Coverage of London Book Fair 2017
Book fairs play a vital role in publishing and allow publishers, authors, industry professionals from all around the world to meet and do business in a fun way. The London Book Fair is no exception to that. The 3-day event (14th-16th March, 2017) was held at Olympia with more than 25,000 visitors. There were two floors in two main halls filled with around 1,500 exhibitors from more than 60 countries. This year the market focus was on Poland with a big Polish pavilion highlighting the country’s dynamic publishing industry and to increase awareness of its literary traditions.
Book fairs like this are always the best opportunities for networking as the publishing world gathers in one place. No matter whether you’re a successful author or a small publisher if you are somehow connected to the publishing industry there is no question that you should attend these events. Besides the exhibitors, you can find many other hubs for networking and interaction such as the Author HQ where successfully published authors share their stories; you can grab a seat at the Children’s Hub, one of the most colorful areas of the Fair or visit the Tech Theatre to find out about all the new ways in which content can be treated. Taking part in these panel discussions are always beneficial and it is good to have an idea about the latest trends in the publishing industry.
Depending on what you want to achieve at the Fair you can simply just plan to attend seminars, different kind of events, panel discussions or just walk around and jump into conversations with exhibitors. However, in some cases, it is better to have pre-arranged meetings where you can have your partner’s full attention and easily present your business proposal. That is what we did with PublishDrive.
Regarding PublishDrive, five members of our team attended the London Book Fair this year. This was actually the very first time for us working with Zsofia Macho on the field who is our content marketer, blogger based in London, UK. It was an intense but amazing 3 days full of great experiences for all of us and we are working hard on closing business deals from the fair. It was lovely to be able to meet new publishers current partners, bloggers and industry professionals face to face from the UK, USA, Israel, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Arab countries, India, Turkey and China. We were able to meet and understand the people, not just the names in emails.
You can see how easily publishing can be global by having all of these nationalities in one place – we are looking forward to getting to know each culture better by our amazing partners. See you next year London, we’ll be there!