Inside the Australian and New Zealand book industry

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Literary Wall Street: Jane Curry on the 2018 London Book Fair

Ventura Press founder and director Jane Curry attended this year’s London Book Fair, and came away with several lessons for first-time and returning Australian attendees.

She reports:

The London Book Fair, held from 10 to 12 April this year, is my favourite of all the fairs.

London in springtime (albeit with its intermittent drizzle) is worth every hour of the long-haul flight. And when in London I feel like a chameleon; having worked in UK publishing before I came to Australia, I speak both languages.

The English way of doing business comes with a dollop of nostalgia for the Commonwealth that makes you feel as if you are in an episode of The Crown.

As evidence, UK publishers are reluctant to acquire UK rights without also having Australian and New Zealand rights, which to me seems both anachronistic and commercially restrictive. They can publish Booker Prize-winning South Korean writer Han Kang without having Korean rights, but Aussies can’t be separated from the motherland.

I challenged this thinking with the success of authors such as Peter Carey, Liane Moriarty and Richard Flanagan, but the Commonwealth mentality remains deeply embedded in their publisher DNA. I had a wonderful catch up with Nigel Newton of Bloomsbury who told me they had no plans to publish in Australia—it was for export sales only. At least it’s now only books and not convicts.

The branding for this year’s fair was interesting: ‘Taking Words Further, Content Across Media’. It is clear the organisers want to extend the reach from books into sexier media such as screen, digital and audio. One example was the addition of the London Book and Screen Week to the program (with Jojo Moyes as guest Ambassador) which reflects the hunger for content to feed the Netflix and streaming boom.

So, to business. The fair itself is divided into two parts with two very separate atmospheres.

The publishers’ stands are in the old part of Olympia: Halls 2-5. The world’s publishers are there: from the Baltic countries who were this year’s guests of honour to Mexico, Korea and Iraq. They are the usual mix of stands. Some, like Hachette, are the size of a small village complete with mezzanine tower, while other stands are the small three-walled ‘boxes’ that we all know and love. On all stands people are selling rights to publish their title in another territory. On the larger stands it is a beehive of frenetic activity and on the smaller ones the same passionate intensity is at play as the spirit of a book is conveyed one on one.

I really worked the UK indie market this year. Our rights manager assigned me ‘homework’ to meet new UK contacts, so, with catalogue and business cards in hand, I called on the companies and lists we targeted and made some excellent new contacts. This ground work is the essence of why attending book fairs is vital to developing businessit is work that just can’t be done by email or third parties.

The other part of the fair is the International Rights Centre, which is held on level two of a connected building. It is not for the faint-hearted: a room full of agents from around the world buying and selling intellectual propertya literary version of Wall Street. I love this room; it is noisy and buzzing with energy. Each agent has a small desk and two chairs either side to conduct their ‘speed dates’. It is both an adrenaline high and also completely exhausting.

For Ventura, it was an excellent fair. To discuss our 2018 fiction list with my UK peers was fulfilling and successful. I also met and agreed terms with agents to represent our list in the Italian, Spanish, German and Korean markets. And to round it out I pitched to key scouts, the industry gatekeepers who are paid by publishers to seek out what’s hot. I grabbed every catalogue I could to see who is selling what and where, gathering the intel we need to maximise our rights sales.

My main takeaways from this year’s London, and the advice I would give to other publishers interested in attending:

  • Have great visuals.
  • Practice your pitch.
  • Know your books.
  • Know the other person’s list before you meet them.
  • Take an umbrella.

 

Category: Features