Alex Hippisley-Cox has worked in publishing for over 20 years including 10 years at Random House UK, where latterly she was Publicity Director for both the Hutchinson and Heinemann imprints. She has been a freelance publicist since 1999 and over recent years has worked with many different UK authors, publishers and retailers. In 2009 she was appointed Head of UK Communications for the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The Hotel Russell in London was the venue for this year’s annual Book Industry Conference organised by the Booksellers Association.  Held over two days, this event is a unique occasion bringing together publishers, retailers, wholesalers and others under one roof to debate matters at the heart of the trade.

The conference was well-attended, maybe in part because it was in London this time and publishers in particular found it easier to get to. As CEOs, managing directors and sales heads crowded into the presentation room, I detected a level of expectancy, an eagerness to hear something new. In these uncertain times meeting at a conference like this is always a good thing as you just don’t know who you might bump into. And that chance meeting might well lead to unexpected business.  So we were keen to hear what the participants had to say…

Chaired by former BBC newsreader (and now author herself) Selina Scott, the first afternoon session was a chance to hear addresses by Presidents Sharon Murray (Booksellers Association) and Victoria Barnsley (Publishers Assocation). Both gave us their views on the state of the industry as it currently stands and what we have to do to grasp the new digital era going forward. Phrases such as ‘Just because it’s boring doesn’t mean it’s not important’, ‘We must stop referring to the digital future and realise we are actually in the digital present’ and ‘We can’t put the genie back in the bottle’ particularly caught my attention, as did the message that we mustn’t give our content away for free. The industry clearly faces huge challenges over the next few years, but the key question is how do we go about it?  What regulation needs to be put in place? And how do we ensure that by embracing digitisation we aren’t at the same time pushing the bricks and mortar outlets one step further towards extinction?

The ‘Industry Question Time’ panel took this further, when leaders from bookselling and publishing debated the key matters and took questions from the audience. Plenty of food for thought about what the independent bookshops need to do to keep trading from the likes of Nic Bottomly from ‘Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights’ in Bath; and Managing Director of Waterstone’s Dominic Myers took the opportunity to tell the conference why he thought the chain had taken a wrong turn over the last few years and what strategies they were putting in place now to make it right. And Tim Hely Hutchinson from Hachette UK even went as far as saying he would back price regulation to stop retailers selling books below cost price. But what must surely be the most shocking question of the afternoon came from a member of the audience who asked ‘What is a Blackberry?’ We clearly have a long way to go before we can safely say everyone has got to grips with the digital revolution!

Katja Böhne, Press Officer Frankfurt Book Fair, and Graham Cook, winner of this year's Rights Professional of the Year Award

Monday night saw the inaugural Bookseller Industry Awards – an amalgamation of the British Book Industry Awards and the Bookseller Retail Awards - held at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. This is a simply stunning building which provided a wonderful backdrop to an event recognising the best in the business.  The Frankfurt Book Fair team were there in force as proud sponsors of the Rights Professional of the Year Award. Katja Böhne, Press Officer of Frankfurt Book Fair, was there to present the trophy to this year’s winner Graham Cook  from Haynes Publishing, the motor manual experts, for his contribution in expanding the company’s rights revenues. Congratulations to Graham!

For me the second day of the conference proved the most interesting. This was the point when we were all divided up into groups and asked to engage in separate debates amongst ourselves. We were each given a group leader and asked to brainstorm certain topics. I was in a group which included Ursula Mackenzie (fresh from her company Little, Brown’s success as Publisher of the Year the night before), Jamie Byng from Canongate and Julia Kingsford (also a little tired after celebrating Foyles’s win as Chain Bookselling Company of the Year!). Despite the late night before, we managed to come up with some really exciting ideas about how we could refresh World Book Day and make it a real highlight of the publishing calendar. Jamie, for instance, came up with the idea of keeping World Book DAY for the kids but expanding the event by launching World Book NIGHT for the adults when thousands of volunteers would be on the streets of the UK giving out specially recommended books in clubs, pubs, outside cinemas etc.  The aim: to give away One Million books to inspire people to start reading again! It seems like the other groups also came up with some great suggestions, so we’ll just have to watch out to see which ideas are actually put into practice over the next twelve months or so.

So to wrap up: it was a a productive conference. If it felt a little flat at times I think this was because it reflected the general mood of the industry right now. Times are tough and we’ve had a difficult past year (what with Borders and Hughes & Huges disappearing from the high street).  The are huge challenges ahead and at times it seems like we are bicycling in sand, but the bottom line is that we all need to work together to make sure we keep our industry alive and if the winners of the awards on the Royal Courts of Justice are anything to go by, we really should have the talent to make sure that the e-book and the p-book can co-exist side by side.