Tue 12 April 2016 at 10.30 am

The wisdom of crowds - crowdfunding and crowdsourcing

Seminar at the London Book Fair, Olympia

Taking Place: Olympia Room, Grand Hall

The popularity of platforms such as Kickstarter is a testimony to the appetite of consumers to get involved in creative projects at an early stage. How are authors and publishers taking advantage of this phenomenon to source both content and funding? An expert panel assesses both the successes and the failures, and passes on tips for those wishing to venture into this exciting world.

The panel is chaired by Angus Phillips, Director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies. His most recent books include Inside Book Publishing (with Giles Clark) and Turning the Page: The evolution of the book. He is the editor of the premier publishing journal Logos.

The speakers on the panel are:

John Mitchinson is the co-founder of Unbound, a revolutionary crowdfunding publishing concept.  He is an author and publisher and amateur pig farmer. Having been the first Marketing Director of Waterstone's he moved on to become a publisher at the Harvill Press and then Cassell & Co. His authors included bestsellers like The Beatles and Michael Palin, to prize-winning literary writers like Richard Ford, Alan Garner and Haruki Murakami. John is a Vice-President of the Hay Festival and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He writes a weekly QI column in the Saturday Telegraph.

Jan Kasprzycki-Rosikon is the Managing Director of MillionYou, the leading crowdsourcing agency in Poland. He has over 16 years’ experience in the content and media industries. Fluent in four languages, he has worked in Asia, Middle East, Europe and the Americas for the World Bank in Washington DC and the Pearson Group in London. Since 2007 MillionYou has been working for many leading brands on implementing internal employee engagement solutions (Deloitte), building citizen-sourcing platforms (City of Warsaw), and engaging a community of 27k creatives to generate content for international brands (Coca-Cola, Nestlé). Jan co-authored Crowdsourcing. How to enagage consumers in the world of brands (One Press, 2013). As a qualified pilot, he is interested in aviation and exploring cultures, customs and religions. He is a graduate of the MA Publishing programme at Oxford Brookes University.

Enrique Parrilla is the Chief Executive Officer of Pentian, the largest multilingual crowdfunding platform for books. The inspiration for Pentian came after looking for a way to give authors the tools they needed to reach their customers and fan-base before facing the cost of producing the book. Enrique Parrilla designed a system that rewards the backers of successful projects with a portion of the royalties for three years subsequent to the book being published. This financial incentive, along with the fact that all the campaigns are capped to a maximum fundraising goal provided the grounds for the viral success that made Pentian reach its one-year goal (200 books) in just eight weeks. Pentian was subsequently launched in the US market during the BookExpo America in New York City in May of 2014 and has a pipeline that exceeds 1000 books at the moment.

You can find more information here