samedi 15 octobre 2011

Buchmesse Day Five - The Last Day of Trading (Retail Rules)

Day five inside of Hall 8.0 at booth L 926 is quiet. People stop by to say goodbye to each other. Most of the European foreign rights’ traders are on their way home for the weekend. The publishers are packing up their books and materials, taking down their booths, and thinking strategically about the next three weeks of follow-up emails, telephone calls, and signed contracts.

Most are left with the question: Which way is the industry turning? For a trading fair that began with a man named Johannes Gensfleisch selling printings of the Pope’s messages on the banks of the Main in October of 1454, it’s a good question.

Gensfleisch, or Gutenberg as he was known in the trade (after the name of his printing shop), was interested in the development of typesetting. Being able to copy three (3) pages in a day was a big deal in Gutenberg’s age. That was high technology! It is also why Frankfurt, and not Leipzig, became known as the world’s foremost foreign trading fair. Gutenberg’s ‘book’, or ‘page’, trading was just as popular as his services. That is, he not only sold ‘books’; he sold the services and technology to make books. That is why his statue graces the square in Goethe Platz today. In Leipzig, book traders from all over came to buy and sell handwritten manuscripts. And from 1764-1861, crowds dominated the plaza here each year. People came to Leipzig for the stories; traders came to Frankfurt for the business.

Today is Leipzig. Teens are dressed in Manga costumes hoping to catch a glimpse of their favourite star illustrator. German authors are signing books in Hall 3, and the buses, trams, and underground rails coming into the Messe stop are crowded, hot, and loud. It’s a great day for a fair! There is sunshine and children’s balloons and costumed entertainers everywhere. There are even some of the same stands retailers probably used in 1800 in Leipzig – a single wooden table crammed with used books for sale. It is retail.

Paris’s Salon de Livre in March is a lot like this day at the Buchmesse as well. The Salon de Livre is primarily for the public. Books are on sale everywhere, and you can glimpse authors, musicians, and yes, even Manga characters.
But Frankfurt is primarily for the trade. And who will be trading the world’s thinking in the future?

That is what Howard is asking himself today, “What has happened to all of those publishers who loved ideas? Who were in the business to get the ideas out?” There use to be an integrity in publishing, a critical eye for new, fresh thought, the types of thought that have never been printed or seen by the world before. And yet, fresh technology is what plasters content.

In this way, the questions asked this week are very much the same as questions asked in any century of publishing:
·         Who will control the information?
·         Who will decide what information people will see and what they won’t see?
·         How and where will people find truly new, inventive ideas? (And not just cheap, commercial sloth.)
·         Will gaming be the new film?
·         Will people interact and change the stories they buy? Would this be a legitimate experience?
·         Have we seen the end of poetry?

I do think we must think in multidisciplinary ways if we are to advance our literature, after all, no project is ever completed with only one subject. Even to write a short story, other fields are required in the content. And this is why European government grants for the arts and translation is so important – so that countries do hear and see new multidisciplinary ideas (no matter the form).
No project stands alone in a discipline, and yet, these very questions will likely consume traders year after year until the next ‘Gutenberg’, or new wave, appears.

On my way out and way home, I hand my Buchmesse pass to a girl with neon green hair and a long black cape and boots. Why shouldn’t she use it? No one ever checked it.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, in a couple of minutes the Frankfurt Book Fair will be closing for today. We thank you for your business and wish you a good day.”

vendredi 14 octobre 2011

Buchmesse Day Four - Transition from Trading to Retail

“Ding, ding, ding, ding. Good morning exhibitors, the doors will be opening for business in a few minutes. We wish you a successful day.”
Day four and still nobody has checked my ticket. I am starting to feel offended. Next year: no ticket. A London publisher agrees with me, “It’s a bit expensive, but I really just come to get a sense of what’s happening in the industry anyway.”

