Frankfurt Fair Dealer, October 13, Day 2

Frankfurt Fair DEALER Thursday 13 October 2011 1

13 OCTOBER 2011

For round-the-clock Frankfurt Book Fair coverage go to www.publishersweekly.com and www.bookbrunch.co.uk

E xplicitly aiming a barb at the Man Booker Prize, a group of publishers and agents with

Andrew Kidd of Aitken Alexander as its spokesman has announced the Literature Prize, “to establish a clear and uncompromising standard of excellence”.

Th e organisers said that there was a vacancy for such a prize, because “as numerous statements by (the Man Booker’s) administrator and this year’s judges illustrate, it now prioritises a notion of ‘readability’ over artistic achievement”. Th ey have the support of authors including former Booker winners Pat Barker and John Banville, as well as Mark Haddon, Jackie Kay, Nicole Krauss, Claire Messud, Pankaj Mishra and David Mitchell. Other “high-profi le writers” are “off ering strong support behind the scenes”.

Th ere will be an announcement about funding for the new prize, and about the composition of the Literature Prize advisory board, “soon”.

Th e organisers added: “We believe though that great writing has the power to change us, to make us see the world a little diff erently from how we saw it before, and that the public deserves a prize whose sole aim is to bring to our attention and celebrate the very best novels published in our time.”

A number of literary publishers and journalists have been strongly critical of the apparent agenda of the 2011 Man Booker judging panel. Dame Stella Rimington, Chair of the judges, said that they were looking for “enjoyable books. I think they are very readable books.” Chris Mullin said that a “big factor” for him was that a novel had to “zip along”. Susan Hill tweeted: “Hurrah! Man Booker judges accused of ‘dumbing down’.

Th ey mean our shortlist is readable and enjoyable.”

In the New Statesman, Leo Robson commented: “I think we can all agree that if a book is to be given a prize, it ought not to be unreadable, but some of us recoil from the use of ‘readable’ to mean (essentially) ‘can be read without struggle/thinking/turning off the telly’.”

Some critics believe that it goes against the original spirit of the Man

New prize takes aim at BookerBooker to include genre novels among the contenders. AD Miller’s Snowdrops was also on the shortlist for the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award, and Patrick deWitt’s Th e Sisters Brothers was described by Man Booker Literary Director as the fi rst western to appear on the shortlist for the Prize. But there was widespread surprise that there was no place on the list for Alan Hollinghurst’s widely acclaimed novel Th e Stranger’s Child. ■

Perseus expands HBRP deal

T he Perseus Books Group is expanding its distribution agreement with Harvard

Business Review Press to include international distribution of both its print and ebooks. Perseus, which distributes HBRP in North America, began selling the Press’s titles into Latin America and the Caribbean on 1 September.

Beginning 1 January, the company will take over sales into Europe through Perseus UK and will also begin distribution into Asia – including China, Japan and Korea – as well as Australia and New Zealand.

“We see only upside in partnering with Perseus to extend our reach internationally,” said Joshua Macht, Group Publisher for HBRP. “Th is expanded partnership will give our books the widest possible distribution wherever – and in whatever format – readers want to purchase and read the content. We are excited about this important step forward in the global growth of our publishing program.”

Th e Press will continue to market and promote its titles from offi ces in the UK and India as well as in the Middle East, including Dubai, Qatar, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. ■

Liz Foley at Harvill Secker has signed up UK & Commonwealth rights to the second volume of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s memoir, In the House of the Interpreter, in a deal with Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein on behalf of Gloria Loomis. The memoir will appear in September 2012, and will cover the author’s schooldays in 1950s Kenya.


P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y & B O O K B R U N C H F R A N K F U R T F A I R D E A L E R

F A I R D E A L I N G S

daughter, Sheikha Bodour, founder of the award-winning children’s publisher Kalimat and of the Emirates Publishers Association, is the driving force behind Knowledge Without Borders, a programme which aims to engrain the habit of reading among Sharjah families by donating libraries, each of 50 books, cleverly shelved within a coff ee table, to 42,000 families in the Emirate.

HE Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi, President of the Emirates Publishers Association,

A hmed Al Amri, Director of the Sharjah International Book

Fair, has announced a $300,000 translation fund to mark the event’s thirtieth anniversary.

