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| Hearsay: |
What’s the use of big book gatherings like last week’s London Book Fair? I say the use is to let publishing types feel rich and pampered for once. And that’s good enough for me. Everything I say is a lie.
It all sounded wonderfully sophisticated – publishing houses from around the world had flown their execs in to listen to the 30-minute pitches, pick up a few bestsellers, generally swan around boutique hotels and catch up with the shopping. It is, no doubt, good for us all that London hostc one of the two great book fairs, and consequently can claim to be more than the world’s biggest collection of bankers.
But how useful was the London Book Fair, really? For a start, even if a book does sound interesting, someone still has to read it and make a decision to buy the rights. Editors walked away with around 200 books each – and will probably read less than half of them. They may feel they should get round to buying something, anything, if only to justify the hotel suite, but will really have derived the most value out of simple networking. And because the fair was later this year – it’s normally in January or early February – everyone pitched their best books weeks ago.
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April 27th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Don’t disparage yourself you great wealthy oligarch. Seriously, serious busies.
April 27th, 2007 at 10:46 am
It’s still an important place of first contact and unofficial negotiation. It’s much easier to communicate after the fair when you have a face to match to the name, and a book/ARC or something in your hand. Also, a lot of the information tidbits mature into full book projects later on. So London, Frankfurt, and Bologna are expensive, but valuable propositions… otherwise, publishers wouldn’t keep attending.
April 30th, 2007 at 6:59 am
This is a very interesting blog post as I too had wondered why we have these hugely expensive book fairs
in the cities mentioned but having read Mark Luk’s comment I now see why these fairs are so well publicised
and attended.
May 1st, 2007 at 9:47 am
Yes, an enormous amount of preparation work goes into the book fairs, months before the actual event occurs. It’s been described to me as back-to-back half-hour appointments, with little time for breaks or even lunch for several days in a row. Also, there are a lot of activities in the evening, so it’s an exhausting process. A lot of the snarky articles written about book fairs focus on the schmoozing or the lack of signed deals, but there is a huge amount of information being exchanged on and off the floor.