Lagos Book and Arts Festival (LABAF)

THE 12th Lagos Book And Art Festival, scheduled for November 12, 2010, will open with a Publishers Forum, according to the organizers. “The Publishers’ Forum is to provide a concentrated space for key publishers in Nigeria to collectively appraise their current operations within the context of the challenges facing their industry”, according to the Festival spokesman Ayo Arigbabu. “It is a ‘focus group’ or a strategy session where the facilitator(s) serve as umpires in a series of brainstorming sessions. The forum is targeted at principals of publishing houses who seek to grow their market and are willing to engage in creative thinking towards identifying strategies that can make this possible for them whether within a collective or through their individual operations”. The expectation is that “cogent strategies would emerge from the session which are immediately implementable or could be built upon in future”. Arigbabu explains that the forum should aid the publishers in collectively identifying key steps that can be taken as individual businesses or as a collective to improve their bottom line”. In his own words: “CORA (the orgainisers), sees itself as a midwife to the different facets of the creative industries in Nigeria. Therefore what we hope to achieve through the publisher’s forum is to provide a platform for Nigerian publishers to collectively brainstorm on how to improve their business”. Within the four hours marked up for the business forum, participants to add value to their businesses through critical feedback on their processes, input on the most challenging areas they have to deal with and useful networking”.