Buchmesse Day Two - The First Day of Trading

I get up when I see the daylight, and although it is only 7:15, my programme says that the Buchmesse opens at 8:00, so I shower, dress and leave quickly without breakfast. It’s a half hour walk, so even at that I will be late.

The cold, damp air prickles my skin. ‘I thought it was supposed to be sunny here this week?’ I think to myself, but it is obviously going to rain later, and I have forgotten my coat up in the room. There’s no time to go back for it now. I walk faster. Past the cigarette dispensers on each corner, by the construction workers building a new hotel, past a fat cat sitting in a window sill.

I arrive in the back supply entrance again, and walk past hall 9.0 to 8.0 where all of the North American (English) publishers are. No one is at the door. Did I even need a ticket? There are a couple of fair people there in red jackets who check my backpack. They will do this another ten times during the day as I leave and enter the building, but only in hall 8.0. In the other halls, with other countries, my bag isn’t even bothered with. “The Americans probably requested it,” someone says to me.

Inside, I look for row L: “M, N, oops, wrong way, K, oh the Scottish presses!  L!” I walk up the aisle to booth 926 where Howard is…?

Nope, no Howard. In fact, there aren’t many people around at all. A woman in the booth next to me says ‘hi’. She is just setting up books and folders for the day. Howard must have come yesterday afternoon to set up his display because the books are there on the shelves and the folders out and ready for a day’s trading. I sit down at the little table with two chairs and change my shoes. I try to re-arrange books into the empty spaces so that the display will look colourful and pleasant. Then I see coffee!

Across the aisle from booth 926 is a café, the Green Café. There are three more: the Red Café, the White Café, the Black Café, but Green is right by aisle L. I walk over and join the line of two people waiting for coffee, order, and fill it with milk. It’s hot, fragrant, and creamy. What is it about European coffee that is so good? It always seems so much richer than a Tim’s.

Howard arrives just as I am finishing the cup and the ‘Buchmesse’ daily news. Each day the fair delivers a ‘news sheet’ to each stand. In this sheet I learn that Nan Graham of Scribner’s has just bought lawyer M.L. Stedman’s (whoever that is) first-time novel, The Light Between Oceans for six figures. Apparently, it’s an enormous amount before the fair has even begun. I suppose the news is intended to boost everyone’s trading morale, hoping to make similar rights’ deals over the next couple of days. There is a very competitive spirit amongst the traders in this way, a horse race of sorts.

A tiny booth at the fair for independent presses like Mosaic Press costs over €1,500, and the larger presses have very elaborate displays taking up whole ‘blocks’ costing thousands of Euros. One even has a second floor meeting and eating area! Each trader would hope to recover that cost in sales over the year.

Howard laughs at me, “I just knew you would be here bright and early!”

“I thought I was late actually; I read it began at 8:00,” I say.

“Nooooo., the doors open at 8:00, but the trading doesn’t officially begin until 9:00. Most people don’t even book meetings until 9:30,” he informs me.

I offer to get him a coffee too, “handy spot this is!” But Howard is booked back-to-back with meetings for the day and before we can talk much his first meeting arrives, a publisher and buyer from India whom he sees at the fair every year. I go to learn more about the electronic media and the Chinese market while Howard is describes the  titles various publishers may be interested in acquiring.

I start by attending one of the hundreds of presentation “Hot Spots” at the fair. This one is over in ‘4.2’, the educational books portion of the fair. Three publishers, all male, are presenting the reasons why their businesses have been so successful. For two, the reasons seems obvious, “identify one or two major projects; dedicate your time and resources to them; and work on them day-after-day, month-after-month, year-after-year,” the managing editor of Merriam-Webster states. The other, is the leading editor of the Chinese national publishing conglomerate. This was interesting. There were five major educational publishers in China, now there is one (including all of the five). They will be opening offices in London and New York, and will be concentrating on the “learning Chinese as a second language market (CTL)” and “assessment and evaluation”. He emphasized, a few times, that, “we will not lay people off!” I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. Has he had criticisms from his workers? Somewhere lost in the translation, I think he wanted people to know that his company was focused on group work and customer service (personal relations). It just came out a bit funny.

After listening to a few of these ‘personal success’ stories I became wary. If someone really does have a formula for success, are they going to announce it to a room filled with hundreds of their competitors? Really? So I wandered over to see what all of the ‘electronic hype’ was about. These aisles were packed with vendors and buyers. There were two basic types – one producing e-book formats (including interactive text book formats) that publishers could use, and a second showing how to market e-books. I had heard over and over again that, “e-publishing is changing everything,” and there seemed to be a real business fear around this. I am a reader. I buy books. I have many friends that own kindles or i-pads or whatever the current version is. I really don’t see what the big scare is, except perhaps the lower cost of production. Is that bad? Not for me. So you have the e-file of the book instead of the paper copy. What’s the big deal? Get on with it already.

