October 16th, 2008

India may produce 70 to 80,000 new titles each year, but Urvashi Butalia, director of Zubaan press, is less than impressed. “That is nothing per capita for a country with a billion or more people.”

 The Indian book market continues to grow at 10 to 30 per cent each year, publishing hundreds of writers in 22 official language. This compares with, say, 20 years ago – the first time when India was a Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair – and could only produce 22 writers.

The German Book Office New Delhi sponsored a Teatime session with publishers aimed at helping Fairgoers make sense of what appears at first to be a chaotic market.

 A few salient facts:

“The multiple languages fragment the market, but also increase it”, explained Butalia. “English publishers are starting to translate into Indian languages, but there is also much translation among the Indian languages.”

70 per cent of the book market is in Indian languages, 30 per cent in English, which is the single largest.

Distribution of books remains a problem - but large industrial corporations have started bookstore chains. Tata is opening 150 bookshops. Others include Reliance and Pantaloon. Smaller chains, such as Crossword and the Oxford Bookstore and Landmark have expansion plans.

A typical paperback costs 200-300 rupees (4 – 6 US-Dollars); hardbacks are 600-700 rupees (12-14 US-Dollars) – though some bestsellers are available for half as much

Print runs have exploded from 1,000 copies to an average of 5-10,000.

A representative from Penguin India said that his business is growing at a rate of 25 per cent per year and that there is “great interest in children’s books, especially those that are didactic or educational”. Other hot topics include business, current affairs, and self-improvement.

That doesn’t mean fiction doesn’t also sell. The current bestselling book in the country is the novel “The Three Mistakes of My Life” by Chetan Bhagat (Rupa), which has moved 500,000 copies so far.  (His previous novel, “One Night @ the Call Center”, was also a runaway hit).

The rights scene is still developing and the number of agents working in the country has risen to three. “But last year they were representing maybe ten authors”, said Butalia. “Now they have 50.”

A question from the audience about rights conflicts with the US and UK markets elicited a mixed response. One person suggested there was no conflict; while another said that books sometimes bleed into India from the UK or US, in part because selling directly into the market can sometimes earn a publisher more money from sales than they might get from rights.

Piracy remains one of the biggest problems in the country. “If you stop at a traffic light in Mumbai or Delhi people will try and sell you the recent bestsellers published quite horribly,” said the representative from Penguin India.

The market is also “clogged up” with cheap remainders, which one person in the audience suggested were being dumped on the country.

Though chaotic, the Indian book market need not be so intimidating. For further information, pick up a copy of the handy “Directory of the CII Publishing Cell” produced for the FBF and available at the Indian Collective Stand in Hall 6.0.  

In its 60th year, the Frankfurt Book Fair is continuing to adapt to a changing industry and structurally is well-placed to develop further, according to the Fair Director Juergen Boos.

Speaking today to members of the international press, Boos described the fair as a kaleidoscope that looked different depending on which part of the book business it was viewed through. It was also continuously evolving:

‘Frankfurt has to change every year because what is interesting to the industry changes every year,’ he said, singling out such emerging opportunities as electronic paper, content for mobile phones and merchandising as areas that will influence fairs of the future. This year alone, some 30 per cent of exhibitors were exhibiting some form of digital content, he noted, ‘You now have a lot more rights to sell.’

While it was too early to assess the impact of the current global financial crisis on the fair, Boos said the fair was still growing each year in spite of the rise in internet communication, clearly indicating that face-to-face meetings were still necessary to establish trust between potential business partners.

Boos also addressed questions on the controversies surrounding both this year’s Guest of Honour Turkey, and next year’s - China. He described the recently announced boycott of the fair by some Turkish writers who oppose the current Turkish Government as a ‘big mistake’, given that the fair would have given them a much larger platform upon which to air their grievances.

‘There is no censorship in Frankfurt, and pubishers can bring whatever authors they want to the fair’, he said, pointing out the the pre-fair Symposium and the International Centre in Hall 5.0 were both venues for discussing controversial issues related to the Guests of Honour. He noted that Turkey’s Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk had been critical of the Turkish Government in his speech at the opening ceremony for this year’s fair but had later sat next to Turkish President Abdullah Gül, who had conceded that more human rights reforms were necessary.

‘I wouldn’t have expected such progress to happen so quickly, but it did’, said a pleased Boos.

Frankfurt’s two overseas joint ventures, the Cape Town and Abu Dhabi International Book Fairs, also came up for discussion.

‘We still have a challenge with Cape Town’, he noted, ‘It needs to become a platform for independent African publishers and for that to happen we need subsidised travel to get African publishers and authors to Cape Town.’

The Abu Dhabi International Book Fair has no such funding issues, but there were structural challenges for the Arab book market such as a lack of an Arabic Books in Print database.

Boos, who recently signed up for another five years as the fair’s Director, would still like to open a book fair in Asia, provided the right partner could be found. It was part of the fair’s role to ’support publishing everywhere around the world,’ he said.

Lunchtime today saw a celebration for the German edition of Kampung Boy by LAT, one of Malaysia’s most celebrated cartoonists. The book is the first of a popular series of autobiographical comic books that humorously capture Malaysian village life. LAT is now an institution in Malaysia and Kampung Boy has been described by no less than The Simpsons creator Matt Groening as ‘one of the all-time great cartoon books.’

The celebration was held at the Malaysian National Institute of Translation (Hall 6.1 E916). The Institute was founded back in 1993 to encourage quality translation and interpreting in Malaysia and, notably, is interested in encouraging translations into and out of Malay and English (Malay is the country’s official language, but many Malaysian books are written in English). Publishers will be made most welcome at their stand, as I was.