Th e SIBF Translation Rights Centre, which is sponsored by Etisalat, the largest telecommunications company in the UAE, and supported by American University of Sharjah (AUS), will off ers grants for deals concluded or initiated at the Fair, and it will include books being translated between any two languages. In its fi rst year, the fund will have a pot of $300,000.

Th e initiative refl ects “the international reach and infl uence of SIBF” and is driven by the vision of its Director – but it also underscores the commitment of the Emirate to the cultural economy, a commitment which comes absolutely from the top. HH Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qassimi is the Fair’s Patron (his memoir is published by BQPF), and at last year’s event, the talk was of “a cultural march... a global road map opening up the world to book-lovers”. His

$300,000 translation fund marks Sharjah’s thirtieth anniversary

said: “We are proud to launch the SIBF Translation Rights Centre to celebrate our thirthieth anniversary. It will mark a signifi cant gathering of international publishers and we will facilitate as many translation deals as we can, confi rming Sharjah’s important role as an infl uential international book fair.”

Crucially, the launch of the SIBF Translation Rights Centre is supported by a hugely expanded professional programme, which will take place on Monday 14 and Tuesday 15 November, prior to offi cial opening of SIBF on Wednesday 16. It will include individual meetings, networking and talks, and will bring together professionals from across the international rights community to do business at the Fair.

Already more than 50 international publishers have confi rmed attendance from some 16 countries, including Japan, Russia, US, Romania, UK and Mexico. Th e programme will also be attended by Arab publishers from across the region keen to build their networks with international publishers. All attendees will receive a list of books currently available in Arabic that are

recommended for translation, and the opportunity to meet their Arabic publishers.

Literary agent Toby Eady said: “Books don’t succeed unless they are very well translated. But brilliant and inspiring translation is not just the bedrock of international publishing, it is the key to better understanding between cultures. Opportunities to meet with publishing professionals from across the world, like the one aff orded at Sharjah Translation Rights Centre, are invaluable in helping us break down the barriers. Hopefully, this will lead to more authors being translated and appreciated in more languages across the world.”

A partnership with the British Council will this year see a roster of international authors heading to Sharjah for the Fair, among them Andrew Rawnsley, Robert Lacey, Amit Chaudhuri, Kate Mosse, Sunetra Gupta and Lauren St John, who was among the attendees at Tuesday night’s Sharjah dinner, held at the Schloss. Guests hosted by Al-Amri and the Sheikha included publishers from Italy, Spain and France, as well as Richard Mollet and Emma House from the UK PA, Steve Rosato from BEA, Margaret Obank from Banipal, Jane Tappuni of Publishing Technology, and Orion’s Lisa Milton, who, at Sharjah 2010, bought UK right’s in Kalimat’s My Own Special Way, which will be published in spring 2012.

Th e Fair itself will also be attended by Arab authors, booksellers and wholesalers, and key English-language book buyers from institutions such as universities and libraries.

Th e translation grant will be available to any attending publisher or agent. Th e full guidelines for 2011 will be announced shortly via www.sharjahbookfair.com. ■

To contact Frankfurt Fair Dealer at the Fair with your news, visit us on the Publishers Weekly stand Hall 8.0 R925Frankfurt reporting by Nicholas Clee and Liz Thomson for BookBrunch and Andrew Albanese and Rachel Deahl for Publishers Weekly

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Sheikha Bodour, centre, with left to right, Orion’s Fiona Kennedy, Lauren St John, Lisa Milton and Alex Williams, also both from Orion

4 Frankfurt Fair DEALER Thursday 13 October 2011



The London Book Fair celebrated China as Market Focus 2012. Some 2,000 Chinese publishers are expected to participate, eager to boost their business with western publishers.

Chris Paterson (second from left), who is advising LBF on the China programme, MC-ed the proceedings, at which speakers Dr Steven Luk, a former banker who is now Managing Director of the Commercial Press Hong Kong Ltd, and Doug Wright, Director of PCG and International Business Development at Publishing Technology, which ramped up its business with China at last month’s Beijing International Book Fair, spoke of the business opportunities that await.

Concluding the evening, the LBF’s Emma Lowe said: “As ever, our Market Focus choice poses the question, ‘Why now?’ Well, the UK and other international markets have a long history of trading with China. Furthermore, our Market Focus programme is based on our exhibitor and visitor feedback which tells us that there is an enormous amount of interest in the Chinese publishing world – not only their cultural heritage but also their fascinating contemporary literary environment.”

