Many publishers from both professional and trade houses were on hand, but the session was not as well attended as some in the past, despite the impressive speakers.  Perhaps conflicts with some sales conferences caused the drop off.  Nevertheless, Macmillan’s John Sargent, Perseus’ David Steinberger (who acted as MC with Tom Allen, President and CEO of AAP), HarperCollins’ Brian Murray, Hachette’s David Young, Reidy, Cengage’s Ronald Dunn and other CEOs were present.

Ravitch was particularly outspoken about the state of American elhi education, declaring at one point that “charter schools transfer public money to private ventures, undermine public schools, and work to destroy teacher unions.”  She mentioned that, when she wrote her first book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, numerous publishers turned it down (it was eventually published by Basic Books.  Her next, Reign of Error, will be published by Knopf).

Snowe referred to the current congressional bipartisanship as “brinkmanship at its worst,” but on balance, she was hopeful that the country – and its leaders – are ready for change. Her book, Fighting for Common Ground, will be published by Weinstein Books in May.

Mollet was more focused on explaining what The Copyright Hub – a global digital copyright exchange initiative that would help potential licensors find the content’s copyright holders – would be able to do if all parties participated.  As the Hub, which is a nonpartisan UK government sanctioned program, would include book, music and other content holders’ rights data, its successful launch would transform the global licensing business.

The meeting wrapped up shortly past 1 pm, and Tom Allen reminded participants that they should return again in 2014 – as soon as that date and venue is set.  For details go to www.publishers.org

The JIBF has always been “less about the Israeli book business and more about the [international] ‘JIBF family’” that has gathered for the occasion over the years, says Deborah Harris. However, Ziv Lewis, Foreign Rights Manager for Kinneret-Zmora-Bitan Dvir Publishing, points out that no matter how international the “JIBF Family”, the fact that some of the largest Israeli publishers chose not to exhibit at the 2013 JIBF “was a striking aspect of this year’s event.” The rights market that the JIBF offers is negligible, and with the value of books so diminished in the eyes of the public through the Israeli national chain stores’ discounting war, there is less incentive for the public to show up and buy books.  As well, publishers have fewer resources to travel from Tel Aviv (the center of Israeli publishing) and buy exhibit space.  Even if the emphasis is more international than local, a Fair that fails to serve the basic needs of the domestic industry hardly seems to live up to its promise as a viable business destination; many of the exhibits in the international hall this year were national literary or cultural organizations (“Books from Romania” or “Books from Hungary”, etc), as opposed to major international publishers there on business.

On the bright side, the Israeli reading public has a proven interest in literary events and activities. “The most interesting recent trend,” says Nilli Cohen, Director of the Institute of the Translation of Hebrew Literature, “is the growing number of debut novels published every year [in combination] with the growing wave of literary and creative writing workshops.” Then there’s Hebrew Book Week, held every June, which is widely agreed to be the yearly highlight for the consumer of Hebrew books. Even though the price-control law currently debated in the Knesset will need to pass before any significant change can happen for the Israeli publishing industry, Ziv Lewis calls Hebrew Book Week a major accomplishment, even globally speaking: “Where else in the world do publishers set aside one week out of the year to go into every part of the country to meet and sell directly to their readers?” he asks.

As for the strongest component of the JIBF itself, everyone paints the Fair’s Zev Birger Editorial and Agent Fellowship in the most glowing terms. “It’s such a different pace from meetings and deals at Frankfurt, and yet making these lasting connections is equally at the heart of our profession,” says literary scout Bettina Schrewe, who participated in the 2009 program. Since its founding in 1985, “the Fellowship’s blend of time spent with international colleagues, conversing and visiting important Israeli cultural sites has perfected the JIBF’s brand of culturally-oriented (vs rights-oriented) professionalism,” says Esther Margolis, Executive Editor of Newmarket Press and Chair of the JIBF American Advisory Committee. The 2013 Fellowship hosted 47 participants from 19 countries, with a greater contingent from Asian countries than ever before, and the Fellowship Alumnae program, headed up by US JIBF representative Philip Rappaport (an editor at Open Road) extends the more structured benefits of the Fellowship to alumnae who choose to return.

