October 14th, 2008

Frankfurt Fellows celebrate on the Main

 

 

A pleasant cruise up Frankfurt’s Main river on the aptly -named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was in order Monday night for those lucky individuals chosen to  participate in the Frankfurt’s successful Fellowship and Invitation Programmes.

The two professional development programmes aim to bring people to Frankfurt who otherwise wouldn’t make it, either because they’re not quite senior enough, or because they lack the financial wherewithal.

In the case of the Fellowship Programme, 16 up-and-coming publishing professionals from 13 countries have spent a month in Germany learning about the German book trade, culminating in the Frankfurt Book Fair itself.

The 25 publishers brought to Germany as part of the Invitation Programme are generally those from less-developed book markets—from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe—who otherwise would struggle to exhibit at the Fair. The Frankfurt Book Fair and Germany’s Federal Foreign Office fund their visit to the fair, and also provide them with exhibition space (in Hall 5.0 E 926).

Talking to one Egyptian publisher on the river cruise gave me not only a sense of the challenges book publishers in that country face, but also put the complaints of some western publishers in some perspective. Egypt has no supply chain for books as such, and few general bookshops. Publishers sell their own books through their own retail outlets and sometimes sell the books of other publishers through largely ad hoc arrangements. There is no review culture for books, and so books sell principally by word-of-mouth. In spite of this, the American University in Cairo Press had great success with Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building. Aswany, now published around the world, was also on the boat.

Neither the Fellowship or Invitation Programme are as well known as they could be. Those lucky enough to participate in the programmes say they derive an enormous amount of professional and personal enjoyment from them. If you’re not at Frankfurt this year, perhaps you should be thinking of applying to one of these programmes for 2009.

Shashi Tharoor nearly became the successor to Kofi Annan as Secretary-General of the United Nations. Had he succeeded, it is likely he would have made the education of women around the world a top priority

“When I was at the UN and asked the one single to change the world, my answer is “educate girls.” He cited statistics that offered proof that if you educate a girl as opposed to a boy, the positive effect spreads out across the entire community with which the girl has, or eventually, will have contact.

Tharoor is today a chairman of the Dubai-based Afras Ventures and a patron of LitCam, the Frankfurt Book Fair Literacy Campaign. His comments came during the opening speeches of the second annual LitCam conference, which this year focused on the topic of multilingualism and – a term new to me – interculturalism in Europe and abroad.

Tharoor described a situation in his homeland of India where fewer than half the women in the country were literate. Yet, recounting his experience touring a charity school that catered exclusively to the children of families who made less than twenty euros a month, that learning to read was possibly the most impactful thing one could to change economic and social prospects.

“Economic success is based on education success”, he said, adding: “In the last century we were told of the objective to make the world safe for democracy, and while that is increasingly being realized, I think now through literacy, we can make the world safe for diversity and development.”

According to 2006 statistics from UNESCO, there are more than 774 million illiterate adults and ¾ of those live in only 12 countries, primarily in South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab states.

NGOs and nonprofit organizations have long championed teaching people to read, but new strategies abound. Under LitCam’s own umbrella, the “Football meets Culture” project combines soccer training with inspirational lessons. In just two years, it has expanded from Germany to South Africa and then Turkey. Others participating in today’s programs included Tin Tua of Burkina Faso, the Mother Child Education Foundation of Turkey and the National Center for Family Literacy of Louisville, KY.

Among those attending the conference was Robert Cornford, marketing manager for the publication, books and journals, for Oxfam in the UK.

“Everything you do in development depends on literacy”, he said. “The printed word is how you communicate with people.”

The LitCam conference continues tomorrow in the Congress Center.

Senior Canadian, Australian and New Zealand diplomats join with the heads of the countrys' three trade associations.

By a unanimous show of hands, publishers from Canada, Australia and New Zealand voted to pursue closer cooperation between the three English-language markets at a special pre-book fair Summit held in Frankfurt today.

‘It makes a hell of lot of sense for these three countries to come together as a coalition’, said His Excellency Mr Ian Kemish, Australia’s Ambassador to Germany, who attended the Summit alongside Canadian Ambassador His Excellency Dr Peter Boehm and Ms Jocelyn Woodley, New Zealand’s Deputy Head of Mission.

It was standing-room only at the Summit, which was organised by the Association for the Export of Canadian Books (AECB), the Australian Publishers Association (APA) and the Book Publishers Association of New Zealand (BPANZ), and was attended by about 120 publishers. Its purpose was to share information about the three markets, and to identify and discuss the challenges they have in common.

Chief among these challenges is the dominance of the two largest English-language markets, the United Kingdom and United States.

