Last night Kathryn and Sophie from emc design went along to the latest in the BookMachine Unplugged series. It was a fantastic evening at The Venue 229 with some brilliant guest speakers and some familiar faces in the crowd. The Unplugged series is looking at collaboration across the Publishing industry and guest speakers are asked to talk for 10 minutes about their experiences.

Michael Bhaskar, from Profile Books, kicked off the evening and in summary he felt that the essence of the industry has always been about collaboration. Books and Published creations couldn’t have ever been produced without collaboration; from authors, editors, designers, marketers to book shops.

Sheila Bounford, from Off the Page Ideas, was up next and actually counter argued this point. She agreed that whilst there is a certain amount of commissioning from Publisher to all associated “collaborators” there was in fact very little actual collaboration. Agile and responsive tech companies are the publishing industries real threats are from these companies (Amazon and Google et al). And Publishers need to get more agile, and responsive to the consumers demand for instantaneous things (mentioned Zero to Book in 5 days). The best way to do this is to truly collaborate.

Robin Wood, Chairman of the IPG, gave us some insights into the work of the IPG. And that to belong to the IPG was in essence to be part of a bigger collaborative effort. Members get support from each other, share resources and mentoring, even from potential competitors.

And last up was John Bond, from WhiteFox, who shared his experiences of working in trade publishing. He talked, amongst other things, about the ABC of Publishing: Authors, Brands, Collaboration. And has set up WhiteFox to ensure the best outsourced services are available for the publishing industry to collaborate with.

Gavin Summers rounded up the evening by inviting everyone to join BookMachine.me so we can really start to get this collaboration thing happening!

You can check out our own BookMachine.me page once you’ve joined the site.

And we couldn’t be advocates for collaboration and BookMachine without offering to collaborate ourselves. So if you have a project or an idea that needs some creative thinking and even funding then give us a bell, poke, tweet….