Episode 62: Publishers Without Borders Director Discusses London Book Fair

Prashant Pathak is the Co-Founder and Director of Publishers Without Borders, a global and non-commercial community supporting publishing professionals through collaboration and knowledge-sharing. With 20 years of experience across publishing, licensing, printing, EdTech, and gaming, Prashant brings a cross-sector perspective to building content, partnerships, and global markets.

Prashant joined us on the Booksmarts Podcast to discuss how the London Book Fair has evolved—from 2010’s concerns regarding ebooks to today’s focus on AI and new technology. He also shares practical advice on turning a busy three days into real outcomes, and explains how Publishers Without Borders fosters genuine human connection beyond the show floor.

To learn more about Publishers Without Borders, click here. You can find Prashant Pathak on most social networking platforms, including LinkedIn.

Digital Transcript

Joshua Tallent
This month on the book smarts podcast, I have the pleasure of chatting with Prashant Pathak, who is the co founder and director of publishers without borders. We asked Prashant to join me on the call or on the on the podcast this this month because London Book Fair is coming up next month, and we wanted to have an opportunity to chat with somebody who’s been to a lot of London book fairs in the past, and also is very active in kind of the broader publishing world. So Prashant, obviously is a great choice because of his work with publishers without borders and all the all the different publishers that he works with. So Prashant, thanks for joining me on the call today.

Prashant Pathak
Thanks Joshua for having me. It’s a pleasure speaking with you, and it’ll be great to talk about the upcoming fair.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, let’s, before we talk about the fair, actually, let’s, let’s get a little bit of your history. Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. How did you get involved in publishing? Your background in that, and then your work with publishers, without porters as well.

Prashant Pathak
Well, I mean, publishing did not come naturally to me. I did not study to get into publishing. I started way back in 2003 in gaming. It was a quality analyst for an online game. In fact, I was one of the team members a lot of the Rings Online when it was launched, and I was supporting the European gaming customers. But somehow things turned and I got, I started working in a publishing services company, and that’s when I had my first bologna and the Frankfurt Book Fair. And after that, I worked for a printer publisher, and that’s when I moved, I mean, that’s when I got an opportunity to visit the London book fair. It was way back in around 2010 and then, after few years of having my own publishing services company and ed tech startups, and then, which did not work out, I went back to publishing, and I started working for a big distribution company in India as a publisher, an accidental publisher, because my exposure has always been on the side of international sales. And somehow we were talking, and he said, Why don’t you come on board and act as a publisher? And we started an imprint called wonder house, which did really well in Indian subcontinent, in Southeast Asia, it grew as a fastest growing children’s book imprint last year, last last year, it was holding around 40% market share. And from then, I got called by this Italian company, jantia editorial, and I’m here working to establish the international imprint and publishers without borders. A beautiful thing that happened during the pandemic. It was not really my brain child to start publishers without borders. It was actually a Canadian publisher, children publisher from Canada, Simone deshokas. He reached out a few of us whom he knew, and he said, Why don’t we start a support community online? And we said, hey, it’s a good idea. Why don’t we start something? And we basically started adding people on the Facebook Messenger, and somehow, within 48 to 72 hours, we had 120 people and nobody was making sense, and things were going here and there. And because of my publishing services experience, I had some handle on how to manage social media. I came out with an idea, why don’t we start a Facebook group, and it will be easy to basically manage conversation and talk to each other. And then around March 2020, we started publishers without borders on Facebook as a group, and in less than one and a half two months time, we saw around 1000 people joining the community. And when, when, when we say 1000 people, and right now there are 5500 people on Facebook, when we say that 5500 that means we have rejected almost around 20,000 people. So we have been very, very selective about letting people in. We try to ensure that either it’s a connection of a connection, and they work in publishing industry at some capacity, and some of it kept on growing. The conversation started happening, and it’s been around five and a half years, almost six years in March for publishers without borders and overall. And then we expanded the community into different platforms. So we have a Facebook community. We are on LinkedIn. We are on Instagram. We recently started a school channel where we will be showcasing our first video by Sarah sopadu from subadu, and she will be talking about why publisher. Is need website. So I mean, there and during the entire period during the pandemic, the one and a half two years, we got overwhelming response from publishers across the globe. The IP really supported us by giving us a lot of information, which we disseminated amongst all the publisher we had the Frankfurt Book Fair really supported us. In fact, Jurgen boost, the CEO, was the first who came online on publishers without border. And then we have had almost, almost everyone from across the world, the book fairs, even from the London book fair, to be on publishers without borders, talking about their events. So it’s been a community which is, which is on volunteer basis, which is nonprofit. Actually, it cannot make profit, but it does not exist in terms of, it’s not registered. So we don’t generate any revenues. It’s it’s just that people volunteer. They come together. And we, we try to bring everyone together on social media platforms, on WhatsApp, and if it’s a physical book, where we create these events called PWB meet a networking event where people meet people as a people, not as a publisher, not as an editor, not as an agent. The then they try to develop friendship. Then they eventually if, if a business happen happens. But on our social media platforms, barring LinkedIn, we don’t allow people to talk about their books and business. So if you’re talking about, hey, this is my book and this is my catalog, we say, Hey, stop. We were going to delete that. Yeah, so we are okay. When you’re talking about, hey, I’m this and I’m having this sandwich and a coffee here, that’s perfectly fine. Hey, I’m reading this book. That is fine. But we intentionally made sure that we do not let business take over this community, because for business, the book fairs are already there. There are different platforms. There are right platform, and we do not want to do that. Okay?

