No sleep on the redeye out of JFK, lucked out on getting into the hotel early, 3-hour nap, 90 minutes at the book fair.
Frankfurter Buchmesse, first impressions:
1. Service providers are trying to be all things to all publishers, so none of them are specific in their claims. There's lots of "entire workflow, from authoring to marketing!" stuff going on, and it gets even more vague from there. It all reminds me of the moment Word made the leap from great word processor to vast noncorporeal bloat (which I can pinpoint exactly: Word 5.1a, we barely knew ye): They want to be able to say "Yes, we do that" to absolutely everything.
So either I simply can't compete with these providers – because I'm not interested in doing absolutely everything – or there's still a place for a service that does one thing really well. (I have some ideas about where that might be an advantage, but I'm not saying what they are yet – because either it would be dumb to tip my hand at this point or the ideas themselves are dumb. Either way, there's dumbness involved and I try not to be dumb about that.)
2. Bring a powerbank tomorrow so my time there isn't limited by my phone charge, which was eaten up more quickly than usual today by Uber, in-show navigation, and sending my kids bakfiets videos. (See below. That's a bakfiets. Now I want to move to Frankfurt.)
3. Not so tight with the final lace on these new Pumas. Ow.
(If you’re at the show and want to connect, I’m in the Matchmaker section on the app!)
That’s a bakfiets. There used to be a video here, but between Squarespace acting wonky, my laptop crossing international borders, and the delights of hotel wi-fi… you get a pic instead, sorry. But aren’t they cool?