Yesterday, November 3rd, was the day of the Independent Publishers Guild Autumn Conference - and we were there!
Environmental sustainability was a huge theme throughout the whole conference and we were proud to see the industry taking climate change seriously and having the conversation! As a publisher, we are keen to print books in the locality in which we aim to distribute them in, avoiding shipping and air produced carbon and cutting the chain in half. Of course, this needs to be an industry effort as we need printers and transport to be prepared globally!
Simon Morley of Gardners, and David Taylor of the Ingram Content Group gave a fantastic talk on what it takes to keep the supply chain turning, the recent impacts and delays, and how supply chain prices rising could lead to book price inflation - something we were hoping wouldn't happen but after the last few years we weren't completely surprised to hear this.
We were relieved to say the least, when Kate Wilson, managing director of Nosy Crow, spoke all about the working environment of a small press as she shared stories of atmospheric chaos, creativity, and the continuous publication date delays that a small press faces - after two years of isolation during the pandemic, it was incredibly reassuring to be amongst fellow publishers facing similar issues.
Finally, Jamil Qureshi gave an incredibly empowering, motivational talk on staying positive and working to create, not to avoid! We hope that upon climbing out of the pandemic's dark and deep well, we will soon be on our way towards this.
Thank you to the IPG for hosting this wonderfully unifying event. We look forward to seeing you all again next year.
