Published in Shelf Awareness

"This is not your typical conference," Scott Lubeck, the executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, told several dozen publishing insiders gathered at midtown Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel last Thursday morning. "But it's not an UNconference, either."

The theme of the BISG NEXT conference was "Developing the 2020 Publishing Program," and towards that end attendees would not simply sit and listen to a bunch of other people's opinions on where the industry is headed. After a keynote address from Magellan Media's Brian O'Leary (a repeat of his bravuro performance at February's Tools of Change), everyone split up into small teams to plot out the next decade of an independent publishing company called Crossroads. Each group was assigned one of four prime topics--identifying customers and core business models, developing a mobile strategy, developing a content strategy and making content discoverable--and given two hours to put together a short presentation. After lunch, members of each team outlined their strategies and fielded questions from the other participants, sparking some lively discussions.

Interestingly, the fictional profile for Crossroads led most of the teams in directions far from traditional book publishing. While Crossroads had a modest but well-respected fiction portfolio and some narrative nonfiction, its offerings also included books about music and computing, as well as magazines on both those subjects; the music magazine was described as "once competitive with Rolling Stone." Throw in a small record label with a focus on concert recordings, and just about every team decided, to one degree or another, that Crossroads would reinvent itself as a multimedia, multi-platform music resource. This was especially striking given that the profile attributed only 15% of the company's revenue to its recordings and just 12% to the music magazine; by contrast, technology and business books accounted for 27% of revenue, and the technology magazine another 28%.

Some groups focused on how the existing audio recordings and critical writing on music from books and magazines would be reconfigured for new technologies, while others focused on integrating contributions from their user community, like uploaded concert footage, and still others pondered how to raise their content's profile in search engines. One thing they didn't talk much about: people finding Crossroads books in bookstores. (The one time the subject did come up, it was to announce that "there aren't any more independent bookstores" in 2020, which set off a short burst of nervous laughter.)

"It's been cool to dig deep into a few aspects of a problem," said Laura Dawson, the content chief at Firebrand. "Breaking it down into specific areas is extremely productive." Dawson did note, however, that the participants seemed skewed toward publishing consultants and service providers and recommended that future conferences involve more people working at publishing companies: "Overall it's extremely valuable. I think publishers would benefit a lot from this, and it would make for an even more dynamic discussion."

"You get a lot of intensity because of the [two-hour] deadline," said Sourcebooks president Dominique Raccah, one of the actual publishers at the conference. (Kaplan also sent a sizable contingent, including president Maureen McMahon.) "But it's really fun." Next Group principal Ann Michael said that the case study profile at a future conference might be tweaked to keep attendees' thoughts closer to book publishing, but also noted that a fictional company allowed them to brainstorm freely, without worrying about their own companies' futures or about revealing too much to competitors. But would the day-long intellectual workout have a lasting effect on participants? "We won't know until later whether this was useful," Dawson concluded. "If we find ourselves referring back to this over and over in the next few months, then we'll know. And if we never talk about it again, we'll know, too."