Transforming the Jerusalem Book Fair into a literary or publishing “Festival” would acknowledge that its cultural strengths outweigh its draw as a deal-making destination. Deborah Harris points out that the international legacy of the Fair and Fellowship are excellent starting places for things like “a more sophisticated, international Literary Café [and events] set in venues that …can reach the audiences of both East and West Jerusalem.” Not only are all these things worth maintaining, says Esther Margolis, but “in a world of increasingly high-powered business conferences, and more business done remotely, the Jerusalem Book Fair’s emphasis on ‘old-fashioned’ relationship building is more valuable—and vital—than ever before.”

Experienced booksellers will tell you Winter Institute 8 was great but possibly not as great as some of the earlier ones; but those who came for the first time raved about it. There’s been lots of coverage of the breakfast presentations by Daniel Pink and Malcolm Gladwell, both of whom delivered mesmerizing talks that were smart, relevant, and compelling. But for me, the real takeaway (both literally and figuratively) were the books…hundreds of titles and over 26,000 copies–some just out; some due over the next few months.

Imagine a locked room filled with ARCs…and eager conference attendees literally peering through the crack in the doors to see what they could see. Teasingly, the ARC room did not open until 2:00 pm on Saturday and everyone took note of the posted hours so that a crowd was waiting as ABA Development Officer, Mark Nichols, finally unlocked the magic doors.

Fears of outages proved unfounded as the books were piled high and there were plenty for all. Over 140 different titles were neatly arranged on long tables, with publisher signs prominently displayed nearby, resulting in an orderly binge: large tote bags provided by Norton and Little, Brown Young Readers allowed booksellers to almost manage carrying their loads…and to come back for another batch shortly thereafter. But then the talk turned to all the carefully shrouded pallets in the corner of the room– even more titles that were scheduled to be displayed at the fabulous author reception on Sunday night when all 61 authors would be on hand to sign copies.

And still more! Monday morning, small presses were featured at breakfast and 9 publishers were on stage to highlight their favorites, and so another batch of new ARCs were added to the galley room and another rush was on. Though weather reduced the crowd that evening, the authors of those galleys too were on hand at the small press reception, meaning even more to entice.

It was all too much to take in…how to choose among dozens and dozens of favorite authors? But why worry when there are hundreds of cartons and dozens of helpful ABA staff to help you ship everything back? A few more won’t hurt…

Winter Institute is rapidly becoming the event that independent booksellers rely on for education, discussion, publisher meetings, and sharing of ideas and enthusiasm and an insatiable appetite for books, and the corollary is the decreasing relevance of BEA as mentioned by many who no longer even go. Winter Institute is contained and focused and manageable. Instead of roaming around huge aisles with overwhelming displays, there are two-on-two discussions and all the key titles prominently arranged. Instead of long lines filled with rabid fans who may or may not be booksellers, there’s orderly access and good exchange about books already read by one and recommended to others.

Winter Institute has grown and established its importance because it works.

Of the many Big Issues on display at this year’s fair, it was the licensing aspect of the art owner/publisher relationship that loomed largest, making itself felt in a variety of ways. Tom Prins, owner of the book exhibit company The Scholar’s Choice, says that the hurdle of digital image licensing is the single largest reason why he doesn’t anticipate major change among their clients’ physical print offerings in the next year or so. He pointed out that even the few images in a work of philosophy or an artist biography can be legal hassle enough to keep a small press’ title out of the Cloud and on the Scholar’s Choice exhibit table.

Jennifer Norton, Assistant Director of Penn State University Press, wholeheartedly confirms that “the navigation of digital licensing and permissions issues is one of the most significant hurdles for first-time authors, as well as for academic presses.” The Art History Publication Initiative was established to help small presses and their first-time authors tackle precisely these sorts of challenges. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Initiative will allow debut art history authors from four academic presses—University of Washington, Duke, Penn State, and University of Pennsylvania–access to the resources and expertise necessary to make 40 new titles available (10 from each press) in all major digital and print formats over the next five years. Grant funds go toward a managing editor and permissions manager who specialize in digital issues and whose skills are shared amongst the four presses. The Initiative also includes digital marketing dollars and enhanced video and audio material on a shared website linked to each individual title.

