Big Day of Deals for English-Language Publishers at Beijing Book Fair
By Teri Tan -- Publishers Weekly, 8/30/2007 7:32:00 AM
The five-day Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) kicked off today with the English-speaking contingent sharing half of the more spacious and brighter Hall 8 with other Chinese publishers. The growth of the American Collective Stand (ACS)—attending its third BIBF—is testimony to the growing presence, and faith, of American publishers in this so-called final frontier for the publishing world. “Our stand is double the size of last year’s. We have 10 new publishers,” said ACS v-p John Malinowski, adding that the number of titles being displayed from small presses has grown from 150 titles to 450.
Optimism was running high even before the booths were set up; both HarperCollins and Penguin led the race to announce new titles, deals and projects. HC’s co-publishing deal for Ma Xiaotiao, China’s bestselling original children’s series, is making waves throughout the exhibition halls. The company announced a second deal this morning, to publish Travel Around China. The travel guide will be published in April 2008 by HarperCollins U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India in anticipation of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. The book was originally created by Blue Sky Publishing and is written and researched by local Chinese editors and photographers. The worldwide rights deal was made for the Collins group by Phil Friedman, v-p and publisher of Collins U.S., and Stella Chou, managing director of China business development. Friedman will serve as U.S. editor of the publication.
Meanwhile, educational/STM stalwarts—Pearson, McGraw-Hill, John Wiley and Cengage (formerly Thomson Learning)—all have big booths at the show, but have not made any major announcements. The Chinese educational system, with more than 200 million students, has been the driving force behind the publishing industry, and all the major companies have some relationships with their Chinese counterparts.
For Thomas Seavey, international licensing and business development manager at Highlights for Children, the number of Chinese students represents huge potential. Since his first BIBF last year, he has closed three translation contracts and one adaptation of Highlights children’s educational magazines. “I came here not expecting much and prepared to wait several years before realizing any deals. I was proven wrong,” he said. Not surprisingly, Seavey has opted for a bigger booth this year.
Meanwhile, international development associate Crystal Niermann at Human Kinetics sees BIBF as an opportunity to meet local publishers do not attend BookExpo, or the Frankfurt and London fairs. The growth in licensing deals and sales of Human Kinetics’s original editions in China (as well as in other parts of Asia) is significant enough for Niermann to consider setting up a distribution office in the region soon.
At Thomas Nelson, international licensing director Trish Morrison works on finding partners to fit specific product categories. “We have already formed alliances with five partners—the State Administration for Religious Affairs and [the China] Children’s Press are among them—and such arrangements are proving to be much more effective for our products.” For this particular trip, Morrison is showcasing Brazilian psychologist/scientist Augusto Cury’s The Extravagant Mind, targeting China’s emerging body-mind-spirit segment.
Niche publishers are also looking to exploit China’s growing consumerism and trendy lifestyle. First-timer Diamond Book Distributors is capitalizing on box office hits Spider-Man, 300 and Transformers—as well as video games such as Halo—to sell Marvel and IDW graphic novels. director for international sales Scott Hatfill said, “This is an exploratory trip for us. We see immense opportunity in this marketplace, which is very familiar with all these comic book characters, and we are looking at mostly B2B partnerships.”
For Bowtie’s operations and product development director Karla Austin, the creation of the first “dog park” in Beijing is proof of the country’s growing fascination with paws, kibbles and kennels. “This is a totally new segment in the marketplace, and it naturally generates a lot of traffic to our booth,” Austin said. So far, Bowtie has sold rights to its bestselling title Dog Bible, through agent Tuttle-Mori, and recently closed two other deals.
On the flip side, pricing and piracy continue to dog (pun intended) China’s book market. Nelson’s Morrison explained: “We have to work on a totally different pricing model for China, and that calls for some adjustment in our methodology and thinking. At the same time, we’re seeing new pirating methods in the form of books with bogus ISBNs issued by bogus publishing houses. It makes tracking down the perpetrator much harder. But with more and better information exchange between the two trading countries, we hope to see less of these problems in the near future.”
