiration about the future of storytelling.

First thing on Wednesday, I watched a demonstration of the most amazing software. It took a bunch of numbers, processed it, asked the data a bunch of questions and then popped out a story. (Have you read Roald Dahl’s THE GREAT AUTOMATIC GRAMMATIZATOR?) Rest assured, authors, this wasn’t fiction. The program relies on having lots of numbers to compare, so imaginative stories aren’t under threat. But it can then write narrative copy about things like the real estate market in a certain area, the performance of a company or a round up of a sporting event. Anything where there are stats, this program can tell a story.

The next talk was about new ways to sell books: subscription models and advert-paid-for stories. (What do you think about either of those options?) Then I went to a talk about new ways of bringing a book to market — releasing parts at a time, having a decreased price for early adopters, offer parts for free and then upgrade to the full product, or paying for continued access to a conversation with an expert. All of these were based on non-fiction and it’s very interesting to think of what could work for fiction. The book recommended was EVERY BOOK IS A START UP. And, like music to my ears, the one thing that was completely pivotal in all of this was THE AUTHOR and what their stories want and need.

I saw a demonstration of a product that will build animation in an app without knowing any code (DemiBooks) and heard a pitch for apps that were being sold door to door, along with other physical products (InkPad Press). I saw mind boggling things happen with complex math visuals (Wolfram Alpha Pro) that, thankfully, in my line of work, I will never have to try to understand.

All in all it was an awesome experience. My next step is to prepare a talk for the Hot Key team summing up my 43 pages of notes into an hour!