Helping art collections and authors successfully collaborate on digital issues beyond licensing is the goal of panOpticon, a content management system software company. PanOpticon has been working with institutional clients like the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and Adelson Galleries for the past five years, with a particular concentration on Catalogues Raisonné–including those of Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Paul Cezanne. “It’s not that all these institutions haven’t had sophisticated digital cataloguing systems for a number of years now–it’s that they were unintelligible to anyone without a library science degree,” says Roger Shepherd, panOpticon’s Founder and Creative Director. The database was built in line with the standards and practices of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association (CRSA), with the goal of being an accessible starting place for any outside author or packager brought in at the start of an art collection’s publication process. The software stores long-form text and extra-textual materials likely to be included in an illustrated publishing project, and automatically formats all fields to Chicago Manual Style when exported.

Whether the focus is licensing or publishing workflow, the over-arching issue at CAA 2013 was digital tools’ capacity to turn long-existing art collections into a greater wealth of resources than ever before. All returning exhibitors agreed they saw a rise in the presence of digital, including an increase in first-time exhibitors like panOpticon, for which digital is the primary focus of business. Nevertheless, the overall mood was not so much one of ready-made, large-scale solutions, but of individual voices identifying the most important questions to address over a period of years and from a variety of perspectives.

Even digital “toys” being sold as apps or online games that exist solely on screens are still making the efforts to mirror the “sandbox” experience of child play. Many new toy companies spoke about the importance of creation and community, emphasizing how interaction with digital products is key and should mirror behavioral patterns cultivated in real life. Toy Talk, headed by former Pixar exec Oren Jacob, aims to do this by creating characters that can actually hold a conversation with children, not dissimilar to Siri, and Roblox is a game that allows kids to virtually construct their own games and worlds in a souped-up, online version of Legos for the online gaming set. Roblox’s DIY model of allowing kids to create for themselves and others to modify reflects earlier statistics from Interpret’s global study that revealed user generated content (UGC) triples time spent playing.

Despite the huge emphasis on gaming (UK consultancy KZero reported more than $800 million of venture capital poured into this sector in the past five years), Björn Jeffery, CEO & Co-Founder of Bonnier’s Toca Boca identified physical/digital mashups as an “anti-trend” of “ungamification.” Most digital games and toys have been made in the interest of learning—following a linear structure that teaches or instructs kids in the process of using them. Toca Boca’s goal with their apps is to emphasize free-form creation over goal-oriented play, allowing their digital offerings to function more as toys than as narratives. The important thing with creating digital products, Jeffery emphasized, is distilling the themes of the physical product, not just transferring them to another medium—and this, he even pointed out, is coming from a book company, where narrative is usually key.

In some markets, combining digital products with physical ones is not only trendy, but essential. In an anecdote from Chinese company Apple Toon’s Calvin Ng, when conversion rates were low with users of their online gaming portal, conversations with parents revealed that they would only pay more for the website if some kind of tangible product was offered. As a result, selling toys with gaming cards became the savior of the company and buoyed their otherwise “pathetic” revenue. Ng also offered some interesting cultural insight about Chinese kids’ interaction with games: while online user-to-user interaction is popular in the US, something like Club Penguin would “never work in China”, as kids there are less inclined to make conversation over the web and are more interested in their personal experiences in the games themselves. Also, in Asia, Michael Cai‘s data from Interpret revealed that South Korean kids have highest penetration of smart phones and tablets — 32%, and Japanese have lowest (in their study) because they tend to play on Wii and Xbox-like devices. All told, 86 million kids worldwide are actively involved in gaming, which includes subscription, social media, apps, etc.

