BOOKING THE FUTURE: a summer school for professionals in publishing sector

Evangelia Avloniti was born in Corfu, Greece. She studied History of Art, Archaeology and Literary Translation at various institutions, including the Courtauld Institute of Art, King’s College, London, Deree – The American College of Greece and University College London. She began her career at Sotheby’s in London and then worked as an editor in ELT publishing for five years. In 2009, she founded the Ersilia Literary Agency, where she represents Greek authors in Greece and worldwide, and foreign agents and publishers in Greece. She was named a Frankfurt Fellow in 2013 and a Zev Birger Fellow in 2015.

Elodie Pazhot dreamed of selling books from the early childhood. She was fortunate to work for some time at the bookshops that had a high reputation: "Vent d'Ouest" ("West Wind") in Nantes, "La Machine à Lire" ("Reading Machine") in Bordeaux. Later, Elodie became a representative of the publishing house "Actes Sud", and then a responsible officer: in the publishing house "Liana Levi" since 2004, she is in charge of commercial affairs. Her competence includes issues of distribution and sales management, contacts with bookstores, organization of commercial meetings and projects, participation of publishing house in salons and festivals, website management and management of publishing house’s pages in social networks.

Emanuele Giammarco is an Italian editor of English and French-language books, a translator (ZZ Packer's "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere") and an editor of Italian fiction. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of the Roman University of La Sapienza in 2013. In 2015, he received a postgraduate degree in publishing and had an internship in Saggiatore, a historic Milanese publisher. In the same year, together with Stefano Friani, he founded Racconti edizioni, the first Italian publishing house specializing in short stories. The first Italian book on his editorial, Elvis Malay's "Dal terrazzo si vede casa mia", is on the long list of prestigious Strega award.

Karina Elm is Customer Relations and Community Manager at NetGalley Germany, a global digital galley distribution platform used by publishers and professional readers (booksellers, book bloggers and other reviewers, librarians etc.) around the world. She previously worked for Ullstein Publishers as part of the team around digital imprints Midnight and Forever and as Online Marketing Manager at Online Marketing Agency Clear Canvas in Berlin. Karina Elm is initiator and driving force behind the German Book Blog Award launched in 2017 and is currently teaching a class at the Free University of Berlin on the topic of Online Reading Communities.

Martin Vopěnka (1963) is a Jewish Czech writer, publisher, traveller and journalist. He’s the author of 20 books, 8 novels for adults and 3 young-adult fiction novels, some of which are published abroad. The themes he explores in his books go beyond those associated with Czech literature and extend to themes of strong philosophical and psychological significance. He contributes polemic articles to the national daily paper MF Dnes. In 1997 and 2012 he was a guest at the Prague Writers Festival. He is a member of the Czech PEN Club and chairman of The Association of Czech Publishers and Booksellers (since 2013). He lives in Prague.

Steve Bohme is Research Director in Nielsen Book Research UK company. He has managed the Books and Consumers survey since 1997, as well as a wide variety of other qualitative and quantitative research projects relating to the book market, and to reading and buying habits. Steve is a Member of the Market Research Society (MRS). Steve Bohme joined Nielsen when Nielsen acquired the business intelligence and commerce solutions products from Bowker in 2013. Prior to that, Steve worked at Bowker Market Research (BML) since 1994, becoming Research Manager in 1996 and Research Director in 2001. He will explain how Nielsen collects and analyses sales data and consumer insights to inform decision making across a range of functions within publishing and bookselling.

Tom Mrazauskas is working as a book designer since 2008. From 2016 he is also publishing photobooks under his own imprint Brave Books. His works have won several awards in international book design competitions. He created the design of books for German publishers (Matthes & Seitz Berlin, Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz and others), as well as publishers from Latvia, Lithuania, Great Britain, France, etc. Stiftung Buchkkunst invited him twice to the jury of the "The Most Beautiful Books of the World" ("Schönste Bücher aus aller Welt"). His book design and publishing experience had to be realized, so since June 2017 he is hosting an international conference on book design and publishing in Riga for designers, publishers, illustrators, printers, booksellers, font designers, programmers and publishers all over the world.

Marcin Skrabka is a lawyer, innovator, independent business analyst and consultant, owner of goodbooks.pl. For many years, he has been a publisher at Wolters Kluwer Poland and Young Digital Planet (Sanoma Learning), where he created online and mobile solutions. Active member of EURead (Stiftung Lesen). The author and project manager of several dozen innovative online publishing, education, telecommunication and banking sectors. Made several startups like prawosocjalne.pl - an innovative online legal information system with information for social workers, or czekieklimaty.pl - the largest online store of literature, films and music from the Czech Republic on the Polish market. Together with the Kukatko Foundation kukatko.pl, he created the Academy of Efficient Book Sellers to exchange know-how in such sales.