An Indian representative that I was speaking with told me that they could produce the .epub version of a book for 34₵. Wow! That’s cheap. And honestly, why not? What’s the big deal? You have the book in an electronic form already from the writer, in Word or .pdf, is it really that hard to just upload it so people can buy it? I can see how publishers wouldn’t be making the same kind of income from the retail sales of course, but aren’t they saving on the printing costs? At any rate, from a consumer’s perspective, I didn’t think this was all that new.

Something that was new for me was the “Storydrive” section of the Buchmesse, and gaming. Here, different electronic game and film producers traded the rights to various games or films, and there were several presentations addressing their conference theme, “how will stories of the future be told?” Yes, this I was interested in. Even at the turn of the 20^th century, Jean Paul Sartre believed that novels were becoming obsolete, and that film was the new wave of disseminating an idea. This is, even today, a primary media source of entertainment for people. Will gaming be the next wave? We’re probably there already (at least with the 6-20 boys’ market) and don’t even know it. Unfortunately, I was told by the nice young man at the desk that, “this part of the fair is a separate section, and you have to buy additional tickets to enter each event there.” My original ticket to the Buchmesse, which no one has checked yet, cost €60, and that was for the whole fair. Every event or presentation in the Storydrive section cost a minimum of €100! That was my first clue that there must be important cutting-edge information here, otherwise, why exclude?

On a professor’s budget, I couldn’t afford to pay €100 for each additional presentation, but I could afford to find and talk with the gamers there! There were only two companies with booths – sealMedia, creators of online role-play games such as ‘Colts of Glory’; and Nintendo Europe.

Boris Zander and Timo Lembcke, from sealMedia in Holzkoppelweg, have created ‘Colts of Glory’, an online, adobe®flash, role play game with ‘wild-west’ gun-shooting cowboy characters. The graphics are rich and detailed. They also have pirate, red light, and biker games, at a lower quality. The two producers have written a novel which takes place during the 1865-1880 U.S. civil war. In the novel, the main characters’ families are killed by outlaws. The online game begins where the paper book ends. Each character/avatar in the game must find the murderers of their families.

Zander and Lembcke’s average consumer age is 25 and over, and most players will stay in the game between 2-16 hours a sitting! With gamers playing longer and longer, the stories have to be more and more involved. So Zander and Lembcke, during the Buchmesse, were looking to sell the foreign rights to not only their game, but to the prequel book as well.

Dr. Rudolf Inderst, working with Nintendo in Germany, said that Nintendo’s once-friendly family market had dried up with the introduction of the Wii, and now the company is returning to its ‘young male gamers’ market. Nintendo is interested in developing online communities and storytelling just like Zander and Lembcke, or Runescape’s founder, and this is where storytelling crosses gaming for companies like these.

Ubisoft’s Louis-Pierre Pharand, and Germany’s Patrick Möller and Martin Ganteföhr, were presenting this day and tomorrow, but since I couldn’t afford a ticket, I stopped by after the presentation and asked for a card from Pharand to follow-up with him later. In Canada, Ubisoft producers are notoriously hard to find or reach. Pharand’s card, with his email address, probably has the currency of gold in some markets, so I was pleased to even receive this small bit of information!

Back at 8.0 L 926, Howard and his wife Jeannette were ready to go for dinner. It is considered rude to ‘talk business’ outside of the Buchmesse, so we walked and talked about our favourite city parts in the World. Jeannette and Howard, whose son lives in Berlin, loves walking the streets of Berlin, marveling at its many art installations and the perfect combination of old-world and new. Howard, on the other hand, prefers the French countryside at La Roch D’Hys. In Frankfurt, both love the North-east side of the city, the market streets of Bornheim-Mitte. It is here that their friend Hilton de la Hunt lives on Gauβstraβe 6. Hunt also runs a very successful restaurant review website and touring company in Frankfurt. He finds the most authentic Frankfurter cuisine and historic restaurants and lists them on his website. The one he suggests for friends, though, is the unlisted Zur Sonne. Zur Sonne is a small, historic Frankfurt pub and restaurant with a beautiful long biergarten, complete with an actual garden. It’s surrounded by old iron gates, medieval beams, and hand-made stone floors. And the food is all local.

We have the local apfel wine, which is infamous for its deceivingly mild alcohol content. The wine is a bitter cross between a British cider and a Japanese sake. With much laughing at the long wooden tables, we all order variations of the Groβse saβe, a ‘green sauce’ made of various herbs (including parsley, chives, borage) mixed with a creamy yogurt, mit potatoes and local dishes such as eggs, beef, or weinersnitzel. There was far too much food, but we all left full, warm, and sleepy. A good ending to a long day.