‘We are all struggling to free ourselves from the proprietorial attitudes of the US and UK that continue to dominate the publishing world,’ noted Juliet Rogers, Immediate Past President of the APA. ‘The US views Canadian rights as an automatic extension of their territory, even though they frequently have no intention of responsibly exercising those rights. The UK fails to grasp that the Empire is dead and that Commonwealth markets are no longer theirs by right.’

The Summit received detailed briefings on the three book markets, and some analysis on recent trends. In Canada, for instance, the supply chain is increasingly being integrated into the US supply chain, while in Australia bookshop returns rates have dropped significantly over the past few years as a result of publishers moving to firm-sale on backlist titles. In New Zealand, on the other hand, the country’s adoption of an open market was described Kevin Chapman, Past President of the BPANZ as ‘like a cancer, an insidious thing’ that had failed to protect the country’s culture.

Taking on Chapman’s exhortation that ‘we have to start taking each seriously and stop ignoring each other,’ a panel then discussed areas where there could be greater cooperation between Canadian, Australia and New Zealand publishers. Ideas discussed included forming consortia to bid for North American or British & Commonwealth rights for books in order to compete with British and American publishers; and working together to address the challenges presented by digital future.

It is expected that a follow-up recent will be held at the London Book Fair to build on the momentum generated by today’s Summit.

‘The digital future presents an opportunity for us to get together,’ said AECB Chair Philip Cercone, looking forward to an era of greater collaboration between the three markets. ‘There are more opportunities than we can imagine.’ 

A novel about the last days of East Germany, Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm (The Tower) is this year’s winner of the 25,000 euro German Book Prize, Germany’s premier award for fiction. Notably, the novel (published by Suhrkamp) was only published in September in Germany and has yet to be published elsewhere.

‘Through the lives of a middle-class Dresden family, [Tellkamp] tells of conformity and of resistance within a system that has run its course,’ says the citation from the award’s seven judges. ‘The novel is set in very different milieus, among school students, doctors, the literati and political cadres. Uwe Tellkamp sends his rebellious hero Christian Hoffman on a journey through hell … as never before, the reader is given a true sense of the flavour, ways of speaking and mentalities in the final days of the GDR [German Democratic Republic].’

Der Turm was chosen from 161 novels published in Germany this year, and a shortlist of five.

English-language extracts and other information about the shortlisted books can be found here.

He is, arguably, the most popular writer on the planet, one so successful that he’s being vetted with a party tomorrow for having sold 100 million copies of his books worldwide. Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian “Alchemist of Words” gave the keynote speech this morning. Entitled “The writer as pop star,” Coelho meditated on his own use of digital publishing tools to reach his massive audience. (His blog alone gets 50,000 unique visitors a day).

Coelho joked before starting that the book had 1,000 more years to go before it would disappear “then the government can rescue it,” he said, making a reference to recent government bailouts of the finance industry.

Last year, in his keynote address, publishing consultant Michael Cader urged publishers to harness advances in technology to connect with their readers; Coelho has taken that advice to heart and demonstrated how it benefitted him. Already a superstar, Coelho has the instincts of a big time performer, a Bono of the literary world and has been prescient enough to embrace the Internet as a friend rather than foe. Earlier this year he made the decision to place his Portuguese works on his web site in a free digital format. Then, he explained, because he did not own the rights to the translation (they were not his work), he linked to file sharing sites across the Web that offered “pirated” copies of his works.

Following the appearance of his books online for free in America, where they can be read online but not printed, he found he had two books – the Alchemist and The Witch of Portobello – on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously for the first time. Coelho’s thinking about the subject of giving away his book for free is simple: “People will read the first chapter and then realize they can’t take the computer on the subway so they will go and buy the book.”

And of course, in the spirit of sharing, he also made his Frankfurt speech available online immediately following the talk. Read it, it’s enlightening if only to underscore the fact that even a man closing in on retirement age is capable of mastering MySpace, blogging and the Internet in general. (Coelho slipped in the fact that his Web master is, appropriately, Turkish). If Coelho can do it, then publishers and authors half his age have no excuse not to at least make some effort.

Despite his enormous success, Coelho appears to have retained some humility. His answer to a an audience question about his opinion of women’s literature was simple and skillfully avoided controversy: “Writing is a feminine process” and as a consequence “there was only feminine writing, written by male authors and female authors.”

When asked the age old question of where he gets his ideas, he replied “other people.”

A quick survey among audience members suggested that self-styled “book people” may not be converted to Coelho just yet. More than a few said they’d yet to read one of his books.

Mostly likely, that wouldn’t give him pause and he’ just see them potential sales.

Alex Goia, a radio reporter from M94.5 in Munich was impressed enough to give him a try.