Joshua Tallent
That makes a lot of sense, and that’s great to know that there’s this kind of just a community for book people. You know, book publishing people to be themselves and, you know, share, share themselves with other people. That’s not, not about the book business, as much as it is the people themselves. That’s a pretty cool, uh, pretty cool idea, absolutely.

Prashant Pathak
And then people talk about very things. Hey, this is what I’m having. Listen, I’m at the book fair, and I’m, I’m, these are actual conversation that happens on Whatsapp group. Hey, I’m at a book fair, and after this, I’m going to this place or a drink. Anybody would like to join me? And then people were like, Hey, me, hey, I’m going to the Frankfurt Book Fair or a London book fair, and I have this apartment. I can share it with two people. Do you want to join me? And then there you go. So, I mean, I have seen those sort of friendships develop, those sort of things happening, and it’s really wonderful to see that.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so let’s, let’s talk about London. We’ve been talking a lot about publishers without borders, but you know, our goal here is to help people understand the London book fair a little bit more, too. So think back to your first London book fairs. You said it was, I think, 2003 and 2010 Okay, well, so not 2000 302. 1003 was when you started, the start of work in publishing. So think back to that first London Book Fair in 2010 and kind of set the scene. What was your role? You said you were, you were working for a publishing services company. What were the major industry topics that were kind of dominating the conversations at that time. What were the things that you remember from back in 2010

Prashant Pathak
so the first London book fair, it was 2010 and it was when the Book Fair was held at Earl’s Court. It was not in Olympia as of now. And at that time, I was working with a printer and a publisher, and my role was to take a new children’s imprint into international market. So we were trying to establish intellectual property while also offering like, like the global printing services they they have. I was very young in publishing, only three or four years in and London felt overwhelming in the best way possible, and the dominant conversation, I clearly remember everywhere, was around ebooks. There was genuine fair in the air. People were asking whether printed books were near the end of their relevance or become completely obsolete. And it was right after the 2008 financial crisis when the global economy were fragile. So many, many believe, I mean, it was kind of very cloudy environment during the London book for that year. And many believe publishing might not survive other any other. Major description. But on one side, publishers were anxious, very defensive. On the other hand, publishing service companies were extremely bullish, offering to convert entire catalogs into ebooks, enhanced formats and interactive content. And that time of and at that period of time, even the terminology about ebooks and ebook three and interactive ebooks and enhance ebooks, I mean, really felt futuristic. So we were just talking, we were talked about vanilla ebooks and interactive ebooks as we were like, predicting the future. Yeah, so when I, when I look back, and at that time, it was kind of moment of panic, but it was also kind of very hopeful at that point of time, that people were thinking that it might bounce back. And so we, we we were very cautious. I mean, there was a caution in the air where people were trying to figure out what exactly going to happen. And that was the London scene that publishing services, people were really bullish, and they were very aggressive on the ebook side. Yeah.

Joshua Tallent
So things have changed a little bit, but also some things are just the same over the over the years. You know, the things that things are different, what have you seen change at the fair since you first started attending? But also kind of what developments or changes might be really new compared to things that are just being rebranded? You know, there’s, there’s always concern about ebooks. There’s, you know, it’s not nearly as big as it was back in 2010 of course. But what do you think has just been a rebranded concern or rebranded headwind compared to things that actually are really different and really new in the last couple of years?

