Let's Talk - Comment #7

According to our survey one of the top reasons/benefits people give for attending Pub U , is the opportunity to network with other industry colleagues. If you have ever attended a conference that contained some time for discussion groups however, you will know that these can go terribly awry. It's for this reason that we steered clear of them last year.

However, we are making some key changes to the format of Pub U for 2008 that will fundamentally change the way we interact with each other. For that reason, this is the post I have been wanting to write for some time.

The initial goal for Pub U was to create a program where 50% of the content used for Pub U each year was the same (curriculum). Initially, the program would be something that industry insiders would attend and then “graduate” from.

Over the last three years, Pub U has become the Christian publishing’s industry conference with an emphasis on highlighting the topics that matter most to industry professionals, with the content changing from one year to the next. In the interest of wanting to cover all the bases, we have found that many of these topics are best categorized by “community”.

These communities are: Editorial, Rights, Sales & Marketing, Publicity, Design, Production, and Management. By focusing on these core areas we ensure that the content for Pub U is relevant to the needs of those attending.

With this in mind, we initially developed “Tracks” for each area with a corresponding “Track Leader”, a person with real working expertise in that field, that can help us to identify the sessions and presenters that would best speak to the issues concerning that community, both for the present and future, as well as for all stripes of professionals from each field (in terms of experience).

This model has been working well, and I believe led us to our best event thus far this past November. Pub U has been mentioned now on multiple industry blogs as well as both internet and print media. In fact, Book Business Magazine just ran a multi-page article with content directly from one of our sessions in the Production Track.

Even though the “Track” concept has worked well, we have now realized, through attendee feedback that it has created a bit of a silo affect. So, we end up with a session in the Design track that really should have had some Marketing folks mixed in and it became a bit of the “preaching to the choir” phenomenon.

Therefore, this year we are moving away from Tracks, yet still focusing on community’s by soliciting the help of industry experts that can help identify four or five sessions/topics that should be addressed with each respective community in mind. Secondly, that person will then be responsible for identifying folks (from both within and outside of Christian publishing) to speak/present in each of those sessions.

Next, since no one person can attend each of the more than 30 sessions, we will host a facilitated round-table time where the Community Leader will moderate some discussion on day two between people within their respective community based on what was learned the day before. We feel by doing this we can still promote best-practices within each discipline, but also create a certain level of cross-pollination among each area. This discussion time would last about 90 minutes.

This new format will focus in on each session and topic instead of track in order to promote a broader dialogue between all components of the publishing industry. We believe this will be a dynamic component to the success of Pub U 2008, we hope you will feel the same way!