As I mentioned last week, I went to the PubWest publishing conference in Portland. On the first day, the keynote speaker was John Ingram. As many of you know, Ingram is the largest book wholesaler in the world, and John is the Vice Chairman of Ingram Industries Inc. and serves as Chairman of Ingram Book Group, Lightning Source Inc., and Ingram Digital Group.
Anyway, Lightning Source (aka LSI) is the printer I use. LSI is also John Ingram's "baby." In the early days, he says LSI was referred to as "John's Cute Idea." Of course, now many years and many dollars later, LSI is wildly successful. In the keynote, he talked about how publishing is changing because of technology, and people are needed to act as intermediaries to help publishers deal with the transition. After his keynote, I stood up (in front of 250 people mind you) and said that as LSI consultants, we are one of those intermediaries. I also said that not incidentally, I'd written a book about it all. Afterward I gave him the copy of Publishize I was carrying around. The keynote speech (and my comment at the end!) is online here.
Talk about getting out of my comfort zone! But as I've said before, everything starts with an idea. When I was driving down to Portland, I had thought, "gee what if I gave John Ingram a copy of Publishize ?" While I was gone, apparently James was thinking about ideas too and wrote an article about it.
Enjoy!
posted @ Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:24 AM