John Mutter first came to Frankfurt in 1993 when he was working as an editor for Publishers Weekly magazine in the US. Now co-founder of the online bookselling newsletter Shelf Awareness, he’s still coming, though he’s now somewhat less obliged to pack his schedule with back-to-back appointments.

“I usually have two or three things set up, as well as lunch, but then I just leave the rest up to serendipity,” he says.

He advises that if you’re an English-speaker to venture out beyond Hall 8.

“The tone is different in different parts of the Fair. Go to the German halls and you’re immediately reminded that this is the national German book fair. If you just get off the S-Bahn at Hall 8, you might just think it’s just about Americans and UK publishers making deals.

Mutter says the same goes for venturing out to neighborhoods not immediately surrounding the Fairgrounds. “If you just stick to the area around here or the train station, you might think Frankfurt was horrible. Try the Sachsenhausen neighborhood, where there are good bars and restaurants. Or the Ziel, which is a wonderful walking and shopping street.”

Mutter is spending the remainder of the show walking the floor with Jen Risko, his colleague and the person responsible for advertising sales for Shelf Awareness.

He says that despite the dire economic news coming out of the stock markets people are still transacting business.

“You’d think that considering people would be more nervous,” he said. “It’s always said that books are recession proof. Maybe they actually are.”

In contrast to Russia, both the Korean government and the Romanian government have recently launched large projects to better promote their writers abroad.

The Korea Literature Translation Institute (6.0 E 937) recently published some wonderful, quite elegant materials to help foreign publishers get a better sense of the Korean literary scene. Just in time for the fair, they published the first issue of a list: Books from Korea, a new quarterly magazine with essays, articles, samples, reviews, and interviews of Korean writers and books. It’s a nice glossy magazine filled with interesting content, like a piece called “The Postmodern City and Its Discontents.”

As if that weren’t enough, they also published the first volume of “New Writing from Korea,” a 374-page collection of excerpts from twenty-five contemporary Korean authors. It’s about half-prose, half-poetry, and is one of the densest, heaviest books I’ve ever tried to lug around in my bag. And possibly the first comprehensive introduction to Korean literature that I’ve encountered.

Over in Romania, they announced the launch of Contemporary Romanian Writers, a new website providing bio and bibliographic information along with book descriptions and excerpts for a host of Romanian writers. From a quick scan, it’s a very well designed site, and one that will be incredibly useful to any publisher interested in Romanian lit.

Obviously a number of other countries are producing beautiful brochures and other materials to promote their authors, but these two really stand out as impressive, ambitious projects.

At the urging of the Frankfurt Book Fair and the German Book Office in Moscow, Russian representatives put on a special “Look at Russia” seminar earlier today. Vladimir Grigoriev, the deputy head of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication, gave a short presentation filled with statistics about the Russian publishing scene, including:

* Approx. 110,000 titles are published each year, from 100 different publishers;

* 80 per cent of these publishers are based in Moscow (Grigoriev said that he’d rather see the scene spread out throughout the country);

* More than 80 per cent of the titles published each year are from Russian authors;

* Translation is a growing field, with approx. 6,000 English works translated into Russia each year, 1,000 from Germany and France, 300+ from Spanish–all numbers that exceed the number of translations published in the U.S. each year;

* Over the next couple of years, Grigoriev believes one or two chains will come to dominate the bookselling market. At the moment there isn’t any one company with a presence throughout Russia.

Always interesting to get these facts, and to compare them with other countries, but I wish he (or another presenter) would’ve talked about some contemporary writers, particular publishing houses, etc. Unlike a number of other countries (Netherlands, Estonia, France, Germany, and many more), Russia does not have a “book office” or any other organization designed to promote Russia literature abroad, which is one reason that only a few contemporary writers are being translated.

Surprisingly (to me at least), the question and answer session got a bit tense when someone questioned the motive of the Russian booth, claiming that instead of sending Russia authors to represent the culture, they only sent the government . . . Grigoriev dodged the question gracefully, claiming that the private publishing scene has only existed for seventeen years, so publishers were still learning how to promote authors abroad. He did follow this up by pointing out that the only state-run publishers are the ones that produce medical books, the official encylopedia, and textbooks . . . You know, fact-based publications. Hmm.

Everyone knows Paulo Coelho was a rock lyricist early in his career, but who knew he could sing? The author was surprisingly on-key as he joined the band on stage last night in a version of Bob Marley’s classic “No Woman, No Cry” at party in his honor at the King Kamehameha Club, sponsored jointly by his German language publisher Diogenes and Mercedes Benz.

The 61-year-old was all smiles while serenading the crowd of publishing execs and assorted well wishers.

Fans of Coelho treat him with a cultish, messianic fervor. Just in case you miss the comparison with God, the invitation made it overt. It came – at least to one friend, hand delivered – on a near poster sized card and the image, of Coelho reaching out and pointing to a glass of wine – riffed on Michaelango’s portrait of God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling as he reaches out his hand to give life to Adam.

Flat screen TV’s around the club flashed portraits of Coelho’s fans posing with their favorite of his books, images he solicited himself off his Website. The only thing missing from the evening were temporary tattoos of the author that could be applied to one’s body, or at the very least, some free copies of his books. Perhaps the organizers assumed everyone there was already familiar with his work (though a surprising number surveyed admitted to having never read him..

As the evening wound down, people slowly trickled out into the drizzling night, the Bossa Nova band, with an impossibly leggy Brazilian singer, finished up with the Joao Gilberto songbook.

Surprisingly, for such a posh party the liquor on offer were call brands only and there were no goodie bags of gifts (or maybe I just got there too late).

Really, after selling one hundred million copies, would the keys to a new Mercedes have been too much to ask?