More than 2,000 Chinese exhibitors expected at LBF 2012

Agent’s cautious debut makes wavesShort Books has acquired WEL rights in a debut novel that turns out to be written by one of the trade’s own – New York agent Barbara J Zitwer.

The J M Barrie Ladies Swimming Society was acquired by Aurea Carpenter, who’d been sent the novel, then titled Skinny-Dipping in Winter by an author named Becky Eastwood. “I didn’t know where it had come from and it seemed too good to be true. Inspired by a swim in the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, the novel had at its centre a group of women who swim together every day of the year in a freezing Cotswold lake.” A number of Short staff swim in the Ladies Pond, so the book struck a chord.

“Becky” didn’t want to meet with Carpenter so, at the LBF a few months later, she asked Zitwer if rights were still available. “Barbara considered her answer carefully, took her sunglasses off, and said, ‘Actually, I wrote that novel and it’s still available.’”

Carpenter “couldn’t resist”, and describes the novel as being “infused with the spirit of JM Barrie. It’s about fi nding your own Neverland, and the healing power of friendship. Barbara has created a very special story, which I am sure will speak to many as it did to me.”

German rights have been sold to Lubbe, world Spanish to Planeta, and publication next year of this “warm-hearted, funny women’s novel that explores the hearts and minds of its female characters from the ages of 15 to 85” will coincide with the centenary of the publication of Peter Pan.

Zitwer can be found on table 24B in the Rights Centre. ■

Barbara Zitwer

BZRK bidsEgmont is reporting “frenzied bidding from publishers all over the world” for Michael Grant’s game-themed thriller series BZRK. Th e three-book series has already attracted £0.5m in advances from publishers in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the US. Egmont MD Cally Poplak said: “BZRK is a brilliantly original thriller, a cracking story and our fi rst transmedia project. We’re delighted that other publishers are as blown away by it as we are.”

BZRK is a “unique storytelling experience” bringing together the worlds of gaming and YA fi ction. It is backed by a team of digital specialists including Rich Silverman, writer on Alternate Reality games for Heroes and Th e Dark Knight. ■

W ith a number of big deals closing the days and hours

before Frankfurt got underway, conversations have trended less toward pinpointing the big book, and more toward sifting all the mini-major deals that have already gone down, writes Rachel Deahl. While Ecco made a splash buying the forthcoming memoir from Amy Winehouse’s dad, and Amazon Publishing made an arguably bigger splash nabbing Penny Marshall’s memoir, it seems every agent is trying to take advantage of Frankfurt to make a big book even bigger. But one thing everyone is buzzing about is a new Swedish trilogy being shopped by the Salmonsson Agency, the outfi t that represent Norwegian bestseller Jo Nesbo.

Amid a frenzied round of deal-making before the fair, Leyla Belle Drake, at Salomonsson, is selling a debut trilogy by Alexander Soderbergh called Th e Andalucian. Th e agency was going to hold off on selling the series until London, but, after the scouts picked up on it, rushed a translation—in a week they got the fi rst 100 pages of the book translated into English to

It’s all about the pre-sales… and the big Swedish trilogy

have ready at Frankfurt. Th e trilogy was pre-empted in Sweden in what Bell called a “huge” deal, and a signifi cant auction has also closed in Italy and Germany. A number of off ers are in from other countries, but the agency is planning to hold on a US sale at the fair and, instead, to shop the rights in the States in November. A UK auction, the agency said, may or may not close in Germany. Th e central character in the trilogy is a middle-aged female nurse and Drake said that the fi rst book was “very cinematic” and featured “explosive action”.

Another book people are buzzing about is the sophomore novel from Laurie Frankel, Deadmail. Molly Friedrich, at the Friedrich Agency, has reportedly coordinated a US auction for the book today. Th e novel is described as a melding of highbrow science fi ction with Nicholas Sparks, and it is a decided departure for the author, whose debut novel, Th e Atlas of Love, was published by St Martin’s Press in August 2010 and sold very modestly. (Th at book, a women’s fi ction entry, put a female-friendly, and serious,

Continued on page 6 ➝

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Colin Dickerman bought North American rights in the days before the Fair to Scott Hutchins’s A Working Th eory of Love, after a 10-way auction conducted by Bill Clegg at William Morris Endeavor. WME, which said the book was their big title at the fair, has just taken a German pre-empt, and also closed in Holland; auctions in France and Italy are set to close soon.

