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LBF 2008: fair focus

17.04.08

With both Gordon Brown and his culture minister Margaret Hodge positive about the future of the publishing industry at the London Book Fair, the overall atmosphere at this year’s event was upbeat—although publishers were starting to feel the effects of a global credit crunch.

Brown, making a surprise visit to the fair to promote his forthcoming book Wartime Courage (Bloomsbury, November), said that Britain’s ­creative industries represent 8% of the economy, and are growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole. The education sector is also growing, and as publishing is at the intersection of the two, it is well placed for the next decade, he said. 

Hodge, meanwhile, praised publishing for being “our most robust creative industry”. During a PA seminar, “The Value of Publishing to Society”, she agreed with chair Simon Juden that publishing was Britain’s “unsung success story”.

Early indications suggested that visitor numbers were up on last year, with 67 countries exhibiting and an extra 10% of stand space. “It feels very buzzy—we are doing good business,” said HarperCollins Worldwide c.e.o. Jane Friedman. Mary Vacher, licensing development director at Random House Children’s Books, added: “ It hasn’t really mattered that the fair has been so close to Bologna—I have had a very good two days full of very good appointments.”

Fair director Alistair Burtenshaw said he felt the fair had settled in well to its new home in Earls Court, after the problems experienced at 2006 in ExCeL. This year’s event occupied Earls Court Two as well as Earls Court One, with last year’s upstairs exhibitors coming down to the ground floor. “It feels to me as if Earls Court is a good home for the London Book Fair,” said Burtenshaw.

Digital issues dominated the ­agenda, with both Penguin and Pan Macmillan using the platform of the fair to announce plans to publish new print and e-books simultaneously from this autumn.

A wealth of seminars also dissected the challenges the trade is facing on digitisation.

Trade challenges

The rights battleground moved from Europe to Australia, as Australian publishers called for an end to British publishers’ insistence on Commonwealth rights (see International News, page 22). And a raft of high-profile rights deals were struck, including the largest-ever sum for world English rights in a Chinese title, and a $1m (£500,000) price tag for the “Freakonomics of sport” (see rights round up, right).

Coedition publishers at the fair reported difficulties in selling to traditional markets in western Europe, as pressures from shifting retail landscapes, the economic downturn and fluctuating currencies took hold. Andrew Welham, deputy c.e.o. of Octopus Publishing, said coedition sales were “challenging in traditional markets like France”. He added: “French publishers across the board have cut back on buying coeditions from British publishers. We are looking elsewhere such as Latin America and eastern Europe.”

Andrew Phillips, c.o.o. of Dorling Kindersley, agreed that the markets that seemed the slowest were the “older, European ones”, with difficulties faced by retailers compounding the pressure. “The Nordic areas and France in particular are slower. There is a lot of consolidation on the retail side in these territories and publishers are feeling some ­pressures.”

But Welham said that new areas were continuing to open up: “We are looking at markets like Poland and ­Bulgaria, and newer ones like ­Romania and the Baltics where we can genuinely develop new business,” he said.

American publishers were seeking international deals to offset woes in their home market. Sterling Publishing reported having “a good time” selling coeditions, but has struggled buying them. Marcus Leaver, president of the New York-based publisher, said: “The weakness of the dollar makes it very, very difficult to bring books in. Yet I would say it is still a buoyant market in general for the right books. As publishers we can’t just throw some old rubbish against the wall and make it stick.”

New faces at the fair

New publishers and imprints in­cluding Haus and Arcadia’s new Arab imprint Arabia Books were unveiled at the fair, along with a plethora of distribution deals including Camra Books’ first step into the US, and Atlantic’s new deal with McSweeney’s Books (see the LBF news round up, page 12).

US publishing veteran Bob Miller, who is heading a new global imprint for HarperCollins, was at the fair after HC Worldwide c.e.o. Jane Friedman hired him to build a global list on a “non-traditional business model”.

He told The Bookseller that he intended to make the list wide-­ranging, not concentrating on any one genre. “The focus is on the format, making it lower price with a smaller hardback or trade paperback,” he said. “It’s that $10 to $20 type of title, sometimes an inspirational book, that conveys the value of what we will be doing.”

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