Suzanne Kavanagh (@sashers) is Director of Marketing and Membership Services at the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). She is a passionate advocate of collaboration and skills in the publishing industry; a perfect speaker for our Unplugged event on the 23^rd. We interviewed her to find out more:

1. What are the best examples of collaboration you’ve seen in publishing?

Two that spring to mind from companies I worked for are the launch of the Routledge Classics and reissue of a biography of Cardinal Ratzinger when he elected Pope Benedict by Continuum. Both were print product launches. They involved working with internal teams across sales, marketing, editorial, design and production. But they also drew in contacts from printers, typesetters, warehouse, wholesalers, key retailers and the press.

Tom Chalmers is Managing Director at IPR License.

Believe it or not it is 40 years, give or take a week, since the first mobile telephone call was made. Martin Cooper, a former Motorola employee, is said to have rang the boss of a rival manufacturer to inform him that he’d lost the race to develop the first portable, hand–held device. I imagine it was a short call. The weight of the phone used to make that call was about the same as a bag of sugar (2lb) and the brick–like battery required, which allowed a talk time of just 30 minutes, took 10 hours to charge.

Paul Rhodes is one of our top speakers at BookMachine Unplugged. He currently runs Orb Entertainment, and previously spent around 15 years across HarperCollins and Walker Books in a variety of strategic, Business Development and digital roles. We interviewed him to find out more.

With BookMachine Unplugged, our event which celebrates the culture of collaboration in publishing, kicking off in a couple of weeks, we’ve been thinking about the collaborative process and how this works from an author’s perspective. Maggie Eckel interviewed Rob Weston (children’s and YA author) about publishing trends back in March; and we thought we’d interview him again, to find out why he says that ‘collaboration has been a great experience’.

Big announcement today. Juliet Mushens will be joining us as our fourth speaker at BookMachine Unplugged on May 23rd.If you use the discount code ‘Juliet’ you can get 15% off your ticket today (ends midnight).

Juliet was named as a ‘Rising Star’ in the Bookseller’s 2012 listing of the industry’s next generation of leaders and innovators. This year she’s also been shortlisted for the Kim Scott Walwyn prize, which recognises the professional achievements and promise of women publishers. We interviewed her to find out more.

Anna Lewis is our host at BookMachine Unplugged on the 23^rd May– having successfully created Completely Novel (a publishing community) she is now co-founder of Valobox, a pay-as-you-go eBook platform. Through launching Valobox, Anna has lots of experience collaborating with publishers and is in an ideal position to host our Unplugged event in London, which celebrates the culture of collaboration in publishing.

We wanted to know a little bit more about Anna, so here are 5 questions…

BookMachine Brighton is back!  After a fun first event back in February, our charming hostess Alice Reeves is back for more (this time co-hosting with Sarah Ann Juckes) – we wanted to get to know a little bit more about Alice, so here are some questions for the social media addict:

Ben Schrank is President and Publisher, Razorbill (Penguin) and a published author too – we are delighted to welcome him as our speaker at BookMachine New York. With under a week to go until the event, we caught up with Ben to find out more.

Nearly 200 people gathered at our drinks event at The London Book Fair on Monday – publishers, editors, designers, digital specialists – the bar in the digital zone was full of exciting conversations about the latest happenings at the fair.

This morning everyone who attended will receive an invite to BookMachine.me, the site which helps people working in publishing to find each other by allowing members to list themselves by their key skills.

We’ve been hard at work making sure that the site has been updated for this new release. You can now:

• Get BookMachine points (lots of plans for this) …. Check yours out!
• Find the best people first (complete profiles rank higher in search)
• Manage your account (easily change your details)

Missed our event? Still want to try the beta site? You can now request an invite and join everyone else, by signing up on the site.

BookMachine host regular events in London, New York, Oxford, Barcelona, Toronto and Brighton and is THE place for the people who make publishing happen.