“The German publishing industry is going through a transition right now. The mood is all right, but everybody can feel the commercial pressure,” Markus Naegele, editor-in-chief of fiction for Heyne in Germany, tells PW. One current difficulty is launching a first-time author, Naegele says. “Booksellers are increasingly reluctant to take risks and order new authors or books on nonmainstream topics. The consequence is that many publishers play it safe and rely on established authors instead of building new voices or work on ambitious projects,” he says. “The gap between the blockbusters and the midlist is getting bigger. Publishers need to work on strategies to build new authors and turn them into successful trademarks. One challenge is: how do you launch a new name without a huge marketing budget?”
Naegele says that one German title that has been selling extremely well is Timur Vermes’s He’s Back, a satirical novel that speculates on what would happen if Hitler were at large in 21st-century Berlin, which Naegele says sold almost two million copies in Germany in hardcover and paperback. On the nonfiction side, a huge success has been Giulia Enders’s Darm mit Charme (Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ).
Naegele says sales of digital books are still growing, but gains have slowed. “The printed book is still where the music plays,” he says. “I can’t see [print] books disappearing anytime soon, as people still want to own books, have them in their living room.”
E-books, however, have changed the landscape for mass market paperbacks. Naegele says sales of the format are declining not only because of the growth of e-books but also because “readers want essential books on first publication and don’t want to wait for the cheaper paperback format. The old rule that you can sell three times the amount of hardcover copies in mass market does not exist anymore.”
