Step Three - Day One

I made it to the BEA. Unfortunately, the exhibits weren’t open on day one. So it was dedicated to lectures and forums. They call them the “Big Ideas at BEA”

The first of the big ideas is titled “Bringing your authors to the Social Media Party… and Getting them to Stay”. A lot of this was about what one company did to integrate both their employees and their authors to social media. There was a vast difference in experience with social media present in the room. I have always known that there was a technological gap between generations, but in my personal life, I saw little of it. Today brought it home in a big way. The largest concern for many of the publishers and authors in the room was to know if social media sites really had an impact on sales. I got the general feeling that the majority of them saw social media as a pick one and go with it rather than being a part of every site out there.

I’ll be the first to admit that being a part of every social media site can be tedious, but if you are trying to build yourself as a brand (which is now known as being a “brandividual” apparently) you must do so everywhere. One woman complained about all the people commenting on the newsfeed that she didn’t know; information overload is what the speaker called it, I call it marketing. If you have finally reached the point where you have more people you don’t know than do, when trying to sell a book through a social media like facebook, I say you’ve done your job. Everything starts with personal networks. When it branches out, that’s the beginning of a market.

The second big idea was very similar to the first. This one was titled “Building Online Reader Communities with an eye on ROI”. It was a forum that, basically, reinforced everything from this first panel using people who are involved in social media. For example, an author there spoke about her experiences with social media. This one didn’t seem to focus on the mainstream social media though. This one focused on publishing social media that I didn’t know existed. The most interesting thing done here however, was the use of a twitter feed during the panel. So if you commented or asked a question... it showed up on the big screen next to the panel. Nifty to be sure.

Then I had lunch. Yum.

At 12:30 I went to my last big idea “I’ll never pay over $9.99 for E-Books! And similar Lies”. This one was the most… eh. The speaker, Michael Norris, Senior Analyst for Simba Information, made some very pretty graphs and spoke of several extensive surveys that I simply don’t all together trust. First off, his graphs and figures never considered free e-books. Granted, he was surveying the amount of people who “bought" e-books (9% in 2009; 8% in 2008) but that didn’t count in the number of people who invested in some sort of e-Reader be it Kindle, Nook, or iPad. In fact, according to him the “device won’t stay around long enough to make an impact”. With the exception of the iPad, he might be right about that. The iPad offers so much more than a simple e-Reader that it really isn’t worth buying a Kindle or Nook for this one functionality when you can put the money towards other devices that do so much more.

But to say that people would be willing to pay more than $9.99 a book…

I don’t know… I’d have to use some MBA tools of analysis for that one. But off the top of my head, I would think that with the threat of substitutes so high, why would someone choose to pay more for an e-book than what they can get it for on the shelf? Also, wouldn't you want to continue to increase the use of e-books rather than discourage it?

All in all though, that was the first day. There was a key note interview with Barbara Streisand that was insightful towards her character, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t truly important towards my purposes here.

There were more big ideas throughout the length of the conference, but this day was the only one in which people attended them. Once the exhibitor rooms opened, no one left there. You would've missed too much.