As in the publishing industries, some companies are adapting their products to digital forms better than others, but there is much innovation and a pretty obvious desire for products that can function in both the digital and physical worlds. The desire to rush into the digital space is tempting, but there is a balance to be conscious of; after all, as Robin Raskin, Founder & President of Living In Digital Times quoted a colleague in the final panel, “You can’t bake a cake faster just because you turn the oven to 800 degrees.”

Lorraine Shanley contributed to this article.

All agreed that social media is currently less important than reviews, or a book making a “best book of the year list.”  Ebooks have not yet proven themselves in this category – despite each having worked with Apple, at its inception, to create iBooks. On the other hand, high quality design and manufacturing is increasingly important and, for Rizzoli and T&H, price (even above $100) is less critical than it once seemed to be.  There were several reasons given for this, including decorators buying books for clients’ shelves – “books as staging,” one packager in the audience commented knowingly.  And an appreciation for quality seems to go hand in hand with a willingness to pay luxury prices for it.

The publishers  agreed it was important for packagers who want to do business with them to present a fully developed, well researched concept – “cook it a little more,” said Muschett, echoing an earlier comment from Goldstein – because with shrinking staffs, no one in house has the time to devote to creating a book from scratch.  It’s important, too, that  publisher and packager can work together to bring in the best book for the right price, which ABPA president Richard Rothschild referred to in his experience with NGS as “horse trading.”   There was a lot of openness to the possibility of a packager supplying all components of the book, or just the design or editorial, and also surprising willingness to discuss which foreign rights might be retained or returned, if not sold within a reasonable amount of time.

Meanwhile, ABPA announced that its website is being revamped, and will soon have information about its thirty or so members that includes their subject category specialties, samples of their books, links to their URLs, and contact information.  By the end of February, this will be available at their website, ABPAonline.org

Official poster for the 2013 Cairo International Book Fair.

The 44th Cairo International Book Fair (CIBF), scheduled to run January 23-February 5, 2013, is the second held since the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, but the first since the election of President Mohamed Morsi and his cabinet. More specifically, the Fair’s coincidence with the January 25th anniversary of the Revolution inevitably ties it to questions about post-revolutionary Egypt. “Irrespective of how many times you might have been to the CIBF, the situation in Egypt is evolving at such a rate that the Fair of three years ago would be very different from the Fair of today,” said Dr. Nigel Fletcher-Jones, Director of the American University in Cairo Press. “What the spirit of this year’s CIBF will be is anyone’s guess.”

The “spirit” of the Fair has had its ups and downs in the past 40+ years. The first CIBF hosted 8 countries, with 262 publishers in 1969, reports Samir Saad Khalil, a Cairo-based publishing consultant and the Fair’s Director from its launch in 1969 until 2002. By 1991, the CIBF had grown to host publishers from 92 countries, an international scope nearing that of Frankfurt at the time. During the deteriorating Egyptian political situation of the mid-90’s the Cairo Book Fair began to fall from prominence. The Cairo Fairgrounds which had long hosted the Fair fell into such disrepair that all Halls and outbuildings were dismantled. Though there had been plans to rebuild, “the budget for reconstruction disappeared in governmental upheaval during the 2011 revolution,” said Khalil, “leaving the grounds empty of any buildings.” Tents were nevertheless erected last year and again this year, and will function in place of the missing halls.

The book industry in which the CIBF boomed and faded–and the one to which it is attempting to return–is one in which fairs play a pivotal role. “There is still no book distribution system in the Arab world,” says Cornelia Helle, Frankfurt Book Fair Sales Manager for the Middle East and Iran. “The publishers absolutely depend on…the many book fairs for the purpose of buying and selling. They have to go there if they wish to survive.” Samir Khalil points out that most countries in the region have two fairs per year (the second Egyptian fair is held in Alexandria): “I know a lot of Arab publishers who move directly from one book fair to another for seven to eight months out of the year” in order to adequately distribute their books.

