Dispatches from the Frankfurt Book Fair

23 October 2013 Books+Publishing

Frankfurt Book Fair first-timer, Giramondo’s Alice Grundy, and long-time attendee, Allen & Unwin’s Clare Drysdale, take us behind-the-scenes at this year’s fair.

Alice Grundy, managing editor, Giramondo, writes:

Imagine the busiest place you’ve ever been and then times it by 10. This was the device suggested to me by a friend as preparation for my first Frankfurt Book Fair. In a series of halls the size of football fields, thousands of publishers around the world gather annually for the book fair. When I first started work in publishing there was some discussion that perhaps the fair wouldn’t survive the digital revolution and then came the question of whether it would survive the global downturn but 2013 has shown that it’s still a publishing mecca—even if many of the foreign publishers asked me the same question: ‘It’s tough in Australia too, right?’

Most of my meetings were with rights buyers from French and German publishers with some English and Spanish publishers as well. These meetings were arranged through Giramondo publisher Ivor Indyk’s contacts, as well as through a former colleague, who put me in touch with some publishers that he thought would be responsive. Armed with a digital catalogue, loaded and ready on my iPad, and the enthusiasm that comes with being a newbie, my meetings started early on Wednesday morning.

As well as being my first time at the fair, it was the first time that Giramondo was represented. As a first-timer, I was happy to be a roving attendee rather than book a stand. It also gave me a chance to scope out how the fair operates. Starting out, most of the meetings commenced with a brief run-down of Giramondo’s history and a discussion on the kinds of titles that we publish before I would begin to pitch our individual titles, drawing links between the content and the agent/editor’s home country, comparing the style to this or that writer, relating the tale of how it came to be published.

There’s something both enervating and terrifying about seeing so many people talking about so many books in the one place at the one time. It’s particularly tough on Thursday afternoon when everyone knows they are only around half-way through, and many are hung-over or sleep deprived from a big Wednesday night. The challenge is to make them pay attention to this title, to persuade them about this book, to encourage their interest in this author.

If there isn’t a pre-existing relationship, at the beginning of the meeting you need to try to read the other person, to gauge what sort of approach would work best, whether their English is perfectly fluent or whether you need to simplify some of your language, whether they’re interested in the meandering journey to publication or simply some hard facts and external indicators of success.

The one question that most surprised and delighted me was, ‘Do you think this is too commercial for our list?’ Too commercial? My mind reeled at the unfamiliar phrase! I could comfortably respond, ‘Not at all.’

Now that I’ve finished with the diet of bad coffee and hot dogs and forking out for 15 euro glasses of wine comes the follow-up: sending out the manuscripts and proofs to those who said they were interested and reading through all the material that, at one appointment or another, I expressed an interest in. I’ll be compiling all my notes on the people I met and building the information banks. And, here’s hoping, I’ll be back in 2014.

Clare Drysdale, UK director, Allen & Unwin, writes:

I enjoy Frankfurt hugely—running the small but potent London office of Allen & Unwin can be a lonely business at times, and the big book fairs are a great chance to reconnect with both A&U colleagues and the publishing world at large. Personal relationships are everything in this business, and there’s nothing more satisfying than matchmaking editors with books that they will love.

I moonlight as a rights seller at book fairs: I focus on translation markets while my colleague Wenona Byrne meets with our subagents and with English-language publishers. It’s a sheer delight to bring foreign publishers up to speed with the success of authors such as Michelle de Kretser, Alex Miller and Charity Norman in the Australian and UK markets, and it’s also fascinating to hear what’s happening in other countries: what a thrill to hear that Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones has become a stalwart of Turkish bestseller lists under the intriguing title God’s Forgotten Children. Kate Morton has some 35 international publishers and while she’s been hugely successful in Europe for some years, it was a nice surprise to learn that she has a burgeoning fan base in Mexico and Chile. Wenona and I were honoured to be presented with a plaque and an enormous black forest cake to mark Allen & Unwin’s 25th year as an exhibitor, a nice reminder that colleagues such as Patrick Gallagher, Paul Donovan and Angela Namoi did the hard yards to establish A&U on the international stage.

You get a slightly blinkered view of Frankfurt when you sell rights and are glued to your stand, at the mercy of passing trade. The daily excursion for ice-cream is a highlight, and is carefully timed: it’s never a good look to drip on your appointment. It also adds some variety to our appalling diet of stand snacks: even Cherry Ripes start to sour when you’re chomping your way through your second bag. There’s a nice camaraderie between the publishers on the Australian Publishers Association stand, and hats off to the legend who ordered VB stubbies for the stand drinks this year! (I may be alone in this view.)

The social side of the fair is extremely important. In the absence of our colleague Jane Palfreyman, the pressure was on me and Wenona to fly the A&U flag on the party circuit. While we couldn’t pretend to match Jane’s superhuman exertions of Frankfurts past, we racked up showings at the Fischer Verlag party, the House of Anansi/Ambo Anthos boat party, the Kobo party (with feathered masks and eyewatering caiprinhas), and Daniela Schlingman’s party, where we watched a lot of ageing European publishers rock out to the publishing cover band Half on Signature. We spent the obligatory evening gossiping at the Frankfurter Hof, shivering outside in the company of smokers, overpriced drinks in hand. When I first came to Frankfurt, the week of the fair felt like a month; six years later, it seems to be over in a blink.

Category: Features