Publishers Training Programme for Young Professionals 2017 held successfully

The 4th edition of Publishers Training Programme for Young Professionals was held on December 1-2, 2017 at the PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry, New Delhi. This edition was all about safeguarding and commercialization of content. It was two days of intensive learning and hands-on training where the participants were encouraged to rethink their backlist and contracts from an IP perspective.

The participants’ preparation had started in advance. All participants were sent reading material to familiarize themselves with the topics to be covered during the course of the programme, along with a list of questions that they could ponder over in relation to their own content/organisation/business.

DAY 1 saw a classroom of 29 participants with a diverse mix of young as well as senior publishing professionals, authors and business management students. The programme started with a welcome note by GBO Director Prashasti Rastogi.The first session, Harvest your IP, was led by expert Vivek Mehra, CEO, SAGE Publications India. Keeping in mind the audience of authors and young publishing professionals, he began with the very basics of copyright, and over the session, built their understanding of the intricacies of rights and licensing by citing multiple case studies. While, Sahil Sethi, a senior law professional from Saikrishna and Associates, addressed all publishing-related legal queries of the participants, and shared with them a case study of the famous Delhi University photocopy copyright case.

The second half of the day kickstarted with Carolin Ulrich’s session Book as a Springboard: the potential of product transformation. Carolin is a creative engineer from Berlin, and she discussed books-related product transformation examples from Germany. She spoke at length about the successes and failures of such ventures, encouraging the participants to think about the parameters one should keep in mind while thinking of product transformation.

The final session of the day, Accelerating Global Rights Trading, took the participants back into the domain of rights and licensing. The session was led by Martin Jack, senior sales manager, IPR License, UK. He spoke about the ease of global rights trade in today’s day and age with platforms like IPR License, and the monetization potential that lies within global rights trading.All sessions were interspersed and followed by a Q&A session.

The constitution of participants and the execution of the training was one of the highlights of the workshop on Day 2. The participants were divided into six groups: each group consisted of three publishing professionals, one author and one business manager. In the role of business managers were management students from the Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhi.

The day began with a brief recap from the three experts, following which the task was explained in detail to the participants. Each group had to choose one product from their backlist and build a business pitch for it. They were asked to focus on product transformation potential, rights and licensing parameters, capital and human resource, product pricing, target audience, and marketing strategy. The groups worked for four hours to create their pitches with inputs and guidance from the experts. For the final stage of the programme, the groups presented their pitches, addressed questions and received feedback from other groups and the experts.

The groups built their pitches around different kinds of content, varying from a children’s book series to a book-reading app. One of the groups has been offered, by session expert Vivek Mehra, a platform for actualizing the business idea they came up with as a part of this training.

The Publishers Training Programme for Young Professional, yet again proved to be a valuable, fruitful training ground as well as a space for the people in the publishing industry to meet and collaborate with like-minded professionals.