Wikitravel Press Blog

With only one Buchmesse under my belt, I’m not sure I’m entirely qualified to dispense advice… but here are 10 things I wish I had known or I’m very glad I did for the Fair.

1. Buddy up. Stands start from 1000 euros (2×2m), and you’ll want to have 3 people a day on site so you can comfortably man it and scout around at the same time. Both are much easier to deal with when you can share with another company, and an official co-exhibitor listing (incl. catalog entries) is “only” 250 euros extra.

2. Sign up early. If you’re not registered by July, a good 4 months before the Fair, you won’t be listed in any of the printed catalogs, making it that much harder for people to find you.

3. Start networking before the Fair. The main value of the online catalog is not the list of companies, but its lists of contacts at those companies. Figure out the companies you want to target and the people at them who will be attending, then fire off emails to arrange appointments. Trying to find anybody while the Fair is already in progress can be tough.

4. Study the event calendar in advance, and plan accordingly. There are hundreds of events, and almost all of them will be irrelevant, but those few that aren’t can be invaluable.

5. Bring A4 handouts that explain what you’re all about, written so that your grandmother can understand it.  When decorating, beware that posters taped to the wall look cheap, and logos silkscreened onto fabric are tough to set up so they look nice. Logos silkscreened onto particleboard sized to fit, on the other hand, are easy to set up and look great — just bring solid hooks to keep them up.

6. Bring a vast stack of business cards, and leave an extra stack at the stand when you’re not there yourself, so people can get in touch with you later.

7. Bring water and snacks. Once on site, a cup of hot water with a teabag from food service monopolist Accente costs 2.50 euros, and you’ll probably have to queue for 15 minutes.

8. Bring a mobile data card (UMTS) for your laptop, preferably with an unlimited or at least very, very cheap quota. Otherwise you’ll have to pay 50 euros a day for wifi!

9. Learn the shortcuts.  Exhibitors have access to special entry gates, which can shortcut the often very long entry queues, esp. on the weekend.  And instead of relying on the perpetually jammed Via Mobile and its slow escalators, it can be much faster to use the stairs or nip between buildings by going outside.

10. Dress up. Slogan T-shirts and black turtlenecks may be hip at Web/new media conferences, but at Frankfurt, dark suits and sober ties are still the order of the day. You don’t need to go whole hog, but at a minimum, a collared shirt, a jacket and presentable (but comfortable!) shoes are needed if you want to get respect, stand out from the tourists, and sneak into that medical journal publisher’s cocktail party.

One of the pleasures of attending trade fairs and conventions is meeting up with other members of the globally distributed Wikitravel tribe.  On Thursday, User:Sapphire managed to drop in during a fortuitously timed stopover at Frankfurt Airport, and today, User:Mark did a five-hour-one-way odyssey from Lausanne just to attend the Fair.  Pictures were taken, books signed, pictures taken, invaluable travel advice dispensed, obscure details of map generation with XSLT and typesetting with xelatex were discussed, and a few beers quaffed too.

This was also the first day of the Fair open to the public, meaning that, aside from the odd journalist, trade visitors virtually trickled to a halt. Instead, vast hordes of random people more than made up for it in quantity, if not necessarily quality — at least from a businessman’s point of view.  One major group of visitors, however, I did not expect: as Frankfurt’s top event in the comics calendar, the Fair has been adopted by the rabid role-playing manga and anime fans, vast hordes of whom showed up in costumes ranging from simple to incredibly elaborate.  Photography was permitted (with permission, always readily granted), and on a sunny day the central Plaza outdoors and, of course, the Comics area itself in Hall 3.0 provided rich hunting grounds for snaphounds.  Next time, I’m bringing along my 50mm prime portrait lens and an external flash!  Take a look at the gallery on my personal pages.

Old Buchmesse hands say that Wednesday is when the action is, but not for us — here every day at the Fair just seems to get busier!  So much so that today’s blog entry is going to be a short one.

But I had the time to nip out and meet up with the EU Latitude project, who have set out to create a database of travel information that aims to cover all of Europe in many languages, all available in a unified XML format for easy syndication to other devices.  It’s not the first time this has been tried, and indeed some larger travel publishers already offer commercial systems for licensing their own proprietary content, but the really interesting bit is that those parts of the content contributed or paid for by local tourism authorities are planned to be licensed under Creative Commons.  I have to emphasize that “planned to be”, because they’re having some problems convincing wary travel publishers of this bit, so drop them a line at Contact Us and let them know what you think!

