Posted by Monica Cardenas on 26 September 2022, in Byte Connects, News

I founded Byte The Book back in 2012. The idea came to me in 2011 while I was on the Novel Studio course at City University. We were reading each manuscript on our kindles and I realised how digital readers as well as other technologies were shortening the value chain between author and reader. Self publishing was starting to become more respectable and some great authors were deciding to put their books out there themselves. I also saw that it was really difficult for authors to meet agents and yet that was a focus for our course and for so many of us writing books. I wanted to try and break down some of the barriers for authors to meet agents and publishers. I have a background in business development and saw that I was good at making connections for myself and for others. Plus authors often don't earn much money from their work but are incredibly talented with plenty of other skills that could benefit each other and also industry professionals. I thought it would be great to set up a network for authors to help each other and to offer their products and skills to others.

I was greatly impressed by Adam Grant's book: Give and Take - The Surprising Power of the Good Guy in a Tough World. In it he says there are three types of people in the world: givers, takers and matchers. The most successful people are the givers that give properly with intent. He gives loads of case studies about how generous people get on in life and people that play the long game, e.g. Abraham Lincoln lost his first election to office by helping others, then got to be president and was loved. He also discusses those that were successful at first like Frank Lloyd Wright, but had problems later on in his career as he was a taker. The most connected person on LinkedIn in 2011 was Adam Rifkin. He was connected to 640 of the most powerful people in the world. He has 50 recommendations. If he were a matcher he’d give the same number of recommendations, but he’d actually given out 257. He looks for opportunities to help others. His guiding principle is that if it only takes five minutes you should do what you can to help people. He also encourages all the people that he helps to help others - the Pay It Forward philosophy. Adam Rifkin is big into anagrams (his background is in tech) and likes the anagram for his name I Find Karma.

The first Byte the Book event was at the Ivy Club back in March 2012. I got a group of people together and suggested we just talked about ways we could help each other. Some great connections were made that night! For our next event my husband suggested I get a speaker to come in. I have a background in tech and I realised lots of people in the publishing industry didn't know about digital and were hungry to learn more. I thought that was a perfect hook to get them to come along to our events.  David Gettman from McKinsey came in to talk about the history of e-books, and for the next one Digital Dan Franklin came to speak. We sold out all of our events after that one. With monthly events in London and at book fairs around the world, Byte the Book grew from there.

Over the last couple of years much of our work has been online but we are still focused on putting people together from across the globe. As well as continuing to connect people online, I am excited to get back to in person events. I'll be in Frankfurt for the book fair this October (we still have a few free tickets for our members email us at info@bytethebook.com for more information on that). After that we have a workshop on TikTok at the Groucho Club on 25th October. We'll be at the Stationers exploring New Bookselling routes on 31st October.  As well as educating attendees it's great that we'll have the opportunity to network again. It is all about connections and that can still happen online. We have an Agent Tables with a Children's Books focus on 8th November. Another great initiative that we started in lockdown and will continue to do are our Member Surgeries, where I meet one-to-one with our members for 15 minutes each to discuss goals but also to make recommendations and provide introductions.  The next one of those is on 1st November and members can book on to it here. I also hope to have a party over the next few months to celebrate our 10 year milestone and to give our members more opportunities to network! Keep an eye on our events page for more details on that.

So if you're not already a member please do join us. You can do so from just £20 a month here. And if you are a member I do encourage you all to help each other so that our lovely network can grow and thrive. Helping others really does make you feel good!