The London Book Fair is an internationally renowned trade exhibition for the publishing industry, a bustling global marketplace that sees over 25,000 publishing professionals meet every year to negotiate rights and sales of content across print, audio, film and digital channels and TV. This large-scale event sees exhibitors from more than 60 countries and visitors from over 118 countries with almost 1,500 international companies being represented.
London is up there with some of the most creative cities in the world that harbours some of the most innovative minds in the fields of publishing, music, art, film and more.
This wonderful event is a great opportunity for creative minds to meet and inspire one another over a mutual appreciation for literature.
For our first year exhibiting at LBF we wanted a to create a memorable presence that would stay with people long after the Fair had shut its doors for 2017. We came up with the idea of the Falcon ‘Book Mountain’, literally a mountain of books, and to run alongside that a competition to win a luxurious hamper from our local vineyard at Biddenden in Kent if you guessed correctly the number of books that made up the Mountain.
This proved a fantastic way to get to talk to people, not just potential new customers but those from all parts of the industry … copy writers, readers, illustrators, authors, printers. Hundreds of visitors and exhibitors alike took the time to enter the competition.
We had some very interesting approaches to
working out quite how many books made up our Book Mountain. It wasn’t unusual
for people to visit the stand late in the day and spend 30 or 40 minutes trying
to work out how many layers there were and the average number of books per
layer. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite that easy. The eventual winner, Emmanuel
Laureau from Talent Sport in Paris, was extremely close with his guess of 745,
just one off the actual total of 744.
We thoroughly enjoyed our three days exhibiting at LBF17, it was a fantastic experience and we can’t wait until next year’s show, which will be taking place from the 10th to the 12th of April 2018. Our only problem is how to top this year’s Book Mountain. We’ll have to have a think about that one! Please do come along to our stand next year and see if we’ve managed it.