I attended a 4 day Publishers Training course in Abu Dhabi, and kept a blog all throughout that was published on www.publishingperspectives.com, to read more check out the below blogs...

A Group Photo of the the participants in Publishers Training, Abu Dhabi 2010

Day 1 of Publishers Training in Abu Dhabi by Salwa Shakhshir

What a great day! I had been eagerly anticipating this program for months now, and walking from our hotel to the NYU campus felt so good! With my new notebook in hand, I felt like a student again, but this time much more eager to learn, not only because the topic is now my choice of career, but also because of the chance to meet and share experiences with other colleagues in the same industry. To be honest, I hadn’t expected there to be so many of us, but we numbered around 30 executives from publishing houses not only from the Arab region like Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, UAE, Tunisia, and also from countries like Senegal, Malaysia, Russia, Nigeria. I’m grateful for this diversity because it has greatly enriched the program and made conversations that much more interesting.

We were first guided to this super hi-tech white room, clad with desks and microphones and screens. The seminar hadn’t even started yet but I was already giddy, for in front of me lay two bestselling books, which I guessed the speaker must have worked on. The first was Dreams from My Father by Barak Obama and the second was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, both of which I have heard of before and both of which I couldn’t wait to read. I felt like I was on Oprah being handed giveaways. I even looked up expecting to see the participants get up and start clapping enthusiastically – but I guess my imagination got a little ahead of me!

After a round of introductory talks, first the speaker was finally on and I think it was apparent to all of us how passionate he is about what he does and how obviously good he is about what he does . . . Phillip Patrick, the vice president for Digital and Marketing Strategy and Publisher of Crown Digital Media at Random House, briefly introduced himself and said that he was an avid reader since the age of five. The first thing that Phillip said which resonated quite loudly for me for obvious reasons, is that if we are to leave this lecture with one thing and one thing only it is this: acknowledging the importance of children books. To put it quite simply, the more children read now, the better it is for publishers later. I couldn’t have agreed with him more!

Publishers hard at work

Before getting into the basics of how to build a successful publishing strategy the participants were asked to name the challenges that they face in the industry. It was no shock to hear that distribution and lack of information availability were top of the list. But when one participant casually said “people don’t read!” I couldn’t help but laugh at the simplicity in which this problem was stated, yet at the same time realizing how sadly true this is. Again, the message was clear: visionary publishers should figure out that if they support children literature, at the end of the day it will end up supporting them.

Why are we starting off talking about the ch