Once again, a very productive BCUPS meeting. Unfortunately, your lowly scribe has not been nearly as productive with writing up the minutes. Ah, the publishing industry and its crazy deadlines. Head-hung-low apologies.
It was great to see some new faces and comforting to see the familiar ones. Our group seems to be growing!
We continued to discuss ideas for professional development and for what our members would like to see. We decided that we would invite speakers from the industry to attend our meetings and offer their sage advice and knowledge in exchange for beverages. We discussed several ideas for speakers and there were a bounty of suggestions, leading to the further suggestion that some of these may be panels …
Selina announced that our first speaker would be Lianne Crawford, Field Learning Consultant for Indigo, on September 4. There was rejoicing around the table. This should prove to be a very interesting session.
We would like to arrange to have a sales rep speak to us in October, ideally on October 2. Several were mentioned, including Dot Middlemass and Nadine Boyd. We’re working on this so stay tuned.
Another speaker we would love to see is someone to talk about the business and accounting side of publishing. Laraine has agreed to work her contacts on this one.
We also discussed inviting a freelance editor to speak.
We decided that we would split the contacting of speakers as we each have different contacts within the industry.
On another topic, Laraine also agreed to write a response to the document that came out of the last APBPC executive meeting. She also volunteered to contact the EAC about perhaps obtaining a discount on membership or workshops for our members.
Selina discussed pubfight and getting a Vancouver team together. Much has happened along these lines since this meeting so I will not dwell on it here. Go team go!
Last, but defiantly not least, we discussed a November party for publishers, booksellers, and other industry professionals to officially launch BCUPS and to work towards one of our objectives, which is building a stronger book community in Vancouver. We should look into securing a venue. Both the Biltmore and the Anza were mentioned as possibilities. We would like to stay away from charging for tickets and rather depend on beverage-sales promises to entice the venue into catering to us. We will discuss this further at the September meeting.
See you next meeting!
