London Book Fair (LBF) is the world’s largest publishing trade fair. It is held at Olympia, a vast exhibition space, the size of an airport terminal building. On entering the main entrance, the noise and heat threaten to overwhelm you: the sheer scale of the place makes you feel small and insignificant in this world of frenetic deal-making. But all you have to do is take a deep breath and do as I did and head up the stairs to look for Author HQ, which like last year, was tucked away in the upper west zone in Hall 1.
Author HQ is always oversubscribed, and there are never enough seats to go around: I was lucky I got one at the last minute for the session, Independent Publishing with Kindle Direct Publishing. On the panel were indie publishing genre fiction superstars, Rachel Abbott, Mark Dawson, Keith Houghton and LJ Ross. As well as writing books readers want to read, half their time is spent on marketing. One simple marketing tip from Rachel was to incorporate an image of your book cover in your email signature. Mark stressed the importance of setting up a mailing list.
Using Sources: Managing Copyright Issues and Avoiding Common Legal Pitfalls featured author Janet Laurence and Nicola Salomon, Chief Executive of the Society of Authors. Nicola dispelled some of the myths relating to copyright in the UK. She talked about Fair Dealing and when and where it applies. Then she covered the law on defamation, warning authors to be careful when choosing fictional names of characters, especially of antagonists. Her tip was to give them names of geographical places.
The last session I attended was the ALLi (Alliance of Independent Authors) event, How to Sell More Books, chaired by founder, Orna Ross. On the panel was best-selling author Adam Croft, internet marketing expert, Gabriel Mercer and author and marketing expert Joanna Penn. Gabriel talked about the segmentation of mailing lists (for high selling authors), and Joanna suggested writing shorter length fiction such as novellas as a way of getting more books out there.
In the end, though, LBF is your chance to network with an international group of fellow authors, editors, booksellers, book publicists and broadcasters. On Wednesday night after the last session finished, we celebrated ALLi’s fifth birthday party, hosted by Amazon, at the Albion pub in Hammersmith, where it was standing room only.
If you couldn’t make it this year, don’t forget that if you join ALLi, you will be eligible for a free ticket. See you there in 2018.
