Nick Webb, MD Europe for Rightscenter.com, serves up an author’s-eye view of Frankfurt in this dispatch, which will appear in a longer article in the journal of the Society of Authors.
If you’re one of those authors who secretly feels low after nipping into Waterstones and seeing the sheer variety of books jostling for shelf space — all of them less worthy than your own — then the Frankfurt Book Fair is, in a word, depressing. The celebration of the competition is so vast that just in Hall 9, the Anglo-American axis, there are nearly 400,000 new titles on display. And here’s what you got: Wheelbarrow Decoration, Deathbed Visions, books on dinosaurs (still), Vocational Diseases of Professional Cooks, novels too numerous to count, anthropomorphic cutesie-pie animal character series (known as “merch”), How to be a Millionaire and Remain a Nice Person, How to be a Millionaire by Being a Complete Bastard, Salads with Edible Flowers, Porn, Porn with Marmite: It’s a body blow to any sense of uniqueness.
Don’t kid yourself that your publisher wants you there, either. No matter how urbane the professions of pleasure when you announce your interest in a visit, the publisher is thinking, “Oh, bugger.” Frankfurt is a market. The rights directors are copyright traders, and your work is currency. The presence of every one of them during the Buchmesse is a catastrophe for the old cash flow. They work like dogs. Let them get on with it. Authors are a pain, you see. They wander up and down those kilometers of exhibits getting melancholy and making injudicious comparisons between their display and that of Stephen King. Occasionally they get drunk, maudlin, stroppy, or randy, and they always need attention.
But, you might ask, what of the publishers? Aren’t they vain media trendies, staying out late at parties, drinking too much and shagging each other? Yes, some are. A bit of Frankfurt apocrypha would have us believe that the city’s prostitutes take the week off during the show because publishers only sleep with each other. Some publishers maintain an annual three- or four-day affair with the same person, an arrangement that may have lasted twenty years. It’s rather like the Book Fair itself, which feels like a continuous event from which you have 51-week breaks. As for publishers’ vanity, authors are the beneficiaries. When some wally wants to make a statement to the parish that here is a major player with a big swinging chequebook, it usually means a fat advance that will earn out when the sun goes nova. Undoubtedly there are some publishers who will be driven by winning rather than by passion for the text. But if publishers bid each other up for a book, the author can only chortle. Frankfurt fever is the name given to this syndrome; fortunately the condition has become less virulent as the importance of Frankfurt as a stage has dwindled.
Though you might think that the more senior the person at Frankfurt, the less he or she does, most publishers work very hard and are suffused with honourable fatigue by fair’s end. You can almost hear the relentless trading: the white noise of people air-kissing and crying, “Darling, super” against the hum of 20,000 people saying, “Oh really, how interesting” and maintaining those affable but non-committal conversations you have with people you know but whose names you cannot remember. But the real heroes are the rights directors and those agents who have non-stop appointments every half hour. By the weekend their eyes are the colour of Spam and their skin grey with exhaustion. Be kind to them if the translation rights into Estonian are taking longer than they should. It’s not for want of effort.
