For five days in October Frankfurt am Main morphs into the capital city of books. Scarcely any other business sector meeting brings as many guests to the city as the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is the world’s largest and most international. Like a magnet, it attracts authors, publishers, editors, journalists, marketing people, literary agents, scouts, book-retailers and readers from all over the world to Germany – and has been doing this for exactly 60 years. Around 400,000 different titles are presented each year, which no one person can really absorb. The Book Fair in Frankfurt means long hours under neon lights on the 13 levels of the five huge fair halls, endless rows of closely positioned stands, where more than 7,000 publishers from over 100 countries exhibit their novels, non-fiction books, children’s literature, audio-books, maps, calendars, magazines, CD-ROMs, films or online services. Perhaps the Book Fair should long since have been re-named the Media or Content Fair. Although the main thing may still be printed matter between two book covers, since the early 1980s it is by no means the only thing. What is more, in the Digital Market Place in Hall 4 the 2008 Book Fair will focus not only on the e-book, but also on what this digital reading tool means in financial terms for bookshops and publishers. Nowhere is the balancing act between the commercial commodity and the cultural good as obvious as at the Book Fair. Of course, business is always on the agenda – but with no content, there can be no business.
In each of the Book Fair’s halls there are more book presentations, readings, interviews with authors, panel discussions, prize presentations and book signing sessions on the hour than any one person can take in; the programme lists more than 2,500 events. And even outside the fair grounds a lot is going on to do with the Book Fair: the honorary guest in 2008 is Turkey and that country is being honoured with special events in almost all the city’s museums, theatres and concert halls. Publishers are having parties and receptions, restaurants are completely booked out, the mixture of languages heard in town is more diverse than it would be otherwise.
These aspects of the world of the Book Fair are on public display for everyone to see. But there is also a parallel aspect in and around the fair grounds that goes unnoticed by the public. And this is where the real engine of the Book Fair hums: the trade in book licences. The magazine Der Spiegel once called this annual hunt by literary agents for big business the “Frankfurt Fever”. For the agents, the Book Fair is an amalgam of speed-dating, a huge splurge and a literary get-together. And even in the digital age, the business with rights and licences is a one-to-one affair. What is more, large sums are involved. Insiders estimate that around 80% of all publishing licence contracts are initiated at book fairs – most of them during the five days in Frankfurt. At level 3 of Hall 6, right beside the Press Centre, the Book Fair installs the Literary Agents & Scouts Centre (LitAg). In 2008, 300 agencies and over 500 agents, more than ever before, have registered to be here, and that number is growing from year to year. Yet further proof of the fact that the licence and rights trade has gained considerably in international importance.
“This trade is also of growing importance for the German book-sector: in 2007, German publishers concluded 9,225 licence contracts with partners abroad; ten years ago the figure was less than half of that,” says Tobias Voss, who is responsible for the International Department at the Frankfurt Book Fair. For the Book Fair’s business is international, and not just on the five days in October. Since 2006, the Frankfurters have been organizing the Book Fair in Cape Town in June, together with the South African Publishers Association; since 2007, they have been partners of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair in March. And during the rest of the year, the Book Fair smoothes the path for publishers to foreign markets: “We offer publishers the possibility to take joint stands at about 25 international book fairs, and we maintain five offices abroad,” says Tobias Voss. These subsidiaries are called Book Information Centres (BIZ), or else German Book Offices (GBO) and, as public-private-partnerships, they are financed equally with the Federal Foreign Office.
The first BIZ was opened in Moscow 15 years ago, at a time of political turmoil when there was great interest in the western book market. Bucharest, Warsaw and Beijing followed, then the German Book Office in New York, and most recently, the GBO in New Delhi, since February 2008. The BIZ in Warsaw, however, was closed, which is easily understood when you know that since 2005 Polish has been the most important language in the German licence business. For the two to three employees at the BIZ and GBO, whose offices are always in the Goethe Institute, the main task is to market German books.
Best-sellers and prize-winning authors do not really need the help of these offices abroad, but as the German book market is one of the world’s most diverse, with about 95,000 new titles each year, there is still enough to do. Much too much even. And who can keep an eye of it all? For this reason the GBO and BIZ are also pilots and ambassadors of German literature. They draw attention to the most exciting new titles and provide select book collections tailored to the respective foreign market, test translations and lists of rights and also network with the local editors. The approaches and contents of this literary diplomacy are highly varied: in Bucharest there are a lot of further training workshops; in Beijing the topical and wide-ranging internet offers play an important role; in Central and Eastern Europe self-help books from German publishers sell particularly well, but not at all in the USA.
The work of the GBO in New York is complicated, as generally the north American publishers do not buy much literature from abroad. Of interest are mainly German books on the topic of National Socialism, but not current fiction, with just a few exceptions, that is. In 2007, only 190 German titles were sold to the USA, more than 530 to France, 630 to Italy, and 700 to Poland. The New York GBO therefore organizes working trips every year for US American editors so as to bring them into contact with the right publishers in Germany. “Each trip results in about 500 contacts – so they awaken a lot of interest,” says Tobias Voss. “The concrete success is hard to measure, because until a book actually appears abroad the process can sometimes take years.” And then it can happen that the circle closes again in Frankfurt, when the international publishing-house proudly presents the translation at the Book Fair.
