PUBLISHING IN THE USA - AWRF
John Freeman & David Levithan with Nicola Legat

Chair Nicola Legat described Levithan as a man on the move, a busy and productive fellow who is both a highly successful YA author as well as holding down a senior publsihing post at Scholastic NY. Freeman on the other hand is a former high profile literary critic who is now editor of Granta.

Legat was the perfect chair for this session being a successful publisher herself at Random House NZ and in some ways she was something of a third panellist rather than a chair which added to the value of the session.
Her two guests are both impressively articulate young men who ranged across a huge range of publishing matters looking at both the past, the present and their vision of the nxet five years with the huge forces for change that are presently being felt in the US.

 Some of the subjects discussed included Amazon and its huge negative impact on independent boostores in the US whose numbers have declined from over 7000 to just 1300 in the past decade; children's book sales are holding up; there are small publishers popping up as well as a huge amount of self-pubolishing being done; Joseh O'Neill's Netherlands; Michael Chabon; on demand publishing (in bookstores); author's new armouries - blogs, websites, Facebook, Twitter; e-books - good for authors and publishers, not so good for booksellers; nerd quotients; literary venture capitalists; loving your books;publishers using their publishing  successes to take publishing risks; creative writning courses - are we geberating more writers than readers? - ; book banning will become impossible with e-books; books will become more accessible with e-books; always looking for the nxet YA phenomenon, no one saw Harry Potter or Twilight coming; interactive books, already here for kids, the adult markey will be next.

A thought provoking session that left the audience still pondering about the future but with a few more answers than they had before.
Thanks guys.