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Earlier this year, I blogged about another trade show, Book Expo America, for the US trade journal Publishers Weekly. My topic was Sunday, just like today’s topic, but that post was an outraged post, and this post is a post of praise for while Book Expo America never opens up to the public, the Frankfurt Book Fair does.
So as some international visitors began to trickle out yesterday morning, many more domestic visitors were rushing in to replace them. It was thrilling to watch - mothers and children, grandfathers and grandchildren, freaks and geeks, academics and poets flooded the book fair, in search of books.
Why then, did I hear so much grumbling from some of the international visitors? Sure, we’re running from appointment to appointment, and it can add a couple minutes to our journey but… People! these folks pay your salary. The fees paid to designers, the advances and royalties paid to agents and authors, the retainers paid to scouts, all that money? That comes from the gaggle of girls all got up in manga outfits. They and their friends and their parents are what keep you in business.
An author is, for sure, still an author without them. But we, we publishers, we are nothing without them. Yet they don’t lord their status as our paymasters over us! No, they’re too busy browsing, scavenging, plundering, buying, spending hours of time building costumes so they can dressing up like their favorite characters and tell the world how much they love the experience our books give them.
So next year, on Friday as we anticipate their arrival, and on Saturday as they flood in, giddy with booklust, and on Sunday, as they being to explore the less familiar parts of global publishing, the American publishers stands, the Estonians, the art book publishers, let’s not be contemptuous, or whiny, but be thinking instead, how can we harness this energy? How can each of us get more of our readers this excited about books?
As I just posted in discussing the lessons of this week’s Book Fair in regards to business models, the future is now here. And since we are still on the Frankfurt time that I described in my opening post, this means that tomorrow, tomorrow will be the first day of Frankfurt 2010, so let’s use the intervening 360 days of nonFrankfurt time to be, yes, embracing the digital as well as the print, but above all to be embracing the reader, who makes all this possible.
Tags: the reader
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20. October 2009
06:49 Uhr
Yay for the readers and writers!
20. October 2009
22:23 Uhr
Thank you, Richard, for this reminder. I’m constantly reminded throughout the fair that the “drive-bys” (those people, from both the public and the industry, who happen to pass by our stand) are future customers, future readers. The work we do in Frankfurt is ultimately about reaching more readers across the globe, so why spurn them in the same moment that we work to attract them??
Viva Les Lecteurs!