Recent efforts to transform the region’s Book Fairs are most visible in the United Arab Emirates, at Fairs in the cities of Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, with significant involvement from the Frankfurt Book Fair at Abu Dhabi. Professional development programs and forums for Rights sales have been added, but “even at Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, Arab publishers mainly come to sell their books,” says Helle.  As for CIBF, Nigel Fletcher-Jones estimates the percentage of non-Arabic publishers at the CIBF is still under 5%, saying that, because of the Fair’s role as primary distribution system, “it’s very much a home territory exhibition.” Translator and Arabic Literature (in English) blogger M. Lynx Qualey noted an increase in translators and international editors in 2012, but suspects this was more curiosity about the first post-revolutionary CIBF than any sustainable change to the overall culture of the Fair.

Nevertheless, there are several significant additions to the 2012 CIBF programing that indicate the commitment of the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO), the Egyptian Publishers Association (EPA), and other industry groups to transforming the profile of the Fair and the Egyptian book industry as a whole. 2013 will be the first Cairo Book Fair to host a two-day professional development program for publishers, and the first year that the GEBO will give an award for excellence in Egyptian publishing, while continuing the awards for individual titles begun in 2012. Khalil also reports that the GEBO is organizing several initiatives at this year’s CIBF to foster more foreign rights deals.

No matter how many countries exist in the region and how many attend a given book fair, it’s crucial to understand that “we have one common market …affected not only by the current situation in Egypt but also by the  situation…of the surrounding region,” says Balsam Saad, Managing Director of Al-Balsam Publishing House and Bookstore in Cairo. This makes it all the easier to understand Nigel Fletcher-Jones’ argument that for most book publishers, the great challenge isn’t censorship within Egypt (although it does exist). Rather, it is international distribution, the same challenge that eats up bandwidth at regional book fairs, and sends publishers shuttling from one fair to the next for more than half the year. “The importation of books into Egypt and the exporting of books from Egypt to other parts of the Middle East continues to be problematic,” says Fletcher-Jones. “Books have to be inspected, to the extent that, if [the authorities] disagree with the representation of the border between Egypt and Sudan in a tourist guide, we’ll have to put little stickers over that part of the map, just so we can get the book in to the country.” He adds “That’s a major incentive to go digital, of course; once the traffic isn’t physical anymore, things get a bit easier.” While digital publishing (very nascent in the Arab world) may help solve some problems, international Arabic distribution and its politics will need to be largely reinvented before the Cairo International Book Fair or any other book fair in the region can transform in turn.

On the Export panel, there was more or less uniform agreement among the panelists (all of whom work for major US distributors) that successful digital export depends on three main components: globally integrated POD systems; platform agnosticism (referring here to a single system’s ability to distribute print or digital titles as needed), and good global partnerships with local etailers. In contrast, the Import panel focused on what made each panelist’s international ebook sales approach unique. Most ambitious is Bastei Lübbe’s International Digital department: since being founded in 2010, it has identified English, Spanish, and Chinese as its three target language markets, and is undertaking its own translations and negotiating sales relationships with etailers around the world. The next move, said Bastei Lübbe International Sales Manager Marion König, is to acquire original English-language content to sell around the world in the original English and in translation. A more hybrid approach is Open Road Media’s “publishing partnerships” with European publishers. While Open Road does the English-language marketing and distributing of various translated titles, translation and editorial remain the original publishers’ responsibility.

No matter the system or partnership by which books reach international readers, the question of what convinces them to buy remains. On the export side, US Publishers need to recognize the ways in which their existing metadata is US-centric, and how to make changes that appeal to different cultural contexts, said Ingram’s Kelly Gallagher. Local context also applies to pricing, but doesn’t always mean “go cheaper,” said Cyrus Kheradi. Looking at the demographics of their ebook customers in India, Random House’s International Sales team came to the conclusion that “For now, the majority of our customers are from the top 5% economically—if they want a title, they’re willing to pay.” When it’s time to reach the next demographic, then reconsider pricing. For more direct marketing approaches, however, both Import and Export panels had similarly abstract answers; it looks like, for now, the words “social media buzz” retain their worldwide appeal.