Friday is a transition day for the fair. It is the day when many European traders conclude their business. It is the day when the AUTHORS arrive. And with the authors, a steady stream of people and ‘goodies’.
For Howard, Friday is very slow. Most of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ business of the rights trading has been conducted over the previous days, and Howard begins to organize his notes for the following week when he will be following up with various foreign publishers wanting rights to his books, getting quotes for print material and e-book transfers, and emailing colleagues to thank them for stopping by so that a relationship can be maintained even though there may not be any book in particular they will be working on together this year. The publishers are also given a package of application forms today to fill out and reserve a booth or location for next year. The early bird deadline for these reservations is in November, so they have to consider this early.

I also have my own list of people I will be following up with: educators in my field, gamers, and .epub producers that have been so interesting to speak with. I don’t have any business contacts like Howard does, but the infusion of cross-disciplinary study is so valuable for me and the process of creation.

Today, I set out to observe the Buchmesse transformation from business conference to public fair. And to do this, I am going to begin in Halls 3 and 6, where most of the German and European publishers are, and where most of the local authors will be doing readings for the public-at-large.

Each large publisher (with a large booth area) has sets of little tables and chairs around their area. These sets of tables, or working desks, have been full with clients and publishers meeting back-to-back. Today, with the exception of the French literary publishers in 6.1, the tables and chairs are largely empty. Instead of being busy meeting other book traders, many of the publishers are sitting around reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, and not looking very busy at all. If you did not have any advance appointments coming to the fair, Friday would be a very good day to book them!

So what are the differences between the halls and countries today? Without a doubt, Hall 3.0 and 3.1, the German publishers, is the busiest. In the morning, the publishers have biscuits and cookies set out for the public; there are authors reading, signing books or doing interviews all day long; and, most importantly, Hall 3 has the best goodies!
It is here you can find every colour of bag imaginable being given away, with all sorts of sayings. There are packages of candy, pens, memory sticks, sample children’s books, children’s book characters dressed up (see the 'Manga' girls below), and of course the key/id badges that go around your neck. What are these called? I am sure in German, there is a wonderfully long compound word for it like: ‘work-necklace-made-of-shoe-laces-that-holds-keys-and-id.’ Or something like that, but I cannot come up with a name for it in English, so that will have to do. My favourite bag is the one Groh publishers are giving out. It has a big red heart in the middle and says, “Alles Liebe”. (Sigh.)
After lunch, when the children get out of school, this building and the rows in it are packed with a wall of people. If you come to the Buchmesse on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, go around to the back doors (where the service entrances are.) There, there is no one on the escalators or stairs, and all of the food and drink vendors are completely empty so it is a lot easier to move.

I sit down to rest my feet at one of the sitting areas and soon find myself in the middle of an author of philosophy, Martin Mosen, being interviewed by a reporter about his latest book (see the photo below). I move to another area, and have just settled in to finish my coffee, and sure enough, Harold Martenstein of Martensteins Morgenmesse is introducing another set of authors for a reading! Mein Deutsche is certainly not good enough to follow the literary conversations, so I move to yet another, this time empty, area, and sit down on a bench. Not long after I have sat down though, an agent comes over and tells me that the [empty] seats are only for publishing meetings, so I give up and haul my ‘goodie stash’ over to Hall 6.1.

The contrast in 6.1 is extreme. First, there are no goodies. I know what you’re thinking, ‘then why go?’
Because it is something to see! 6.1 is filled predominantly with French and Asian publishing houses, and it smells divine. There is some combination between an orchid and a perfumery house that envelopes you as you walk through the door. And it is veeeeeerrrrry quiet. No noise. No crowds. The French publishing houses are still very busy with trade meetings; their small tables are full. Yet walking through their aisles reminded me of being in an extraordinarily expensive fashion salon. One publishing house was designed (and I do mean designed!) all in black – black tables, rich black carpets, post-modernist couches, and stark bookshelves with singular flowers. From there, I walked right into a ‘room’ of white – white, thick carpeting, white accent pillows. Have you ever walked through a modern home design concept centre? This was it! And it was all that more impressive because, remember, the buchmesse is basically just a big warehouse. Most publishers’ booths do look like a stand in a warehouse. Not the French corridor however. If I were trading here; if I were buying clothes here!, I would expect to pay a lot of money for my titles. It is a foreign rights’ salon.

