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CLNZ CEO, Paula Browning pictured with Teacher’s Choice winner Mark Sayes of ESA Publications at Thursday night’s awards ceremony.

It’s hard to believe that a year has gone by since we were last here celebrating the best in New Zealand education resources. However if I look back at what the last year has involved at CLNZ, in the New Zealand creative industries and in the copyright world, it’s all been pretty full on!

In November 2014, CLNZ was still involved in a copyright tribunal reference with our universities over the licence fee paid for the use of copyright materials. A month later we were out of the Tribunal and had a new, world-leading, licence agreement in place. The world-leading aspect of this is no overstatement. No other collective management organisation with university agreements has a licensing framework in place to equal the one CLNZ has with Universities New Zealand. What’s so special about this agreement? It involves each institution implementing software that enables the electronic reporting of their use of materials under the licence every year. The outcome of this for authors and publishers is that every use of your work will be paid for, not only the uses that were picked up during the surveys that took place historically in the universities. These systems will come online progressively over the next year and we’ll keep you up to date with where we’re up to with them. I’d like to acknowledge Melanie Johnson, Copyright Officer at University of Auckland, who is with us tonight, for her advocacy and support of this significant change within the universities.

And so 2015 kicked off with 2 years of litigation left behind us and the prospect of being able to get on with business. We started with a survey of teachers to find out what content they are using in their classrooms and what would make their role of educating the next generation easier. The results of this survey have been shared with PANZ members and offered some valuable insights – the overall picture of which is that there’s no silver bullet in terms of content or format when it comes to trying to deliver quality education outcomes. However there was one theme that came through very strongly. And while I’m sure no one in this room will be surprised to hear it, it was great to see. New Zealand teachers like, prefer and want New Zealand resources. Unlike a Google search, New Zealand created resources can be trusted and they align with the New Zealand curriculum. In order to give teacher’s a chance to have a further say about the resources they like, we’ve added a Teacher’s Choice award to the primary, secondary and Te Reo Maori categories of tonight’s awards. Only the teacher’s votes counted here, so those of you who win these awards will know just how much those in the classroom value what you’re doing.

Another major piece of work this year involved the collation of the second edition of the Price Waterhouse Coopers economic valuation of publishing in New Zealand. We had some challenges with this in 2014 and we were sure 2015 was going to be so much better. But alas, no. So just like Steve Hansen does at half time in an All Blacks game when the first 40 minutes didn’t deliver the desired results – here’s my – let’s call it “encouragement” – for 2016. We cannot lobby the government and demonstrate the value of publishing in New Zealand unless we can quantify what the industry is worth. It would be ideal if we could do this using only publically available statistics. But the world is not ideal and in order to value our industry properly we need your co-operation. To those of you who did help by providing your financial data to PwC – my sincere thanks. To those of you who didn’t – for whatever reason – please rethink. The future of the government’s support for the industry – whether that’s in grants, support from Education New Zealand and New Zealand Trade & Enterprise or through our copyright law – requires that we demonstrate our contribution to the economy.

This is never going to be more important than it will be in 2016. During next year, the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment will complete their qualitative study of the creative sector prior to reviewing the Copyright Act. There is no government money being put towards quantitative valuation of the sector so each creative industry will, yet again, have to fund its own. Copyright Act reviews don’t come along every day. Our current Act is 21 years old  – and while the majority of what we currently have works in practice – our chances of keeping it intact (if you look at what’s happened elsewhere in the world) are under threat. This is why we need the economic valuations and also why CLNZ, along with the Society of Authors and the Publishers Association, are members of WeCreate – the New Zealand creative sector alliance. And now I’d like to share with you a short story on why our creative industries, including publishing, are so important to New Zealand. http://wecreate.org.nz/about-us/2015-video-presentation/#1

Report by Alex Hedley, Publisher, General Non-fiction, Penguin Random House New Zealand

Asian Publishers Fellowship

At the start of October I attended a fully-funded fellowship with a group of editors from the Asian region, at the invitation of the Korean Publishers Association. ‘The Asian Publishers Fellowship Program’, as it was called, ran alongside Editor’s Week in Seoul. There were two editors from China, three from Korea, and one from each of Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia. It was the first time an editor from the Pacific was invited to take part.