Th e historical novel Amy Einhorn bought before the fair, Tanis Rideout’s debut Above All Th ings, also has some people talking. Th e Cooke Agency brokered that deal, on behalf of McClelland & Stewart, which has world rights. About George Mallory’s wife waiting to hear from the doomed explorer while he was attempting to become the fi rst person to ascend Mt Everest, the novel was pre-emptied in Italy, and a rep from the Cooke Agency said the UK auction was about to close, with off ers coming “imminently” from Germany, Spain and France. ■

spin on Th ree Men and a Baby, with two women coming to their friend’s aid after her husband abandons her and their newborn.) It already has sales in Italy, Spain and Germany.

Th ere is also a buzz – thanks in large part to the snatching of UK rights by Canongate’s Tif Loehnis – in Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Lee Boudreaux at Ecco bought weeks before the fair and, as one scout put it, people are even more curious now that Canongate has acquired the title. Fountain, a PEN/Hemingway winner who, like Frankel, does not have a signifi cant sales record - his debut was 2007’s short story collection Brief Encounters With Che Guevera (which Harper Perennial published as a paperback original) – is now very much on the radar of foreign publishers. Curtis Brown is handling the book at the fair, on behalf of ICM.

Frankfurt pre-sales

Sarah Mussi is among the fi rst signings at Hot Key Books, the new children’s fi ction list from Bonnier.

Th e publisher has acquired WEL rights following a deal with Sophie Hicks of Ed Victor Literary Agency.

Sarah Odedina, Managing Director of Hot Key Books, said: “I am delighted to have done this deal with Sophie for a book for our fi rst list. Th e novel is a wonderful story in which an angel falls in love with a very unsuitable character. Part angelic romance and part urban tragedy, this novel will grip young adult readers with its brilliant story-telling and wonderfully realised world.”

Sophie Hicks added: “It was a persuasive pre-empt and an impressive pitch for the novel so both Sarah (Mussi) and I are delighted to be in business with Sarah Odedina and Hot Key books. I have worked with Sarah for more than a decade and she is a fantastic publisher. One of her greatest skills is in publishing authors not books. We are looking forward to a long and successful partnership.” ■

Hot Key signs Mussi

Sarah Odedina and Sophie Hicks

Continued from page 4➝UN signs up to pub2webThe United Nations eCollection has become the latest signing to Publishing Technoloy’s pub2web platform.

One of Publishing Technology’s core solutions, pub2web provides custom web platforms, tailor made to any business model and any type of content. Louise Tutton, Chief Operating Offi cer of Publishing Technology’s Online Division, said: “With 40 new agreements so far this year, we are continuing to build on the success of our state-of-the-art solutions to the unique challenges of digital publishing. The new United Nations eCollection will take full advantage of the powerful combination of semantic web technologies and sophisticated information commerce capabilities available within the pub2web platform as standard. This combination allows for ease of breaking down content silos and moving away from the traditional containers of journals, books and reference works while allowing publishers to experiment with new business models (such as Patron-Driven Acquisition) and to deliver an enriched user experience.”

The United Nations eCollection will be built on a custom interface on the pub2web platform that will allow cross searching, discovery and sales via pay-per-view or by subscription for over 1,500 publications produced by the international organization, and all new and forthcoming titles, including ebooks, reports, periodicals and selected grey literature. It will benefi t library customers and patrons in higher education institutions, as well as commercial and individual end-users with centralized delivery of online content.

Valentina Kalk in the Department of Public Information of the United Nations observed: “Delivering a wealth of titles and serial publications to our readers worldwide via a single multilingual online platform is very exciting. It is increasingly important that we make information more discoverable and searchable in the easiest and most environmentally-friendly ways possible. Publishing Technology has the expertise to deliver this for us and we very much look forward to working with them in this venture.” ■

Liz Foley at Harvill Secker has acquired “an extraordinary debut: both a completely terrifying and gripping thriller and a novel which brings something new and fresh to the genre”. Aftermath by Koethi Zan is the story of Sarah Farber, who has spent the last 10 years rarely leaving her apartment after surviving an abduction, and whose abductor comes up for parole. Foley bought UK/Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) from Dorothy Vincent at Janklow & Nesbit, New York. Zan is a lawyer at MTV, where she is Senior Vice-President and Deputy General Counsel.

