Books are more than books: multimedia possibilities for content enrichment, with Lindy Ryan of Black Spot Books and Vesuvian Media Group

Inside Independent Publishing (with IBPA)

Some books lend themselves to creative collaborations and multimedia treatments. Lindy Ryan of Black Spot Books and Vesuvian Media Group outlines the key issues facing publishers today and talks about what makes some stories suitable for dramatic performance and other nonprint media.

Topics Covered

• Top issues for publishing today
  • Connecting books and readers while still supporting local indie booksellers
  • Opportunities in digital publishing and other technologies
  • Embracing and developing diversity in all areas of publishing
• New media and ways of getting storytelling content to readers
• How do stories break into new media?
• What makes a book suitable for adaptation into different media?
  • Literary and visual quality
  • A fresh and unique voice
• Enhanced ebook experiences
• Growth of the ebook and audiobook markets
• The challenge: making these expensive projects profitable
• Why smaller is better: innovation and vision
• Advocacy on the IBPA Board

Links

Vesuvian Media
https://vesuvianmedia.com/

Participants

Lindy Ryan is an entrepreneur, award-winning professor, and an experienced publishing professional. In 2011, Ryan was part of the executive leadership team that founded Radiant Advisors, a data and business intelligence research and advisory firm, where Ryan developed and launched the company's editorial and research divisions, and later its data visualization practice, for clients that included household names in entertainment and media (21st Century Fox Films, Fox Networks, Warner Bros., Disney).

In 2016, Ryan took her industry experience into academia, where she served as an active member of the New Jersey Big Data Alliance. She was previously an active researcher at the Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute where she leads a team studying digital literacy.

Ryan is an award-winning professor of data analysis and business communication at Rutgers University. She is a prolific speaker at conferences worldwide and the author of numerous papers and two textbooks, “The Visual Imperative: Creating a Culture of Visual Discovery" (Elsevier) and "Visual Data Storytelling with Tableau" (Pearson).

In 2017, Ryan launched Black Spot Books, a traditional small press focused in speculative fiction. The company was acquired in 2019 as an imprint of multimedia corporation Vesuvian Media Group. In 2020, Ryan was named Chief Content Officer of Rosewind Books, Vesuvian’s clean romance division.

Ryan currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA). Ryan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration: Entrepreneurship and Strategy, and a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership and a Doctorate in Education, Organizational Leadership.

Peter Goodman (host) is publisher of Stone Bridge Press (www.stonebridge.com) in Berkeley, California. He began his publishing career in Tokyo, Japan, in 1976. A longtime member of IBPA, he has served on the IBPA board and as IBPA board chair.

For more information, go to IBPA at https://www.ibpa-online.org/.