Paju Book City

We spent much of our time at Paju Book City. The Koreans are proud of Paju and rightly so. Paju is home to 250 publishing companies and 10,000 book industry professionals (and counting). It’s also flush with cafes, bookstores and leafy streets – a place for literary-minded Koreans and writers to gather on weekends. Last year over 40,000 titles were published in South Korea, a mind-boggling number even with a population of 50 million. Having come from being one of the world’s poorest nations in the 1960s to the land of corporate giants like Samsung, LG and Hyundai, South Korea is an incredible story of industrial success. Not surprisingly, one of the dominant publishing trends is business books, but children’s is still the biggest market for locally published titles, followed by literature and poetry, and a good showing of ‘self-empowerment’ titles.

The theme of our fellowship itself was the ‘era of the proteur’ (a proteur being mixture of an amateur and professional), and how this is affecting the place and role of the traditional book editor. Much of the talk was around authors who aren’t writers, and the rise of amateur publishers. The group concluded that the professional editor’s role is still as important as it ever was – perhaps even more so. Our ability to discover new authors in new markets and innovate with new technology is an important competitive edge, but maintaining our traditional standards of editorial excellence is critical to the success and credibility of books in the modern age.

The interim ban on Into the River has ended with the majority of the Film and Literature Board of Review classifying the book as ‘unrestricted’. The majority of the Board stated that the book dealt with the subject matter in a way that was essential to the story and was not gratuitous.

The board consists of three lawyers, chair Dr Don Mathieson, Andrew Caisley and Michael Stephens, and Professor of Film and Television Studies at Auckland University Lawrence Simmons and consultant Sandy Gill.

The majority viewed the book as dealing with matters “about the potentially negative consequences that can follow from involvement in casual sex, under age drinking, drug taking, crime, violence and bullying” in a way that was likely to educate, rather than promote. The majority therefore reached the conclusion that Into the River was not “objectionable” as defined by section 3(1) of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993. The sole dissenting voice was that of Dr Mathieson.

The Film and Literature Board also removed its earlier age restriction on Into the River and the book now carries no age restriction.  The majority decision can be viewed here. The dissenting decision can be viewed here.

Debra Millar, Publishing Director at Penguin Random House NZ, says they have sold North American rights for Into the River and Thunder Road to an independent US publisher Polis Books, as well as ANZ and UK audio rights for Into the River to Audible. But there have been no other confirmed rights sales at this point, she says.

However, the company’s Australian based rights manager is still following up on interest from other countries and discussions held at Frankfurt.

“We have seen strong orders for Into the River from New Zealand booksellers since the ban was lifted, and to date we have reprinted 1000 copies to meet demand, Debra notes. “There has also been unprecedented eBook sales globally since the review board decision to impose an interim restriction on sales in New Zealand.”

Report from Peter Dowling Managing Director of Oratia Media (www.oratiamedia.com) and publisher of its books division Libro International (www.librointernational.com), and international councillor of the Publishers Association of New Zealand.

Smaller and better: that’s my feeling after four days at the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair, the major event on the world publishing calendar.

The Frankfurter Buchmesse organisers condensed the layout of the fair this year, bringing English-language publishers from the distant and cavernous Hall 8 to reside across three levels in Hall 6. With the New Zealand stand well positioned on the ground floor, it was a lot easier to connect for meetings in the other halls and to feel part of this great global village of books.

Compliments again to Anne de Lautour (pictured below with Peter) and the Publishers Association of New Zealand for the very cool and visible design of the collective stand on which Oratia Media took its place alongside 14 other Kiwi publishers – and to our stand staff Christiane Arheilger and Heike Reifgens. There’s a supportive spirit of collegiality and fun all week (rated as the week’s best by many fair regulars). 

Meetings here are conducted at half-hour intervals, which on the busiest days this year meant over 15 official encounters with publishers, agents, distributors and service providers at our stands and theirs – before dinners and gatherings into the night. Along with reviewing current business relationships, presenting new books, seeking rights deals and pitching new series and book ideas, I started communicating our soon-to-be-public rebranding and development plans.