In Hall 5, you get to hear the most languages: Urdu, Spanish, Icelandic, Italian… walking through 5 is like being in a highly-diverse, multilingual, metropolitan capital.
One exhibit I really enjoyed seeing was the Marshall McLuhan exhibit, and again, here are people I would likely never have an opportunity to speak with in Canada, but because we are all foreigners here, the conversation was easy and relaxed. The McLuhan publishers are just recently re-released McLuhan’s 1967, The Medium is the Massage, and All Media Work Us Over Completely. It strikes me how powerful and relevant those words still are today, especially for the publishing industry at the pivotal point in history.

“All media work us over completely.” We are all working inside of the media barriers or venue provided to us. If it’s e-books, we are only capable of seeing and experiencing what the publishers or creators of those platforms have constructed. It is not of our own limitless capacity to experience the text in our own design.
These issues came through loud and clear in all of the e-publishing presentations around the Buchmesse. Amazon®, for example, makes available an e-format only used in its kindle®. Authors, including independent (indie) authors, who wish to sell through Amazon® must transfer their manuscript from the written form to an .xslt compatible with the kindle®. Once uploaded into Amazon’s online store, it cannot be changed unless the author uploads a newer version.
New York Times bestselling author Dr. C.J. Lyons has had considerable success with Amazon®, so the company brings her everywhere to promote the product. Lyons, author of Blind Faith, says she loves the self-publishing e-format because she gets immediate feedback from her readers and can change the book if something seems wrong and upload a revised version immediately. Likewise, based upon her readers’ online feedback, she can create new follow-up books which she knows her readers will like (because they have told her what they want). For Lyons, it takes all of the marketing guesswork out of writing, and the return profits for the author are much more dependable than a publisher’s version. No wonder the publishing world is scared!

However, Amazon® does nothing at all to market the book. All they do is make it available to consumers online for little or no cost to themselves (since the author is the one who edits, transfers the media and uploads it), and on average, Amazon® takes 75% of the online profits from the book’s sales.
What about truly literary authors who do not have the good fortune Lyons has had? They depend upon an agent or publishing house to market their work for awards and disseminate its ideas.

For consumers, or e-book readers, the market is equally frustrating. If you have bought a kindle® or an i-pad®, you can only buy books from Amazon® or Apple® respectively. You cannot, for example, buy an e-book on i-tunes and use, open and read it on your kindle® because the two formats are incompatible.
That’s what a lot of the industry’s technology people are developing: programs that can transfer a .doc or .pdf into any e-book (.epub) format for any online bookstore. Manuela Pohle of le-tex in Leipzig, Germany, for example, has designed just such a program, but currently it is only available in German.
A company that can eventually do this, will likely be the next Apple®.

By the way, is it just me, or does it drive anyone else crazy listening to bilingual presentations? If you speak the two languages used in the presentation, you are continually having to endure listening to everything twice! The best translators, I think, add or enrich the second version so that any bilingual speakers in the crowd aren’t bored out of their minds.

Tomorrow, the last day of the Buchmesse for me, a day full of retail vendor sales and public appearances by authors, I will be looking forward to summarizing the week, its highlights, surprises, and really interesting information (for an outsider anyway)!

jeudi 13 octobre 2011

Buchmesse Day Three - Second Day of Trading

Things I love about Europe:
1.       When parallel parking, you can park in any direction you like. You don’t have to face the same way as all of the other cars.
2.       After work, everyone goes out for a pint, bier, vin, and debates the state of the world with their neighbours. In person. With actual, live humans.
3.       Fresh, local food markets are still available in central, pedestrian-only streets.
4.       The coffee tastes rich and creamy.
5.       People don’t automatically assume you speak English.
6.       The transportation systems are so advanced you do not need a car. Trains, buses, trams, subways run frequently, cheaply everywhere.
7.       And the women (well, okay, not Parisienne women perhaps) really look like strong, healthy women. I think this is what always impresses me most about Germany. The women look healthy. They have strong athletic bodies. They are not taken in by fashion extremes. They look like they could be sisters or best friends of mine. I feel like I fit in there. They are real women.

