The Writing
on China's Great Wall
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (JULY 2001)
The
free market’s last great territorial conquest, China
remains a daunting and volatile arena for many book
publishers in the West. This month Toby Eady,
of the eponymous London-based literary agency, looks
back on some of his Asian adventures and shares a few
words of wisdom for those seeking Chinese fortunes.
When
I first visited the Beijing Book Fair four years
ago, by the time I got into the halls there was hardly
a book left on the stands. These volumes had all been
sold, stolen, or seized by the censors the day before,
deemed unsuitable for popular consumption. But for all
that, compared to BEA in Chicago or even Frankfurt,
there was action — and in cash. My client, a Chinese
lawyer, had written a book roughly translated as “How
far does contract law reach in China?”, and we sold
it for cash handily withdrawn from a suitcase by the
highest bidder. There was no question of royalties.
But there were other sales to be had. We made separate
deals with publishers in Beijing and Shanghai, and what
I learned that day, later to be reinforced, is that
there is no national distribution in China. Each major
city has its own publishers who print and distribute
locally. Printing is cheap, distribution is easy — and
piracy is endemic.
There are no less than five different pirated editions
of Wei Hui’s novel Shanghai Baby being
sold in Shanghai, several in Chengdu, two in Beijing,
and probably several Mongolian editions. The censors’
office reckons over a million copies have been bought
of this banned novel, which so incensed the powers that
be that the government burned 40,000 copies, shutting
down the book’s original publisher last year. Wei Hui
will not become rich on her Chinese sales. A bestseller,
much borrowed, has a mere 7,000 copies printed throughout
China.
Yet the story of Shanghai Baby’s circuitous route
to success is instructive in its own way. If you really
want a Chinese bestseller, here’s how: Get the list
of banned books from a friendly policeman, download
them off the Internet, get four chapters translated,
and sell them. I was in China when the authorities moved
in on Shanghai Baby, and believe me, you couldn’t
ask for better publicity. Wei Hui was bought by Judith
Curr at Pocket. Eight publishers turned her
down in London, but watching her in BBC’s Breakfast
Time this morning, she’s got it — she could damage
Pfizer’s Viagra sales. She has been sold in France (Picquier),
Italy (Rizzoli), and Japan (Bungei Shunju),
where 200,000 copies were sold in two weeks after she
toured. Robinson’s first printing in the UK will
be 60,000 copies. Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia
will take 100,000, the latter in connection with her
tour there in July. In total 19 countries have bought
her, and with film rights, book rights, and royalties,
we’re talking $2 million easy. Yet would her novel have
been noticed if it had not been burned?
In fact, though busts of Mao and copies of the Little
Red Book have now flooded the junk shops in Xian,
Chinese authors still know that the government publishing
houses won’t publish a Shanghai Baby, Ma Jian’s
Red Dust, or Jung Chang’s Wild Swans.
In Ma Jian’s case, knowing his story from another expelled
poet/painter, three years ago I gave him $10,000 to
write Red Dust — a remarkable Chinese answer
to On the Road. But at the same time I gave Flora
Drew money to work on a simultaneous translation.
At Frankfurt I sold it to Jan Mets, a Dutch publisher,
and then to Rebecca Carter at Chatto &
Windus and Dan Frank at Pantheon.
Yet American publishers are parochial, and frightened
of foreigners. Though it was well reviewed, Simon
& Schuster couldn’t get Wild Swans on
the bestseller list. The book has nonetheless sold over
9 million copies in 32 languages. It sells 400,000 copies
every year, 10 years after publication. How did that
one start, you ask? A young woman walks into your office
in 1985 and says, Do you think a book telling the story
of three women would work, and in the telling of which
the book could show how China had changed in the last
60 years? Instinct immediately said yes, where others
had said no. But beyond instinct, I also follow a simple
rule: don’t represent authors mimicking Western writers,
and don’t use academics as translators — they don’t
have Chinese as a living language. (Check out the dead
translation of Hong Ying’s Daughter of the
River, or Gao’s Soul Mountain.)
Publishing
in the Streets
Officially
there are over 1,000 recognized publishers in China,
with the major houses in Beijing and Shanghai. Each
book is chosen by an editorial board on which there
will be a party member, hence the cautious nature of
what gets published. A sampling of major Chinese publishers
would include Xinhua Publishing House, which
has good relations with Germany, Russia, Japan, Singapore,
and the US, and has over 5,000 titles in print that
cover a range of fiction and nonfiction. Also players
are the People’s Education Press (which is as
it sounds) and the Foreign Language Press, which
was founded in 1952 and has published over 20,000 titles
emanating from 40 languages. Most foreign titles are
bought through Taiwanese agents at present. Advances
are not gargantuan — Bill Gates’ $50,000 being
the highest advance paid. Most advances run between
$500 and $2,000 per title, and be surprised if you get
paid royalties: the sales force from my experience gets
space by giving the kiosk or bookstore extra copies
to sell without accounting for them.
Books not of the educational or how-to variety are a
luxury, as evident in the past strength of the Book-of-the-Month
Club and the Literary Guild. Now Bertelsmann’s
book club in Shanghai is working on the basis of subscription
and home delivery, much the same as in West Germany
after 1945. On the other hand, China boasts very good
art book publishers such as Art Books in Cianjing,
whose work rivals Abrams. And in Nanjing,
which has many mom-and-pop bookshops with the same feel
as a good independent store in America, booksellers
proffer two-volume works to foreigners for $30 (there
is nothing comparable in the West!). With the main publishers
in China firmly controlled, however, Chinese writers
tend to publish their own books, and distribute them
via their networks of friends on the streets. What they
are writing today is exciting, real, and new, but you’ll
find them not on the big lists of the Chinese publishers.
Danielle Steel or John Grisham they are
not. Chinese writers are distinctly wary of product
writers, and they don’t come out of writing schools.
John Steinbeck would have understood them, and
so would have the original poets and authors published
in the Evergreen Review in the fifties. Their
enthusiasm and courage is that of first novelists everywhere.
©2001
Publishing Trends
