During the last Readmagine conference there was a dialogue between Ashleigh Gardner (Wattpad) and Tuomas Sorjamaa (Kaiken) about the Intellectual Property as a new kind of raw material for the business models in a multichannel environment and the new partnerships that could merge between different kind of retailers or producers of content.
In the conversation were explained the business models of both cases, hybrid in several senses and their relation with the concept of ‘book industry’, the role of fan fiction, the multichannel strategies, the user data collection, the user content generation, videogames, emerging genres, creating content for very different products, partnerships with other platform, new kind of authorship or the leverage of new behavior trends.
Ashleihg Gardner is Deputy General Manager, Wattpad Studios, Publishing at Wattpad which aims to create meaningful promotional and editorial partnerships with the publishing, advertising, and entertainment industries. Before joining Wattpad, Ashleigh was director of content management at Kobo, where she focused on expanding Kobo’s existing catalogue, while developing new ebook stores in international markets.
Tuomas Sorjamaa is Licensing & Acquisitions Manager at Kaiken Entertainment, an entertainment company specializing in storytelling through TV, film, digital products, licensing and publishing. Kaiken discovers, develops and creates original IPs with potential to build multimedia franchises around them. At Kaiken, Tuomas handles licensing and rights sales and new IP acquisitions and development. Previously he has worked as writer, editor, and children’s publisher. Tuomas holds master’s degrees in both intellectual property law and English language and literature.