The elephant in both rooms was Subsidiary Rights. Given that translation is traditionally associated with Rights sales, the Import panel’s examples of original publishers commissioning—and then selling—their own translations abroad illustrated one way in which the lines between the roles of Rights and International Sales departments are blurred by digital distribution capabilities. The wider implications of this “blurring” in the long run went untouched, however. Rights weren’t directly addressed in the Export panel until an audience member asked at the end of the session: “Have ebooks changed export so much that the role of Sub Rights will have to change, too?” Chitra Bopardikar said that for Perseus, “digital export has not yet changed our sub-rights practices,” while Cyrus Kheradi went so far as to say that “Random House still believes the best thing for a title is to have its own publisher in each different territory. We prioritize Rights,” closing an hour of discussion of “new horizons” on a strikingly conservative note, and highlighting the persistence of traditional structures when it comes to dealing with non-traditional forms of media—even at DBW.

So what do children’s publishers need to reach and realize their core audience through the ether? Many platforms attempted to answer that question, from wildly popular storytelling quest site Poptropica to Scholastic’s accessible reading platform Storia, from nostalgic app from RRKidz to interactive preschool channel Magic Town. All platforms presented great environments for readers to discover and play and even Simon & Schuster’s Mara Anastas talked about how third party websites helped make series Dork Diaries a hit. But the competition among them for publisher partnerships was palpable, leading to Idea Logical founder Mike Shatzkin’s astute question of the day: are these platforms ideal collaborators or are they ultimately competition? Kate Wilson, Managing Director of Nosy Crow, tackled the question by comparing platforms to bookstores; publishers have always had to choose between retail channels, it’s just about finding options that will lead to “leaders of influence.” Karen Lotz, President and Publisher of Candlewick, said that the tenuous relationship between these third party sites and publishers pinpointed why Candlewick was following a strategy of “leading by not going first” and waiting to see where the marketplace goes.

Another theme of the day in regards to helping kids discover digital books was that publishers must redefine what exactly a “book” is. During a panel on publishers creating their own original intellectual property, Eric Huang, Director of New Business and IP Acquisitions for Penguin Children’s UK, argued that publishers have the same storytelling power as Hollywood studios– they just need to be able to see how a book fits into the greater world of a franchise concept. The idea that kids’ definition of a book is changing was backed by Bowker data revealing that most kids consider books just as important as other types of media (less so among boys) and Darien, CT librarian Gretchen Caserotti’s observation that parents’ definition of a “book” (often referring to novels) differs greatly from kids’ (which can include various genres and formats).

When it comes to potential new markets for children’s books, many looked to the educational market for new opportunities. Neal Goff’s presentation on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) showed how standardized metadata in the educational sphere can help trade publishers make their materials more searchable among teachers, and school library platforms myON and Brain Hive also presented partnership opportunities to bring trade books into the classroom through different business models.

Another emerging market that seemed to always be in the background of conversation was the ‘new adult’ market, and while it does not exactly present new opportunities to children’s publishers to get their books out to kids, it does present a unique problem: what are publishers to do when a majority of the people reading their books (and are providing a voracious audience) are not, in fact, the target audience? With Bowker sharing that over 62% of YA readers are over 18 and even YA reading community Random Buzzers having an average user age of 21, one can’t help but wonder if the popular YA market is becoming something separate from children’s altogether.

Even with the challenges ahead, the conference was all around hopeful. The children’s book market remains stable, and while print is still driving sales, there are many innovative developments for digital products, especially with kids being such voracious media consumers. What those “media” are and what role publishers play in producing them remains to be seen.

But original IP is becoming increasingly prominent in children’s publishing. “Especially for kids, there are so many ways to exploit properties right now,” says Devereux Chatillon, a lawyer for Callaway and Zola, “and the margins for print publishers are getting squeezed so much that opportunity and necessity have combined.”

While original IP may not be anything groundbreaking, it does lend itself uniquely to the children’s market. “Children’s entertainment is all about characters and stories,” explains Eric Huang, Publishing Director, Media and Entertainment, at Penguin UK, as a reason why children’s original IP can be particularly compelling. Jonathan Yaged, President of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, agrees, describing the role of stories in kids’ lives: “A fundamental part of being a kid is experimenting and roleplaying, particularly for preschool and early grade-school children… For older kids, the stories and characters become more aspirational. Even in the most fantastical settings, the best stories and characters encourage kids to expand their worlds and try new things.” Of course, Eric Huang also adds, “Owning IP or representing commercial rights for IP is also more important in the kids market because of the potential for merchandise and licensing is around kids brands.”