“He was smart, and funny. Older, but still young at heart,” said Goia. “I’ve not read any of his books, but a friend recommended “The Alchemist” and I think I’ll read it now.

And that is a perfect example of how is how you get to one hundred million sales – you do it by selling one book at a time.

First thing first: It’s the FBF’s 60th anniversary and, according to FBF director Juergen Boos in his speech to open this year’s conference, it’s one of the biggest yet, with  some 7,400 exhibitors – or 7,373 to be exact. The German’s command the greatest number of stands – some 3,337 – with the British have 834 and the Americans occupy 662. In all, more than 100 countries are represented. And over the next three days there will be some 400 events for professionals (that’s one every 4 minutes, if you’re counting just the hours the fair is open.To top it off, 3,000 people are expected to attend the anniversary party taking place this weekend.

Wow. Herr Gutenberg would be proud.

Prior to the official opening of the Literary Agents & Scouts Centre, agents and publishers are already deal-making. The action is in the lobbies and bars of the Frankfurter Hof and the Hessischer Hof, where groups sit in small groups at table flipping through books, materials, drinking tea, smiling and nodding. Others, in between appointments, linger on the fringes looking expectant, as if they are waiting for someone asking them to dance.

Rooms at the two hotels are so sought after during the Frankfurt Book Fair that it’s said someone has to die before you can get a reservation. Consequently, most of the faces belong to familiar names: There’s Jamie Byng of Scotland’s Cannongate air kissing George Gibson of Bloomsbury USA (they are both Europeans after all) David Poindexter of San Francisco’s MacAdam/Cage stopping by to say hi to Esther Margolis of Newmarket Press. Languages range across English, German and a smattering of French.

On Monday, Daisy Hutton sat at the bar observing the room at the Hessischer Hof. A nine-year veteran of Frankfurt, she was attending the fair for the first time in the role of VP of International Licensing for Thomas Nelson – a Christian publisher based out of Nashville and seventh biggest publisher in the US – a job she’d held for just a month.

Hutton was on the selling side and deemed the FBF so important to her job that she traveled despite having given birth just four months ago. She was on the selling side, looking for publishers to purchase rights to Nelson’s titles, and was waiting to meet a Brazilian publisher.

“The rights world is such a small world and everyone knows everyone else”, she said. “You never want to burn a bridge because you’ll probably find yourself working with or for everyone else at one point or another.”

Hutton observed that the global economic downturn has led some people to be more conservative in their purchases.

“There was less early buying, with people snapping up books prior to the Fair,” she said, “People are waiting to see how they perform in the marketplace.”

Hutton’s biggest surprise so far: The emergence of “terroir” fiction. “It’s something a French publisher told me about and I’d never heard of – she used the term in reference to one of our Amish titles, which are becoming very popular.

Catherine MacGregor, rights director for HarperCollins Canada, was “cautiously optimistic” that the economy wouldn’t have a serious impact on her business.

“Yes, people are less apt to take risks,” she said, “but things are still steady.”

In publishing, timing can be everything. One book MacGregor is selling that she thinks might interest publishers is “Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hat Capitalism” by Joseph Heath.

“We’re publishing the book next year and Frankfurt is the time when it’s important to get the word out. It’s when you can generate buzz, especially among scouts and sub-agents.”

The Grove/Atlantic team from the US divided forces, with publisher Morgan Entriken commandeering the couch at the Hessischer Hof, while Amy Hundley, subsidiary rights director worked the room at the Frankfurter Hof.

To Hundley, the scene was all about relationship building. “You get to reacquaint yourself with what kinds of books different editors are interested in, who has similar tastes as you,” she explained.

Observing how many American editors, publishers and agents were present Hundley (a newlywed who went directly from her Honeymoon in Amsterdam to the Frankfurter Hof) scoffed at the recent comments by the secretary of the Swedish Academy that said Americans don’t read enough translated fiction.

“If you look at books like ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ and ‘Night Train to Lisbon,’ they were both bestsellers in the US,” she said.

In 2007, Hundley had an extremely busy Fair, as publisher in ten different countries snapped up rights to the book “The Butterfly Mosque,” a memoir by G. Willow Wilson, an American woman who converts to Islam and moves to Cairo.

This year she has high hopes for Robert Olen Butler’s latest novel “Hell” – about a journalist who does the nightly newscast in Hell and is looking for way out.

“It’s a very clever book and is the only book at the Fair that has the character of Dick Cheney [the US vice president] as a minion of Satan,” she says, adding after some reconsideration “well, maybe not the only book…”

It is then that the popping of Champagne corks behind the bar interrupts our conversation, signaling that the deal making for the day is done and the party has begun.