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Mama Always Said There Would Be Weeks Like This...
May 2, 2008
Mama always said there would be weeks like this – but I don’t know that she knew about book industry panels. I’ll have been on three this week: one of emerging fiction writers at the LA Times book festival (
see previous post), and two today: one for Turn Here video, which produces all our videos here at PW (check back here for a really good one if I do say so myself, an interview with my old friend and now big star, Lewis Black). The one later is on translation at PEN, and will star Morgan Entrekin, whose video interview you can also see on PW.
Anyway, the Turn Here event, held at the Manhattan Hearst building because Will Hearst was one of the first Angel investors in the company founded by a San Francisco entrepreneur named Bradley Inman, was well attended, mostly by publishers who wanted to hear about developments in technology, and how such developments could be used in their business. I was on the hot seat, along with Google’s Tom Turvey and B&N.com’s newish head of Digital Media, Mike Skagerlind. – but it was actually pretty cool. I was the “voice of traditional publishing,” I guess, and was as much a listener as a speaker, as Tom and Mike and Brad explained what their companies are doing. The one contribution I think I made came after Tom exhorted publishers to look at the data, the metrics, about how digital promotion does or does not serve their purposes. I felt the proverbial lightbulb over my head: that’s the problem! Or at least part of the problem. “I don’t know about you,” I said to the publishing audience, “but when I get presented with metrics about Web progress here at PW, I can’t understand what I’m looking at.!” Let’s face it, in this business, about the most we have ever had to handle was P&Ls. Afterwards, Turvey said he agreed, and that it was high time tech folk stopped complaining that print-types just didn’t “get it,” and time that they made their information understandable to us poor old just plain print folks.
So, in other words, it was a good day.
Posted by Sara Nelson on May 2, 2008 | Comments (3)
