The below is a post written by Peter Collingridge, co-founder and MD of Enhanced Editions. Peter was asked to write it as part of his attendance of this week’s government C&binet Forum, a conference, “created by the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport to foster international dialogue about the creative economy”. The post is cross-posted at C&binet’s website and was written with a the brief to ask a question of the audience for C&binet.
I was delighted to be invited to C&binet as one of the British Council’s “young creative” entrepreneurs.
The themes of the conference – attracting talent, developing business models, accessing funding, and securing rights – certainly resonate: I’ve been wrestling with them since setting up Enhanced Editions in July 2008 to make bespoke digital books for the iPhone.
Our founding team has a diverse range of skills and experiences but we all share an almost obsessive focus on quality and a conviction in our business. Our titles bring together a range of digital and social media to create a new user experience that redefines the roles of the publisher, agent, and reader. And the indications are that this new model has also resonated with users and industry alike.
Our first title, Bunny Munro (by rockstar Nick Cave), brought together ebook, video, audio, a soundtrack synchronised to the text, live newsfeeds and a beautiful, customisable user interface. The Bookseller described it as “the moment digital publishing came of age”.
We felt that raising capital at this stage would be a costly distraction, so we minimized costs, including forgoing salaries. Silicon Valley calls this ‘bootstrapping’, and we think it helps to set priorities and make decisions.
But it’s tough, and we’re not helped by government red tape, increases in employers’ NI, VAT changes and a high tax rates. As C&binet makes very clear, creative start-ups are key to the vibrancy of the UK’s creative industry, but these policies create obstructions and disincentives for entrepreneurs who are already grappling with a multitude of challenges.
The questions being addressed at the conference are complex and deserve discussion and debate. They have great relevance to our business as it both tries to establish new models and grows fast. But they’re not the only questions I want the government to discuss. What I want to know is – and my question for the poll is – what can the government do to help start-ups in the creative industries?