“Publishers’ business models are changing dramatically because of the rise of digital,” says Devereux Chatillon, “putting pressure on them to find other markets.” But the good news about this is, as Jess Brallier, SVP and Publisher of virtual world Poptropica, puts it, “One can be more reckless, wonderfully so, with one’s own IP.” This idea is exemplified with Macmillan’s new series of preschool apps called “Play and Learn with Wallace.” Not only will each app teach reading and counting skills, problem solving, and hand-eye coordination, but the apps can also be combined with one another through a “Super Shuffle” mode that will join multiple apps in endless combinations, without the worry of author rights.

Within the digital realm, original IP can take many forms and easily adapt to new ones as technology progresses. Edmund and Cecile, for example, is Penguin UK’s first picture book brand that is being launched as an app first.  “Technology allows IP to travel incredibly far at incredible speed.  The flow of IP is instantaneous, no longer slowed by truckers, loading docks, oceans, and customs agents.  All of which makes for powerful publishing,” says Jess Brallier. “For example, when a new story is published on Poptropica (www.poptropica.com), 500,000 kids jump into it within just its first two hours.  Those kids come from over 130 countries with their web browsers set to over 100 languages.  That’s very far and very fast.” Though Poptropica hosts ads and has created islands based on other publishers’ popular characters, it has been moving towards developing more of its own IP, having released a video game and books based on the site. With such a powerful platform already available to it, Poptropica has shifted focus, moving away from licensing and instead starting to concentrate on their own IP. Owning their own IP allows publishers to react and experiment, moving forward without having to go back to authors to renegotiate contracts.

But before you chuck all tradition out the window, keep in mind that most original IP projects still take a more familiar form as printed books. Morgan Rhodes’s Falling Kingdom series (Razorbill), for example, is an original property that was developed as kind of Game of Thrones for the teen set, and it will be available in 16 countries worldwide. “Original IP is not really breaking new ground here,” said Ben Schrank, President and Publisher at Razorbill and former Editorial Director at Alloy. “It’s just something people are more aware of now.” Corinne Helman, VP of Digital Publishing and Business Development at HarperCollins, echoes this sentiment: “I don’t think the shift is about technology, it is about realizing that content is king and it is more lucrative to be its owner.”

In order to make the most of media partnerships, a certain skill set needs to be developed to be able to work with authors and find opportunities. For Ben Schrank, this came easily, being an author himself. “I’ve always felt that a bit of IP enhances editorial—that it’s a very complimentary skill set,” he explains when it comes to traditional editors vs. editors working with original IP. “Although some people just like to do it and some don’t—but I am very respectful of traditional editors.”

One reason why traditional editors may be a little hesitant to work with original IP can stem from the fact that, as Corinne Helman describes it, “IP is very labor intensive.” She elaborates, “You need to be good at drafting proposals.  You need to find authors who are suitable for this kind of work.  You need to set up relationships with other media companies to sell your rights.  It is much more proactive than waiting for the manuscript to land on your desk.”

Regardless of challenges old and new, original IP is becoming commonplace at many children’s publishers, with all major houses doing in-house IP in one way or another.  Being able to own the rights to their properties allows publishers to protect and distribute their content globally, as well as profit from new partnerships. Maybe adult publishing could even learn from children’s publishing’s experimentation. As Corinne Helman says, “Children’s publishers have often led the way – I think IP is just another example of that.”

This article was written for the program book distributed for participants of  Publishers Launch: Children’s Publishing Goes Digital
A full-day conference addressing the digital opportunities and challenges for children’s publishers as ereading tablets take off.
McGraw Hill auditorium, New York, NY
January 15, 2013
http://www.publisherslaunch.com/2012-2013/launch-kids/registration/