Each October, a five km square strip on the South-west side of Frankfurt’s city centre houses the world’s largest gathering of publishers. Over a million book traders vie for a spot and time to sell and buy the world’s hottest new books and media. This is where I decided to come this year, with Mosaic Press publisher Howard Aster, to get an insider’s view of the Buchmesse marathon.
Arriving on an Air France night flight from Detroit, Michigan, I stumbled off of the plane in a sleep-deprived stupor. Seven hours and four movies had not left my mind clear enough to think in another language. Let me see? What German do I remember? (It has been 20 years since I dumped my ex-boyfriend rugby player after all.)
Morgen
Ja. Nein.
Danke.
Wie geht’s?
Kein Problem.
Ich liebe dich (yes, left over from the boyfriend).
Ausgezeichnet.
Entschuldigung.
Tschűss!
Scheiβe.
Bitte geben sie mich ein…?
Haben sie…?
Und alle mein numbers: eins, zwei, drei…but only to zwanzig.
Sprechen sie Englisch?
Ich verstehe nicht.
Oh, und fuβball of course, but it was really only the last two sentences that were of any use to me at 2a.m. my time.
And truthfully, am I really going to do the work of stringing sentences together when the ticket machines for the trains are in Englisch? “Nein.”
I have never been to Frankfurt before, only the Rhineland and countryside. And perhaps the train is not the best way to enter the city for the first time. Remember all of those American Nazi movies we have all seen? Remember the part(s) where they take all of the prisoners on the trains through the ghettos to the concentration camps? Ja. The train/tram/metro system in Frankfurt converges into the city centre like a vortex. All meeting at ‘Frankfurt Hbf’. It seemed like an eerie engineering nightmare to me, passing all of those rectangular Bauhaus buildings into a centre rail yard. Maybe there’s a reason ‘rail’ rhymes with ‘jail’.
Once out of the RMV train station though, the trams and buses strolled me through modern tree-lined city streets and gardens. Relief! I am not being taken away after all; I am not in some bad 1970s flick.
Now I know that you are not supposed to sleep when you get off of a plane (so that you can sync your body to the local time zone), but as soon as I found my Star-Trek-like dorm room, I passed out until 1p.m. Even then, I had to force myself awake, reminding myself to, ‘drink water’, ‘go for a walk’, ‘get up’. My hotel was about a 30 minute walk to the fairgrounds, but that is because all of the closest hotels are sold out by December of the previous year (the deadline for renting a stand/forum at the fair).
Completely unexpected is the sheer size of the Messe. If you are from Canada like me, think of the CNE in Toronto or the Convention Centre on front street, and multiply that by ten. The CNE or Convention Centre would be just one building in the Messe. I walked up to the grounds this first day from the service entrance side. A giant purple dinosaur was just being driven into one of the buildings, and it took me another 15 minutes to walk across the grounds to building 4.0 where my ‘First Timer’s’ seminar was taking place in the Entente room.
It was here that I learned about the layout of the fair. We were told to “wear comfortable shoes!” And, “drink water!” Very practical advice for a trade fair the size of a small city. The Buchmesse not only trades manuscript rights, but film, gaming, and electronic rights as well. “The industry is in flux,” one of the presenters states, “no one knows where the boundaries for electronic media will be or what the price structures for these foreign rights will look like in the future.” Epub is the preferred electronic version for manuscripts because it can be used in every type of electronic reader, but national bookstore chains like Amazon, or Germany’s own Thalia and Weltbild stores, create their own readers and files which are brand-specific and books for those readers must be purchased from the store (a lot like itunes and ipods really). The electronic, or “transmedia” rights are traded in an area of the fair known as “Storydrive”, on the first floor of building 6.0, right below the French and Asian publishers.
One of the French book rights specialists, Anne-Solange Noble of Editions Gallimard, enlightens us on the trading of foreign copyrights. When it first opened, the Buchmesse was only for business people in the publishing industry. It wasn’t open to the general public. Today, the fair opens to the public on Saturdays and Sundays and brings in nearly half of its income from commercial book retailers on those days.
“Gallimard is a traditional book publisher with a catalogue of highly literary authors and children’s titles. [Gallimard] is still family-owned and run by Antoine Gallimard after all of these years. For us, the Buchmesse is the only truly international trade fair,” says Noble. At the Buchmesse, French, Indian, Arabic, and many other book titles are sold to publishers and translators in Sweden, Norway, and China. “We never go to American publishers,” Noble says, “because they’re just not interested in our catalogue of books.” Book fairs in London or America sell and buy exclusively English language titles, but in Frankfurt, all languages are sold and bought to other [non-English] countries and multilinguals.
Before even coming to the fair, publishers book meetings with other foreign publishers and literary agents to discuss the sale and purchase of 2-3 titles on their book list(s). The bookings take place over the web at www.book-fair.com , and last 30 minutes each. Each meeting involves a lot of research beforehand, finding the publishers whose lists are a perfect match for the titles you usually publish. Noble says that the fair is not the place to do business. It is where business relationships begin. Publishers and agents are looking for like-minded colleagues who love the same type of books they do; they are looking to network with people who will care about the titles and books they have.
“In my first year of trading,” says Zubaan Books editor Urvashi Butalia, “a big publishing house gave us the largest advance we have ever seen yet! But that publisher did nothing for the promotion of the book or the author. It meant nothing to him.” Zubaan Books was the first feminist press in India, from the house of ‘Kali for Women’. What matters most to Butalia is that the book titles sold are loved by the foreign publishers who buy them. “This way,” says Butalia, “I know the book and its message will reach an audience somewhere in the world. It won’t be buried.” An accidental encounter with a publisher some years ago, led to a collegial relationship built of trust and love for the type of books Zubaan publishes.
“He came by my stall at the end of the day,” Butalia recounts, “and offered us just €800 for the rights to one of our foremost national authors, an author who had won a great many literary rewards! It was so low. I said, ‘Come back later this evening and let me think about it.’”
“I thought, ‘it’s not much money, but he really loves the book and I know he will do well for it.’ So we accepted!” And that was the best decision Butalia ever made. It has paid off over the years in long-term, international publicity for Zubaan.
The advice I received today reminded me that a long work day packed full of meetings can be exhaustive and people do not want to waste their time speaking about every single book on someone’s list to trade. They simply want a clear, honest peaceful conversation with a like-minded book publisher. They don’t want to hear that everything is “amazing”. They just want to hear that, “this one title fits your list (the types of books you publish)”, then they will follow-up later in the year.
This led me to some questions I have for Howard tomorrow on my first day of interning, for instance:
How much does he sell his foreign rights for? I know that the selling of foreign rights is what helps his company break even, but is it enough?
Does he have his meetings right at his booth?
Does he always meet with the same people? Does he contact people more than he is contacted?
Who does he do business with most, and where did he first meet this contact?
And does he buy anything? If not (as Noble suggested), why? And if so, what and why?
Tonight as I finish this reflection on day 1 of my Buchmesse, the ‘German Book Prize for 2011’, the equivalent of the Giller, is being announced at the opening ceremonies. Who will it be?
Whoever it is, you’ll never be able to get it in English!
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