Prashant Pathak
I think the fair pattern is still the same, only the terminology has changed. We were worried about technology taking over that point of time through ebooks and now we are, we are just talking about artificial intelligence at this point of time. What I find really interesting is that many of the challenges are not new at all. I mean, they are just simply, sort of, as you said, rebranded and so 15 years ago, we were talking about a lot of conversation was also around freedom to publish in piracy, and those conversation I see are still ongoing today. The technology and metadata dominate headlines now, I think, but the core issues are still same, familiar publishing. I mean, we have a habit of packaging old anxieties into new language, I believe, and it still revolves around the same so I think we’re just around that circle technology is again, it’s still the big part, and I think it’s going to be a big part for the first foreseeable future, as long as we do not see a major disruption happens,

Joshua Tallent
yeah, yeah. I mean, technology is not going away, it just gets more complex or changes in different ways, and publishing is impacted the same as every other industry, so we just have to roll with those punches.

Prashant Pathak
And I think, I think, as a publisher, we think that technology is complex because we do not have a complete grasp on it, and it is not really that complex. It’s just that our nature of work is more creative than sitting around and looking how technology is evolving. It’s and it has been evolving into phases. It just, it didn’t happen, just overnight. Yeah. So, so we get, as a publisher, the publishing community, we get more anxious because we see something dropping from the heaven, and we say, what is this? But then it has been evolving over a period of time.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, so looking at the ecosystem today and the conversations you’re expecting to happen in London in a couple of weeks, what specific segment of publishing do you think is driving the most significant changes right now, and how is that impacting the work that you’re doing.

Prashant Pathak
Well, technology, as we talked about, is the visible driver, but according to me, but the real shift is how we think about content itself. And I’ve stated this in the past and couple of occasions I was talking that whatever you say we publishing is the business of curating content. If you’re not curating great content, your publishing will not work, right? So it’s simply how we curate it, how we shape it, how we decide what is worth publishing in the first. Place. And today, content creation really happens in isolation. We have we were in isolation during the pandemic for a couple of years, and we see what has happened then we and when I say isolation, it’s not only about people, but it’s also about today’s content is curated along with data analytics, rankings, algorithms and the trend signals that are happening around the online platform or the offline platform, and sometimes it is not only about what we believe the strongest content is, but what the data suggests might be viable or discoverable. So this has clearly changed the way we have worked. We spend more time understanding ecosystem and behavior. For me, this has not made publishing, you know, more difficult. It has made it more interesting. So the driving force for the most you know significant change is, is the dialog between the creativity and the computation and and I believe none of them should be. I mean, talking in isolation, talking alone, right?

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that siloing is difficult causes a lot more problems in the industry in general. I love what you said, and that’s something I’ve said a lot as well in the past, is that publishers are not just publishing books. Publishers are curating content. They are the ones who have the connections to creative people who are writing content, they have created, people on their teams who are taking that content and turning it into something useful. If you see a publisher as just a book publisher, there will always that will be limited in the future, that you won’t be able to think of yourself as a as a content you know, Curator or or whatever you want to call it, that’s a really valuable insight. And I think a lot of publishers are starting to figure it out. They’ve figured it out, and some publishers figured out a long time ago, and they’re the ones who are succeeding because they’re thinking, they’re thinking outside the box. They’re selling rights to the content. They’re thinking about how they use the content themselves, or when, when things like an ebook format or an audio book format become a big thing. It’s not it’s no longer a struggle. It’s a opportunity. It’s we have this content and we can do something with it in just a different way than maybe we didn’t see a couple of years ago or whenever.

Prashant Pathak
I’ve been shouting about it all the time. Book is just one media, one media with your content flows. There’s audio book, ebooks, and there are several other format where you can go into and the first thing that so when people say that I have my content into this particular media, and I have not put the content into a certain media, because we don’t see revenues you would not sell If you’re not there. So the first requirement of selling something is to make it available, and then only you can make decisions whether it is not happening or happening, and, and, and you can figure out how to make it work. So I’ve always been talking about it that we have to make sure that we are available in the first place, and then we figure out how we can sell it further, yeah, or it can be available to people further.

Joshua Tallent
And then that’s where something like London Book Fair can be pretty helpful. Because you’re going to the fair, you’re seeing what other publishers or other companies are doing. You’re seeing innovations that happen on the you know, on the technology side, going to something like CES is an interesting way to see, you know, the Consumer Electronics Show is an interesting way to see what consumer electronics are coming out, what’s what’s robotics happening? What’s happening robotics right now, and these other things. Same thing happens at a book fair in that you can walk around and talk with other companies that are doing innovative things with audiobooks or AI or ebooks or some other format that we’ve never seen before, or some app or some idea or community building, or whatever it is, those are the kinds of things you want to take back with you after you come to the fair, like take that back home. So when you go back home from London book fair or bologna or Frankfurt or wherever, and you’ve been seeing these different things, these strategic insights or ideas. How do you translate those? How would you recommend a publisher translate those into real, actionable change or project roadmaps or investigations when they get back home, how do they take those ideas they’re seeing and do something with them?

