PublishDrive CEO in panel about self-publishing at Frankfurt Book Fair 2015

Book fairs are the gathering points of book industry professionals such as investor events or conferences for startups. Everyone goes there for networking and hustling their companies. According to this logic Frankfurt Book Fair is the SXSW for book industry professionals in Europe.

It is never a question whether you should attend Frankfurt Book Fair or not – if you want to meet in person your colleagues or partners who you are constantly in conversation with via email or you want to party out with your future partners, this is the best place to be!

In 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair PublishDrive was honored to be invited by Porter Anderson from The Bookseller to one of the panels about digital publishing. Our CEO, Kinga Jentetics was speaking about how self-publishers may exploit their opportunities in the digital publishing scene. We had the amazing opportunity to speak up with Porter Anderson from The Bookseller, Mary Cummings from Diversion Books and Cameron Drew from Booktrack.

There are a lot of amazing things what these other guys in the panel do, but what the most astonishing for me was during the panel discussion that the audience was extremely engaged and asked very thoughtful questions. We had a full audience eager to ask questions about PublishDrive. Many of them considered themselves as an author or very small publisher, but who are eager to learn more about ebook publishing.

The most important questions were the following:

How does PublishDrive handle metadata?

PublishDrive helps you store your metadata (title, ISBN number, price etc.) in one place in a user-friendly format. Afterwords we take care of all metadata management issues for different retailers. In every country retailers use different categorization for instance in different formats (ONIX, excel sheet, emails!), which makes your metadata management difficult. With PublishDrive we focus on bridging those gaps, so your books will be categorized in the best way in other countries as well.

Does PublishDrive provide professional editing during its book review system? How are books reviewed and in what languages?

We do not offer professional editing, because we believe, you as a content creator are the best in this job. We can offer you services who can help you with that, but our main focus is on helping you in the ebook management process, not in the content creation part. With PublishDrive we accept all languages and all kind of content, however we take care of avoiding explicit content. Other than that we do not judge the content itself, because we believe your readers will decide whether your book is good or not. But in all, we are happy to give you any advice on your content if you need.

What kind of marketing options does PublishDrive have?

PublishDrive has built in social media integration, so you directly can post to your Facebook or Twitter fans in our platform. With PublishDrive we have personal relationships to all stores with extra merchandizing options. Every month we compile a merchandizing plan for our retailer partners where your book may be included. As a result your book may be featured in Apple iBooks for instance. However these services are not guaranteed, because editors will review ourbook suggestions, but we found that 95% of our suggestions were featured for 1 week at least. We do merchandizing plan for free, and we appreciate all relevant marketing materials from you.

What languages does PublishDrive support?

We accept all languages. Currently we have more than 20 different languages in our platform from English to Turkish, Roman, Hungarian, Serbian etc. We constantly develop our retailer partner list globally, so feel free to upload content in any languages.

How is international pricing handled at PublishDrive?

We make pricing easy for you: you set your own currency for pricing and we will do the rest for you. In the background we calculate ebook prices for different countries in different currencies taking into account cultural differencies as well. This way we make sure your ebook reaches the right audience at the right price.

It was an honour to take part in the panel discussion with Porter Anderson at Frankfurt Book Fair and to meet so many new publishers and author, see you next time as well!

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Waiting for the crowd at FBF 2015