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.

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…

Worried about Amazon buying up GoodReads? Have no fear: Random House, Inc have launched BookScout a new social book discovery app on Facebook. The app allows readers to create and organize their own digital bookshelves and explore friends’ bookshelves to learn what others are reading. BookScout encourages organic word-of-mouth recommendations as people can share what they’re currently reading with their Facebook friends, tag books they’d like to read, and keep track of books they’ve read. The app also provides personalized book recommendations from all publishers, and includes links to major retailers so people can easily purchase print books and eBooks they’re interested in.

Sophie asked Amanda Close, SVP Digital Marketplace Development, some more questions to find out why the app has been made, what the plans are for future and how the analytics are forming future growth strategies…

Enric Sagrera is the CEO at iBuksgrup, the first Spanish ebook aggregator. iBuksgrup are sponsoring our first Spanish event, BookMachine Barcelona and here, Enric talks a little bit about how they are helping publishers to distribute their content across a number of platforms.

Maria Cardona runs her own digital consultancy for publishers and will be hosting our first Spanish BookMachine event. Prior to setting up Mmcardona, she worked in both trade and educational publishing, and was also part of the core London Bookfair team. Here, Maria shares some of her thoughts and tells us why you should come along to BookMachine Barcelona.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘publishing trends.’  I wrote this piece on new adult lit and soon after attended a panel discussion organised by Children’s Book Circle on ‘Sick-Lit’ a publishing trend identified and bemoaned by The Daily Mail in this article.

A lot of things came up in the discussion but one of the best points was made by author Anthony McGowan.  He shared how sceptical he was of trends in general as slapping a label on a group of books that have similar plots or themes deals only with concepts, not characters or writing.  Trends mean that books that are widely different can get lumped together, which isn’t what good writing is about.

Charly Ford is a Project Manager at Osprey Publishing and is hosting the BookMachine event in Oxford. Here, Charly shares her enthusiasm for publishing and tells us why you should come along and join the fun later this month.

In the run up to BookMachine Toronto we caught up with Greg Ioannou who is a busy Publishing bod. Between all the various roles he fulfills (Publisher at Iguana Books, President of Colborne Communications and President of the Editors’ Association of Canada), he does a lot of networking. So if you’re going to the first BookMachine Toronto, Greg will be propping up the buffet bar so do say hello!

Ricardo Redisch kindly gave up some time to talk to me before the first BookMachine Toronto. Working as Executive Publisher at Grupo Editorial Nacional, one of the biggest 3 Academic and Educational Publishers in Brazil, Ricardo is based in Toronto and has some really interesting insights into why publishers should be listening to their readers through social media…