I went to the Expo yesterday and was quite impressed. It was the first one and everything ran like clockwork – good job! The quality of all the speakers I heard was top notch and the price is right ($30). I would recommend that authors keep an eye out for it next year.
The Expo is primarily about regular books, but there were two ebook items of interest. First, Allen Lau of Wattpad was an exhibitor. We chatted about how Wattpad was doing and Allan made the following comments:
Looking at the statistics from his servers, there seem to be a proportionally more writers to readers in Canada, Australia and the UK. The US is jut the reverse with more readers than writers.
Wattpad’s new social media features have become extremely popular, especially the Twitter-like fan site and message boards. Authors have note that publishing on Wattpad does not seem to cannibalize their print sales, and, as a matter of fact, seem to increase some author’s sales on LuLu.
I asked him about his relations with publishers, given the problems of pirating. Alan said that they are getting along well with most publishers. The publishers have submitted their Onyx files to him which contain over 150,000 entries of full text books. Wattpad can immediately match posting against these files and delete the infringing material as it is published. In an odd turn of events, those publishers who seem to be the most averse to ebooks and epublishing are also those who refuse to submit their Onyx files, and so are hurting themselves as Wattpad can’t filter out any works that infringe their publications.
Some publishers are encouraging their authors to use the social medial functions of Wattpad to increase their exposure.
Mark Coker of Smashwords spoke and gave the basics of epublishing to the auidience (without a big plug for Smashwords, which was very nice). One thing he said was that he feels that ebooks should be formatted very simply as they have to look good on a huge variety of screen formats. The more complicated you make the formatting the more trouble you’ll run into later.
FTC disclaimer: In keeping with the FTC’s rules about “freebies” I need to report that Alan Lau of Wattpad saved me $3.25. The Expo didn’t have any coat racks and when I went downstairs to check my coat I found that the hotel charges $3.25 per item. So I want back to the Expo and asked Allan to let me put my coat behind his table. I don’t want the FTC on my back so I thought I should mention this up front and hereby declare to the FTC that I will, sometime in the future, hold Alan’s coat so we will be even.
