Last week, four UTP staff visited the Frankfurt Book Fair. Frankfurt has a long history as a destination for literary types, stretching back to the late fifteenth century, when local booksellers hosted a book fair which gave Gutenberg a chance to promote his new printing press.
Today, the Frankfurter Buchmesse is the biggest book fair in the world, with around 7,000 publishers, agents, and other publishing-related companies and organizations showing off their latest titles, selling translation rights to books, and promoting the latest technology and book-related products. This year was my first time attending the Fair, although University of Toronto Press has had a longstanding presence there.
I was at the fair to try to sell translation rights to UTP titles to publishers in other countries. My fair experience started on Tuesday at the International Rights Directors meeting. There, I heard a variety of speakers on two very different topics: new trends in digital licensing, and the Arab book market. While it’s definitely a growing market, with lots of interesting work being done particularly in countries like Egypt and Lebanon, the Arab market is a tricky one to break into given the lack of coordinated information about the publishing industry in these countries, state censorship, and lack of strong laws protecting author’s and publisher’s copyrights.
On Wednesday, the fair officially began. Between the four UTP staff in attendance, we had dozens of appointments scheduled over four days. While I was trying to sell translation rights, our sales and marketing manager met with current and potential sales and distribution companies from other countries, discussing opportunities to get UTP books on more bookstore shelves in more countries. John Yates and Hamish Cameron were at the Fair to promote our digital publishing services, PShift, to other scholarly presses.
Our stand was in Hall 8: the hall for international, English-speaking publishers. Hall 8 is the biggest hall at the fair, with 19 rows of booths or stands. We were part of the red-lined Canada stand organized by Livres Canada Books and were in good company with other Canadian publishers. Also in the hall were companies from the US (including many university presses), Australia, New Zealand, the UK, South Africa, and Israel, and more. Most of the companies in the hall were publishers of all sizes, but there were also agents, ebook vendors (the two-storey Kobo stand was popular), software providers, and more. Each day I wandered through Hall 8 and I don’t think I managed to see, let alone visit, every stand.
It’s customary at the fair for potential buyers to visit the rights sellers at their stands. Since my main focus at the fair was to sell translation rights to our books, most of my meetings took place at the UTP stand. I met with agents from Japan, Korea, China, Italy, Turkey, and Poland, and publishers from across the globe, from Brazil, the Czech Republic, the UK, Quebec, and more. UTP has relationships stretching back decades with some of the publishers and agents I met with; for others, this was the first time we were meeting to talk about future opportunities for collaboration. There were also many spontaneous meetings as people stopped by our stand looking for information about what UTP does and asking about opportunities to work together or just to chat about our books.
Each publisher or agent that I met with was looking for different books, but I heard lots of interest in Partners and Rivals by Wendy Dobson, other titles from our Rotman-UTP imprint backlist, and Child to Soldier by Opiyo Oloya. Gutenberg Galaxy, Myth and Meaning, and works by Bernard Lonergan remain perennial favourites. On the Higher Education side, A History of Anthropological Theory and Eating Culture also received a lot of attention.
In addition to my appointments, I also had some opportunities to attend information sessions to learn about the publishing markets in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. And in between meetings and sessions, I visited some of the other halls. There are 10 halls of exhibitors, spread out over 3 floors of the conference centre. There are three halls for non-English publishers – and it seemed like every single country in the world was represented. Instead of each publisher having their own stand, as was generally the case in Hall 8, many countries organize large stands at which each publisher has a table and some bookshelves. The impact of seeing all these stands representing so many different countries, publishers and other companies, highlighting such diversity in publishing was overwhelming.
Beyond that, each niche of the market – from educational publishers to STM publishers to literary agents to software/technology providers – has their own section of a hall.
The two levels of Hall 3 and part of Hall 4 were reserved for German publishers. I didn’t get a chance to visit that hall during the week, unfortunately. The Fair isn’t just a corporate event: the fair is open to visitors on Saturday and Sunday and Frankfurters (and some tourists too) flood the fairgrounds to visit their favourite publishers’ booths, attend author events, and check out book and book-related vendors. This area was too busy on the weekend for me to do any sightseeing – although I did enjoy catching glimpses of all the costumed cos-players wandering around the hall. (The fair is also host to a cos-play competition, and some of the costumes were truly impressive.)
The UTP team agreed that the fair made us appreciate what an amazing industry we’re part of. Seeing so many publishers and others involved in the book industry in one place, talking about the latest books, ideas, trends, and innovations taking place all over the world, learning about how others are tackling similar challenges and embracing related opportunities – you can’t help but be a little awestruck and inspired by it all. That inspiration will keep me going as I follow up on all of my appointments and try to seal some new translation rights deals!