Today was the last trade visitors’ day, and tomorrow the Fair opens up to the public.  I doubt there will be too many crowds in the Scientific Publishing section, but the already intense crowds in the hallways and at lunchtime aren’t going to get any better…

After a bit of a quiet start on Wednesday, the Fair’s travel publishers seem to have ventured out to explore en masse today, and I had the chance to have many interesting discussions with many smaller publishers in the travel industry.  Most if not all are facing the same problem: paying writers to write guidebooks is prohibitively expensive, especially in niche speciality markets (hiking guides, smaller languages, etc), so they’re stuck with slow release cycles and are increasingly losing market share to the Internet and the (mostly English) juggernauts of the travel publishing world.  What to do?

The solution is simple: take the guidebooks that you can’t afford to update and release them under the Creative Commons license, so they can be integrated into Wikitravel.  Once quality content is online, Wikitravellers will find and start to use it, and the community will then start to update the content.  This now-revised content then can be packaged back into guidebooks using Wikitravel Press technology, sold either under the Wikitravel brand, or as a white-label version for your own distribution via other channels.

Speaking of white-label distribution, this is another opportunity for all those countless companies out there reusing Wikitravel content on their websites.  Once the Wikitravel Fresh system announced yesterday is in place, we’ll be setting up a partner program so your users can use your website to order books from Wikitravel Press, with a partner commission for you plus the possibility of applying your own branding.

And an update: our Paris editor, map wizard and all-around good guy Mark Jaroski will be at the Wikitravel Press stand (Hall 4.2, E427) on Saturday afternoon.  Drop by to get an autographed copy of the guide!

The first day of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008, and we’re starting off with a bang: Wikitravel Press is delighted to announce its upcoming line of Wikitravel Fresh guidebooks, built by readers from their choice of any of the tens of thousands of guides on Wikitravel.  For example, you could select “Frankfurt”, “Luxembourg” and “Helsinki”, and we’ll assemble and ship you a guide containing only those articles — cheaper, lighter and more environmentally friendly than buying three separate guides!

To make this happen, we’re teaming up with PediaPress, who have built the Collections extension for MediaWiki, which allows building your own article collections, and the PediaPress engine, for converting those collections into books.  Wikitravel Fresh books aren’t available just yet, but the technology is in place, we’re currently putting on the finishing touches and expect to have them up on Wikitravel in time for Christmas.

As for the Book Fair itself, let’s just say that it’s big — thousands of exhibitors scattered across over tens of floors in eight gigantic halls, all grouped by theme.  E-books and electronic distribution may be the buzzwords of the day (and indeed, Amazon’s Kindle presentation drew a standing-room-only crowd), but there’s still plenty of life left in the dead trees printing business as well.

Our neighbors in the Scientific Publishing section (where we’re co-exhibiting with PediaPress) are a pretty buttoned-down lot by day, but when the clock strikes five and alcohol can be served, the frenetic pace of business slows down and the bespectacled men in suits start the Buchmesse Waltz.  It goes like this: a large scientific publisher sets up a bar deep within their gigantic exhibition section and starts serving up free booze, the more moneyed ones even hiring comely staff in short skirts or bartenders in tuxedos to do the pouring.  Drawn like bees to honey, everybody nearby starts gravitating towards the bar…  and that’s when the publisher’s sales reps, lounging near the bar like lions at a watering hole, pounce on their prey.  The meek end up trapped, nodding with glass of wine in hand and glazed eyes as the agents hypnotize them with sales pitches, while the intrepid spot the opportunity and sneak off with a bottle of beer while the sales reps are distracted.  And so the cycle of publishing life continues…

This blog has been a little quiet lately, but that’s because we’ve been working quite hard on not one, but two fascinating projects and we look forward to announcing them quite soon.  Stay tuned…

But today’s news is that Wikitravel Press will be exhibiting at the Frankfurt Book Fair, in Frankfurt, Germany, in two weeks’ time.  This is the world’s largest exhibition for the publishing industry, with over 7000 exhibitors and nearly 200,000 visitors expected, and we’re excited to have this opportunity to publicize what we’re doing at Wikitravel Press.

Trade days are October 15-17th (Wed-Fri), while the fair opens to the public on October 18 and 19 (Sat-Sun).  You can find us at stand 4.2 E427 (see also hall plan).  Note that we’re not in Hall 3.1 (travel), but next door in Hall 4.2 (scientific publishing), since we’re exhibiting together with our fellow Wiki-to-print enthusiasts PediaPress.  Entry to the fair costs 12 euros for the general public, half that for students.  No book sales allowed until Sunday, but Wikitravellers just might get a free copy of our newly revised Paris guide (while supplies last).  See you there!