At the New Zealand party: Michael Duckworth (University of Hawaii Press) and Scott Beatty (Trajectory)

Smaller and better also describes how the book industry is looking now. Sure, bookstores have closed, publishers have pulled out of some markets and tightened their lists, and ebooks have generally not delivered on their promise. But a leaner publishing industry has got smarter and is seeing a consumer move back to print, and for independents there’s market share to be grabbed and easier international connections to be made.

For our authors, exposure to the international publishing community will hopefully lead to seeing their books overseas and in translation. With our Chinese agent Fanny Yu of CA-Link I toasted the sale of mainland Chinese rights to Dawn McMillan and Ross Kinnaird’s I Need a New Bum!, and I got a good response to their new book Mister Spears and his Hairy Ears. Our new international picture book series Indigenous Voices, which includes a great new story from Tim Tipene, is exciting a lot of interest also. And the September release of Hirini Moko Mead’s classic Te Toi Whakairo: The Art of Maori Carving is also promising good sales offshore.

With Fanny Yu of our Chinese agency CA-Link

I was also delighted to present some fine NZ books from outside our own programme, including Neil Coleman’s hard-hitting YA novel Roskill, David Bell’s YA fantasy novel The Dog Hunters (first in a very promising series), David Lupton and Leonel Alvarado’s beautiful The Divine Remains, and the sumptuousCoast, Country, Neighbourhood, City, which profiles the work of design studio Isthmus.

Our section of the NZ stand

So much of world publishing is dominated by big US, UK, French and German corporations. Alongside good meetings with colleagues from all those markets, this year Frankfurt brought me great exchanges with publishers from publishers as far flung as Belarus, Chile, El Salvador, Ireland … Big is beautiful but so is small.

Read more from Peter on http://librointernational.blogspot.co.nz/

From Book Sellers NZ:
With over 180+ bookshops involved, publishers, book industry associations, community groups and some libraries.  Check out “What’s Up” and Participating Stores online http://www.booksellers.co.nz/bkshop-day/participating-shops

Now it’s time to take to social media and create a ground swell!  Easy quick links are below:

1. Take action and post this event onto your Facebook page  and LIKE & SHARE our page and stories.
2. Include a note for newsletters due out before the day.
3. Take part in the “Snap Me Reading” competition, we are seeing some clever photos of where people read!
4. Take part in the All Good colouring competition – lets see that artistic flair!
5. We are posting up an “Author and Quote” everyday, these could be your favourites  to follow on your Facebook page
6. Go out and visit your local participating bookshop on NZ Bookshop Day, tell your friends!

Thank you to those who have already starting promoting, blogging, liking,  tweeting, snapping, etc.

All Campaign and Bookshop Event updates

Like us on NZ Bookshop Day Facebook

Follow us Twitter – #nzbookshopday, #snapmereading and #allgoodcolouring
Post your photo using hashtag  #snapmereading.  Add your caption and this hashtag sends it straight to our Facebook competition page.

Pin this wonderful collage of NZ Bookshop Day

Competitions – Spread the word to friends and family to enter into the competitions!  Great prizes!

Click here to post a photo of your families entertaining reading moments

Pop into your local store or download colouring sheet to be in the draw.

Yvonne Cookson

Project Manager

Booksellers NZ

04 815 8364

www.booksellers.co.nz

Dame Wendy Pye was one of 16 women icons from APEC countries when she represented New Zealand at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Women and the Economy 2015 Fora in Manila in mid-September.

Dame Wendy Pye next to her 4 foot x 8 foot visual

“The meeting was very interesting,” said Dame Wendy. “It was attended by leading Information Computer and Technology people from all over Asia and America. Taking part in the conference on ICT were women from many start ups and companies who were selling apps and digital content, not in publishing but other fields.

“There were interesting seminars also on crowd funding and also the future of digital technology,” she told PANZ News.

“The ICONs from other countries were wonderful women who had achieved great success in their own countries. Representatives from Russia, China and Canada were to me the most outstanding women.

“A great event and a celebration for all women achievers,” said Dame Wendy.

Delegates attended the twin launch of Iconograph and Luxe Philippines exhibits at the Philippine International Convention Center. Iconograph highlighted the stories of the 16 extraordinary women economic leaders from APEC economies.