Things I don’t like about about large cities: why do all of the subways/metros/undergrounds always have that slightly warm smell of oil, dust and day-old urine? It’s disgusting.

This second day of trading, especially the morning, was much quieter. People were out late the night before at the Frankfurter Hof party celebrating deals and award winners. In the central part of Frankfurt, at the ‘Willy-Brandt Platz’ stop, is the ridiculously expensive Steinberger Frankfurter Hof hotel. It looks like a palace. Maybe it was! Think of the Chateau Laurier, but much more upscale! Gold-leaf gates, lush sculpted halls and carpeting, and a thousand Buchmesse traders rolled into one room networking. One of the fair’s journalist tweeters @bondnic said, “a rogues gallery of international publishing”, and there they are. Most of the people in the Hof’s lobby are not staying there; they are simply there to be seen.

I am at the fair to learn, however, and on this day I learn a little bit more about what Howard does between his frequent meetings with old and new colleagues in the business. Now, I feel like I have answered most of those questions I had for him on the first day:

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 that enough?

30 years ago when Howard first began publishing as an independent, he was still working in Political Science at McMaster University. There were certain books, ideas people had written that he “just felt should be heard,” Howard’s wife Jeannette said. He always felt strongly that good books should be published no matter the cost. At that time, there were grants for publishing in certain fields and for independent publishers, but as the Canadian government became increasingly conservative, the grants dried up. It was then that Howard started selling more foreign rights and even ‘brokering’ the rights for others when possible. Some years the press breaks even. Some years it doesn’t. “It’s very hard,” Howard says. Most of his authors only make a small profit after a couple of printings, and only then off of the list price. The foreign right to a book depends on the book, the foreign market, and what the publisher is willing, or in most cases, able to pay.

In the Frankfurt Book Fair daily newsletter (p.4), Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, said that he pays “an e-book royalty rate of 25% of net receipts”, and that print royalties “averaged 16-18%”. That seems really high to me, being an author, but perhaps that is for the publisher, and the author receives a [very] small percentage of that afterwards.

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?
Howard sits in the Mosaic Press booth from the opening bell to the closing bell, well, okay, it’s not actually a bell, more like an announcement, but I like to think of these traders out on the ‘stock market floor selling shares’.
He only has a few meetings booked throughout the day today, but people he has known from the fair and through publishing over the years stop by his booth and take a seat as soon as he is free. Most of the people he speaks with, he has known from years of work at the fair, and any new traders who come by, stop because they have noticed a book or flyer that catches their interest. They want to know more about the book, and a relationship begins.

Who does he do business with most, and where did he first meet this contact?
Howard’s oldest contact he met right here in Frankfurt, a Mexican publisher named Raoul. Usually, the publishers just meet to discuss an idea or the possibility of a plan, and to talk about the books. It is afterwards that the real business work begins. Following up on queries, emailing copies of books to look over, and then exchanging signed contracts, and finally soliciting printers. Frankfurt is the catalyst for the working relationships in a book.

And does he buy anything? If not (as Noble suggested), why? And if so, what and why?
Not really because he just can’t afford it as an independent, but he may ‘broker’ or act as the liaison between one publisher and another.
While I am there today, for instance, Howard is meeting with the publishers from Oakville’s children’s press, ‘Flowerpot Press’. They are trying to find quotes for getting a softcover with sound and a hardcover children’s book printed, and they have come to Howard to see if he can get the printing quotes for them. They expect to be able to reproduce the hardcover for about $1.27, and expect the same thing to sell at WalMart® for $17.10.

