The London Book Fair : Day 3

Ok, so the final day of the London Book Fair, the day I had been most looking forward to; but turned out to be a regular emotional rollercoaster. 

I did not get off to a good start, my train running an hour late meant that I missed the first seminar that I wanted to attend, which was a shame. It got worse when I was turned away from the door of the second. Any guesses why? Because I was wearing my trademark T-shirt and cargoes? Nope. Because I was a writer in a publishers world? Nope. Because it was massively oversubscribed? Naturally. 

This, I freely admit ticked me off more than a little, it is abundantly clear that the organisers have learnt absolutely nothing over the last few days. To make this worse, I got talking to some of the staff on duty (the ones turning us away) and they said it is the exactly same thing every year. The moral of this story – is if you want to go to a seminar, turn up half an hour early minimum. If you have back to back seminars as I tended to, then you can pretty much forget the second. Sorry, that was a little over stated, they did actually learn something; that having people standing in oversubscribed venues can have a negative impact on health. Their solution, a larger room? More chairs? Nope, just ban people from standing thereby reducing capacity even more.

Anyway, back to the day. The final seminar was much better, and admittedly the one I was most looking forward to. I arrived nice and early so I managed to get myself a seat. The topic was “Immersion and linearity in games” although the presenter who devised the name later said it was utterly meaningless, and designed just to look cool! The discussion centred on multi-platform storytelling, whereby a single world would be explored by the audience through the scope of different platforms, ranging from books to games, from social networks to movies, all tying into a central product. Good examples of this are Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, both use multiple media to tell their story. All the panellists agreed that authors were in the best position to begin a multi-platform franchise, as books are so versatile and comparatively cheap to produce. For example, a world is introduced by a book, which in time becomes a series. Once the strength of a particular series is established, and an audience is developed it can branch into games (to provide interactivity and dynamic story telling) and into movies or TV for visual representation of the characters. The rule however is not to tell the same story over and over again, but rather introduce new elements of the world. The first reason for this is that audiences are not stupid, they know when a producer is just rehashing a story for another medium which is not multi-platform publishing, it is merchandising. The second reason is rather more subtle, it makes the audience buy into new platforms, or platforms they wouldn’t usually be interested in. Someone who doesn’t tend to read books might buy one which expands the life of a particular character in a movie, or play a game that follows a more remote region only touched on in the book.

I and all the panellists were very excited by this very young industry, the potential for great entertainment and excellent stories being developed in this way is enormous and I cannot wait to see what the literary giants are able to produce in partnership with the television juggernauts and computer game innovators.