Prashant Pathak
So coming back after two and a half intense days of meeting so many people, the first thing I can personally talk about myself is I try to cut as much as noise, which I had in the last two and a half three days, and try to figure out my short medium and. Long term goals coming out of the fair and usually being on the sales side. My you know, long term goal has always been making some sales, but the medium term goals have been around figuring out what can what I can do something in between to make sure that the sales happen for a longer period of time. So I think the first thing, if a publisher is coming back from intense event like a London Book Fair, which is an amalgamation of everything. So it’s not only you’re meeting publishers, it’s also a lot of service providers you’re meeting you’re meeting printers. You can see a lot of rights agent in the right center at the London book where you see a lot of stock buyers of books coming from African continent. So a lot is happening. You can see the academic publisher, the higher education publisher, the children publisher at the London because a lot is happening in a very short period of time. And mind you, it’s a two and a half days, practically two and a half days book fair. So a lot happens in the first thing I would advise the publisher to do is just think about what exactly they thought about getting out of London when they went into the London Book Fair. Because a lot of conversation happens. A lot of things happen, and you get distracted, and then basically try to focus back on the things which they decided they wanted to do when they were going in, and rest of the thing can happen over the period of one year. You have one more year to go back again.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, yeah, go in with a plan, and then come back and process and take those ideas and start figuring out how to take those ideas into into reality. That makes a lot of sense. A lot of the fair is planned out well in advance, but some of it does go off script. And we talked, you talked a little bit about how publishers Without Borders kind of gets involved in that, you know, things were coming up and, hey, come to this thing, or here’s something you might not have heard of that’s happening. You know, how do you initiate meaningful and productive conversations with someone that you might not know, or effectively, kind of leverage your network for impromptu conversations at a fair like like London.

Prashant Pathak
Well, it’s B to B business book fair. It’s an expensive book fair, if you come to think of it, and when you’re walking into the fair, everything is account people’s time or account is accounted, completely accounted for. They have spent a lot of money to be there to do something. So if you really want something out of someone, be straight. I mean, just go in. If you have a request, put in a request, respect their time. They might be something or they might be off to something. Even they are having a sandwich, they would like to have the sandwich alone, because it’s been busy day. So whatever you have if, if you want to do an impromptu conversation, be respectful of somebody’s, you know, time, ask straightforward questions, ask straight put in a straightforward request. And so this is what I want to do. And maybe, can we do it here, or maybe sometime later? And I think that’s the that’s the best way to go about it. The other thing is, we can. I can always suggest, is we at publishers without borders, we do create an event called a PWB meet from last three years at the London Book Fair. This year, the publishers Without Borders meet is going to happen at the Soho residence at the ward Street. And everybody is invited, sent free event. Anybody can come in. They have to register first, and you can have a lot of impromptu conversation after the book fair, which might lead to something. But during the book fair, I would say that respects people time and they are busy, be very straightforward. It’s a wonderful industry we work in. I have never been said no by anyone. If I wanted something, I have walked in respectfully asked, and they said, okay, they can come back and talk about it, or grab a card, exchange cards, write an email. And the industry we are in, I have seen people responding if you go with an earnest request, yeah,

Joshua Tallent
that’s good. I like that advice a lot. Well. Prashant, thank you very much for joining us. I really appreciate your time and appreciate you taking some time to chat about the London Book Fair and publishers without borders. Where can people find out more about the work that you’re doing, and where can they? Where can they join that work?

Prashant Pathak
They can find me on LinkedIn, practically on all the social media platforms, if you just type my name, and the best way to follow publishers Without Borders is we have a link tree, link, link, dot tree, backslash publishers without borders that will lead you to all the social media channels and handles we have, and I’ll share that link with you. To put it in the conversation somewhere, and people can join us through that link. Great.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, we’ll put that in the show notes. Again. Really appreciate your time and looking forward to seeing you in London in a couple of weeks.

Prashant Pathak
Looking forward to see you as well. And thank you for having me

Joshua Tallent
and also the Firebrand group is going to be at the London book fair. You can see us at booth 5c, 108, if you want to come, drop by and say hello or just reach out to me if you’ve got time and want to set up a meeting, that’s it for this episode of the book smarts podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast. And we also really appreciate it when you share the podcast with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show or want to set up a meeting at London, you can email me at Joshua at Firebrand tech.com thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.