We hope you’ve had a chance to read about our opservations from Publishing University 2013 and the experts’ thoughts on book publishing and marketing,

Today I’ll start with this question: have you ever thought of yourself as a global company?

Most likely you already are, particularly if you are creating and selling in the digital space. From the thumbnail of your book cover in the iTunes bookstore to the fact that 5.1 billion of the 7.1 billion people on our planet have cellphones … many of us using them for reading.

Futurist David Houle really brought this home for me in his keynote at IBPA Publishing University on Saturday. As he explained, we are in a transformation point of the “Shift Age.” 2010-2020 represents a transformation where “legacy thinking falls away.” These are the three key forces

• Flow to global – Not just economic, but the human construct, too. Neither time, distance, nor place limit our communications. 
• Flow to individual – An explosion of choice means power moves from the producer to the consumer.
• Accelerating Electronic Connectedness – Internet and cellphones.

So what does this mean for creatives and their publishers? According to David:

Content is not king. ConTEXT is king. Context isn’t about content exclusively, and it isn’t about product absolutely. ~ David Heule, futurist and author

Sound familiar? In his presentation, David offered that intellectual property creates wealth in the Shift Age. Validation of this point was available all weekend long.

• Guy Kawasaki’s presentation about his new book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to Publish a Book.
  
• Christopher Kenneally’s panel, Beyond the Click: There’s More to Publishing than Uploading a file
  • Allen Lau, co-founder and CEO of Wattpad, the world’s largest community of readers and writers.
    
  • Matthew Cavnar, VP of Business Development at Vook, a cloud-based ePublishing platform.
• Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, an ebook distributor serving more than 35,000 indie authors and small presses around the world.
• Brian Felsen, president of BookBaby, CD Baby, and HostBaby.
• Dominique Raccah‘s keynote that focused on the evolution of Sourcebooks.

Shift happens. My sense of the weekend is that attendees look at the idea of “legacy thinking falling away” in the same way the world looked at Lenin’s statue coming down in Red Square. Transformation.

Progressive thinking and flexibility have always been the hallmarks of the independent publishers and writers. The shift to the individual is neither new nor unique to IBPA and its members.

Now is the perfect time for the self-described small, nontraditional, or artisanal publisher and independent creator (author, illustrator, blogger) to drop the labels, step into the spotlight, share their expertise, and shine.

IBPA Publishing University makes that possible … and I can’t wait until next year. I hope I’ll see you there.