Flowerpot Press has also brought the coloured drawings of a North Parade illustrator they have just found and love. They want to get Howard’s advice on the contract language. “We would like to just buy it outright,” the publishers say, “because it would save us a lot of trouble.”
 “I can see it being made into a series of books because this one character is just wonderful, but the story needs a lot of work.”
They discuss how to word the contract for the illustrator. Should the percentage be on the list or on the net sales figures? What if there are going to be subsequent books in the series? What percentage should the paper or hardcover be?

I leave all of this to Howard, and go to hear this year’s winner of the German Book Prize, the 37,500 uro equivalent of Canada’s Giller.
Prize-winning novelist Eugen Ruge reminds me a little of M.G. Vassanji, that same East to West struggle of immigration and adaptation. He is a very personable speaker, and although I could only understand about ten percent of what he was saying, the crowd loved him. Ruge is from the ‘Eastern side of the wall’ and so are his characters in In Zeiten des Abnehmenden Lichts (In Times of Fading Light) by Rowohlt Verlag press.  The novel covers three generations of struggle in Eastern Germany, then the Soviet Union, and finally in America. It may be possible to find this volume on the shelves in North America in a couple of years because the author himself speaks English and has worked in the film industry in the West for a number of years. Also, many European countries like Germany, France, and the Netherlands, provide 20,000 or more in funding for authors for translations of their countries’ novels. This way, the ideas and work of great European literati can be read by countries outside of the EC.

Next to the site of the reading, and in the same building as “Storydrive” was the “Antiquariatsmesse”. (Remind me to thank Germany for all of our compound words!) This was a collection of vendors displaying rare and ancient German books for sale. Inside, there were bindings of gold and leather and iron and wood carvings, and bibles with medieval ‘book of hour’ colour illustrations. There were ancient illustrations of plants and animals which look slightly altered from our 21st century versions of the same. Have you ever seen Napoleon’s stuffed dog and horse in Paris? When I first saw it, I wondered if the animal was simply deteriorating over time, or if the species had really just evolved that much without us realizing it. In the Antiquariatsmesse, I was looking at a very detailed drawing of a dandelion, and to me, it did look quite distinct. The leaf and stem were the same, but the shape and depth of the flower and seeds were much smaller in length and diameter (in context). So, has the flower evolved? Has the artist evolved? Or is the artistic perception different today? Whatever the case, these are wonderful historical records of how people either saw, described and interpreted the same plants and animals five centuries ago, or how our biological world has evolved over this period.

Every year, my sons have to get dividers for their binders in school. You know the coloured, red, blue, pink, yellow, and green sheets that go in between the lined binder sheets to separate the different subjects? I always thought this was a contemporary stationary product sold at Staples® in the “school supply” section. Turns out, nope -15th century! Eberhard Talke of the Antiquariat Aix-la-chapelle store in Aachen showed me three versions of the 15-16th century divider, or in Deutsche, Blattweiser/n. Because printed text was so rare (and often written by hand), people use to buy one page (Seïtenwiser) at a time. Once they had collected all of the pages in a volume, a process that might take years, they would take the pages to a book ‘binder’ (yes, same word as our ‘3-holed’ version!) and have them bound in leather or wood or precious metals, and sometimes, they would have the binder add dividers. Only these dividers weren’t in colour or plastic. There were some made of rope, and others made of small origami paper with letters of the alphabet on them (and the letters were shaped just like they are in grade one!). I was thrilled to learn this. We often say that Shakespeare marked the beginning of ‘modern English’. Well, in Germany anyway, the Blattweisen mark the beginning of modern book publishing for me.

I hope Staples® has bought the foreign rights for those things! J

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 20th 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.

mardi 11 octobre 2011

Buchmesse Day One, Frankfurt, 2011

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!