For those of you unfamiliar with New York Book Forum, it is in name a regional publishing industry organization, but attracts attendees from all over for their in-person and virtual events, with the audience including publishers, manufacturers, vendors, authors, agents, and more. This year’s President’s Night event was hosted by Scholastic, which provided meeting space and a generous meal in their corporate cafe for the night’s attendees.
Regional organizations like the New York Book Forum are critical to our organization. Westchester has participated in many other regional or industry-specific get togethers over the year, from Bookmachine’s get togethers in London to Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) regional events for academic publishers in DC and New York. Certainly the industry is the poorer for the absence of Bookbuilders of Boston, which did not resume programming after the pandemic. Their annual NEPCo awards allowed publishers and vendors to submit joint projects to help educate the industry on new workflow models, products, and more. With publishing friends of mine in the Boston area looking for work right now, the absence of Bookbuilders on industry networking is really difficult, which makes me grateful for the opportunities afforded by events like what New York Book Forum puts on about 10 times per year, to allow people to gather, network, and learn.
Scholastic’s Irene Chan did an amazing job interviewing Dave McCree, CEO of Lakeside Book Company about the trends he and his colleagues are seeing in the industry. For those of us in production and manufacturing, conversations like this are riveting, but Irene and Dave did a good job making the discussion accessible and entertaining for everyone in the audience. A big portion of their discussion revolved around the practicalities of printing schedules and capacity. There are an enormous amount of titles being printed these days, and each of those projects has to compete for windows of production time, no matter how few or how many copies are being printed. But when factors like the rising trends for deluxe editions requiring foils, stamps, or the ever present edge dyeing are added to the mix, that’s creating competition not just for printing windows but also for specific machinery needed to handle tasks like edge dyeing. Dave shared a lot of solid information about how to work with your production department, your vendors, and your printers to try to preplan and make the initial print runs – as well as reprints – go smoothly.
Upcoming New York Book Forum events include a virtual event – accessible to us all – about Romance titles. Stay tuned for further learning and professional development events on the New York Book Forum calendar.
Westchester welcomes any input you have about what you are doing to customize your titles, and any ways we can help you manage your production schedules. Contact us to discuss your publications program, today.