Getting It Right at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2002

By Sally Taylor, International Correspondent for Publishers Weekly -- Publishers Weekly, 10/15/2002

The Rights Directors' Meeting every year at this undisputed world congress of book people speaks to the heart of the business. The buying and selling of translation rights is the main reason most people come to Frankfurt.

The Rights meeting, coordinated by the Book Fair itself, packed a room of 300 this year to listen to the latest updates on a far flung group of countries, united only in their growing value as rights markets. Agents and publishers from China, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, Brazil and South Korea spoke, in English, on why their markets offer income growth and added value to book publishers.

While every country wants to promote its own authors, the truth is, only some writers translate successfully into many languages. That remarkable young man, Harry Potter, is the latest and best example.

Eric Yang of his eponymous rights agency in Seoul, Korea reported this year that Harry's books have sold 8 million copies, so far, in Korea's hangul characters. Demand for translations, in general, are booming, Yang reported. As many as 700 Korean publishers were attending Frankfurt this year, looking for titles to buy.

Lynette Owen, Copyright Director for Pearson Education, Ltd. In the UK, probably handles more rights agreements with educational publishers in more countries than most of us will ever visit in a lifetime. She focused on central and Eastern Europe, a region of 300 million people, divided by ten languages and even more cultures.

Poland, the biggest book market in this region, continued to buy rights all the way through the Communist era and then enjoyed a huge boom in the 1990s after the Iron Curtain fell. "The craze to publish anything and everything had a rather negative effect on the educational and academic sector," she admits. It was a common phenomenon in most of this part of the world.

Natalia Avetisian of the Slovo Publishing House in Moscow and Irina Prokhorova, Editor & Publisher of the New Literary Review Press there gave in depth reports on the state of Russian language book markets in Belarus and the Ukraine. Comparing print runs in 1991 to 2001, they report a healthy growth in educational titles, which now account for 36% of the trade. Fiction is still a whopping 28%, but books for children and teenagers have declined to 12%. Both those categories accounted for 65% of the books printed in 1991, when the country was soaking up a world of reading unavailable before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

This year, all the former Soviet countries, including Russia, reported a return to earth, in terms of rights purchasing, but with markets maturing. Book lovers abound among this 300 million population and even the little Baltic state of Lithuania, featured country of the Frankfurt Fair this year, boasts a strong local language market eager for international titles in certain subject areas.

If less is more in these markets, then Sergio Machada, President of the Record Publishing Group in Brazil, had to report that in his country, more is less. Brazil is once again struggling with financial instability that has brought down the value of the local currency by two-thirds in four years. Even with 175 million people, that has a huge impact on the number of rights agreements publishers can afford to make and the income publishers can expect to received from sales.

Still Machado is sanguine, both about the future of his country as a viable book market and the importance of maintaining loyal relationships with international partners.

"The publishing paradigms of the first world, such as auctions for everything and a low level of loyalty among authors and publishers, should not apply in a market with this level of volatility," he said. "See the Brazilian publisher as your partner in the market, for the long term."

The country that has reported the least progress in translation relations is China. Government control of the publishing sector remains stifling, according to Edward Ye, Editor in Chief of the Shanghai Translation Publishing House.

Only the 562 official government houses are issued ISBN numbers and book projects developed by private "cultural agencies" cannot actually make contracts as publishers. There are more than 1000 of these agencies, and they must all work through the official houses. Nor are joint ventures with foreign publishers yet allowed.

In spite of these difficulties, the Government reported more than 7000 translation agreements in the year 2000. Over two million books were imported, by more than 30 official import/export agencies, as well.

The sales of Chinese language rights are further complicated by the existence of two sets of Chinese characters. The traditional or "complicated" Chinese characters are still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. While a fraction of the size of China, Taiwan is a huge book market, bigger than the mainland, in terms of rights sales.

The mainland uses a simplified character system developed by the Communist regime to facilitate the spread of literacy in the country, and coincidentally control the spread of information to the masses. Computers have made it easy for publishers to produce both complex and simplified versions of a Chinese work or translation, but distribution is an insurmountable stumbling block.

Ye recommends publishers make two different agreements for their translations into Chinese, one with Taiwan publishers for the complicated character edition, and one with the mainland for the simplified character edition. Even though cooperation between publishers from the two major Chinese markets is improving, two contracts guarantee sales in both markets.

To contact the above speakers by email:
Natalie A. Avetisian avetisian@slovo-pub.ru
Simona Kessler skessler@fx.ro
Hans Kim Hans@cmgbook.co.kr
Ye Lu yelu@yiwen.com.cn
Sergio Machado sacm@record.com.br
Lynette Owen Lynette.Owen@pearsoned-ema.com
Irina Prokhorova nlo.ltd@g23.relcom.ru
Eric Yang amonoh@ericyangagency.co.kr

For details on the rights available at Frankfurt this year, and the rest of the events, check out www.frankfurt.book-fair.com.