Lessons from the London Book Fair

By chance the London Book Fair fell during one of my weeks off and so I took a bit of time off from editing to infiltrate the publishing business and listen in.

These are some of the lessons I learned. Now bear in mind that this isn't my advice, but what the pros at the fair were saying.

Beauuuutiful cover!

#Lesson 1: Pretty books matter
One of the comments that was made by booksellers over and over is that what a book looks like matters hugely. Don’t judge a book by its cover? Forget it, everybody does. Booksellers are flooded with hundreds of books, so if you want your book to stand out, it’s got to be stunning. In the words on a bookseller, ‘make it a beautiful objects that people want to get their hands on’. That being said, easier said than done…

# Lesson 2: Use social media – but be genuine
One of the advice I heard the most is also the least helpful: use social media. Oh thanks, geez, hadn’t thought about that! Everybody said it, especially those who haven’t grown up breathing and living twitter and facebook. They mostly said sensible stuff that seemed pretty obvious to me, but it least it’s making me think I’m doing things right:
- Don’t be a knob. Be polite and enthusiastic and give other people a hand. Or as somebody put it, forget about the self-absorbed part of your brain that drove you to be shut up in your own little world for months to write a book.
- Don’t spam people to ask them to buy your book. Nobody wants someone’s book rammed down their throat all the time. An interesting blog post post on this topic came out this week telling authors to 'shut up'.
- Make connections. When publicists tell authors to use social media, what they mean is to reach out to people, engage in conversations, have a ‘presence’. The same blogger who told authors to 'shut up' wrote a following blog explaining what authors should do instead of spamming.
- Be genuine. Find what social media comes naturally to you and do that one. For me it would be blogging, but an author was talking about reaching our to other debut authors through twitter was how she started using twitter, linking to pages she liked and found useful.

# Lesson 3: Build an audience. 
I think this is in competition with ‘use social media’ for most annoying advice! Yeah, thanks, I’d love to. HOW? In all honesty, I can’t say I got the answer to that one. But I got tidbits of information, things that might help.
- travel back in time to a time when there weren’t a million bloggers (see blog earlier)
- sign up to websites such as wattpad or platforms where your readers are and engage with the people there (genuinely, not spamming – see above). Make the networking part of your routine.
- publish nothing until you’ve got 3 books. Or, without going that far, publish books very close together, so your audience can continue to engage with your books. If you wait too long between books, you will lose your audience and have to start all over again
- call on your family and friends to help you spread the word
- start a mailing list

# Lesson 4: Metadata matter
Lots of acronyms like SEO and SEM got brandished around, and in all honesty I mostly didn’t have a clue what these people were talking about. Google tells me this is ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and ‘Search Engine Marketing’. Note to self: do some more research.

# Lesson 5: Do your research
When contacting people – publishers, agents, booksellers – find out what they like and don’t like, and find the name of the person you should be contacting, then contact them, and not their colleagues, who might have completely different tastes.


And finally, The Bookseller’s secret to success:
- Write a great book
- Find your audience and given them time to tell their friends about your book
- Repeat

Now I learned another very important thing, but that deserves a post of its own, so stay posted.