At Portobello, Philip Gwyn Jones has commissioned a book from investigative journalist Mike Power, who broke the story about the accelerated rise to widespread use of the untested new recreational drug mephedrone (aka miaow) and has become a pre-eminent commentator on the rise of “research chemicals”

. Portobello has world rights in the book from Andrew Gordon at Higham Associates, for publication in 2013.

Jeremy Robson arrives at Frankfurt this year rebranded as the Robson Press, working under Iain Dale’s Biteback umbrella. His highlights include From Russia With Love, the autobiography of Viktoria Mullova, the fi ddler who defected to the West in 1983 with her Georgian lover, a conductor, leaving behind the priceless Stradivarius with which she’d won the International Tchaikovsky Competition. (She is now married to cellist Matthew Barley.) Robson has world rights in her book through Robert Dudley, and told FFD that the memoir – told through a close friend – contained “tremendous insight” into what it’s like being a young musician and how diffi cult it was to assimilate, personally and musically, into the expansive liberalism of the West. UK publication is in April 2012.

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and Germany has had the libreka.de site since 2007 as central sites for the sale of ebooks by independent booksellers. Th e ABA in the US was in at the launch of Google eBooks in December last year.

Here in the UK, the BA has followed the ABA in keeping up a continuing dialogue with Google to enable bookshops to sell Google eBooks from day one of their launch, either through wholesaler Gardners’ Hive website or through an Affi liate scheme. Th is includes in-store and online marketing materials, and help guides for both booksellers and their customers. Th e BA has also had discussions with Anobii, the social networking site for books, about how independent booksellers could use their knowledge and experience to attract consumers to the site.

But publishers seem reluctant to engage with booksellers directly, preferring to use one or more of the online retailers or aggregators such as Amazon, Apple, OverDrive or Hive. Th ey could do more to use the network of high street bookshops to entice readers into sampling or buying ebooks while browsing the printed versions in-store.

Checklist for Publishers • Do consider high street bookshops

as an outlet for ebooks.• Make it as easy for them to obtain

ebooks as it is for printed books.• Ensure you supply in industry

standard formats (e.g. epub/pdf).• Please don’t undermine booksellers

with pricing strategies that may put them at a competitive disadvantage.

• Consider ways in which ebook and print sales can be linked in the bookshop to benefi t both.

• Make it clear in your promotional material to consumers that they should ask about ebooks at their local bookshop.

• Put simply, books are wonderful products and bookshops are the best places to tempt people into buying them, but they need help and they need it now.

Sydney Davies is Head of Trade & Industry at the Booksellers Association. ■

for all that sales space being lost in bookshops. BML’s Books & Consumers 2010 reported that with the demise of Borders “over half of the money spent by Borders buyers in 2009 [was] eff ectively leaving the industry altogether in 2010”.

High street and academic booksellers have seen their market eroded, yet they are providing the shop window for publishers’ product at great expense. We all know the anecdotes about consumers visiting bookshops and then ordering online. Some of them care so little that they will even scan the barcode and order right there and then. Already a little more than half of UK consumers now use their mobiles during the purchasing process, and this is expected to grow quickly, according to a report quoted in City AM.

Th e basic fi nancial model, and the organisation of the book supply chain, is still largely as was when free pricing came in in 1995. But times have changed, not least with the advent of the internet and now the ebook.

Something has to change. Publishers need to review the way they do business with booksellers if they want to keep these shop windows, which

put a wide range of titles in front of readers, and engage them in ways online can never do. Crucially, they also need to address how to help booksellers access and sell their ebooks. Th ese are trusted retailers we are talking about, with a track record and a desire to support copyright.

We are seeing ebooks start to take hold in the UK, but the vast majority of those sales are through one company. Publishers can, and should, do more to help their long time partners, the high street booksellers, to get into this market.

Th e French website 1001libraires.com launched in April this year

I t has become de rigueur to say that the High Street bookshop has no future. I could quote

numerous pundits and industry insiders plus recent articles in the national press. So what? I hear publishers say, we still have the internet retailers, supermarkets and the burgeoning ebook market. It’s tough for some, but in reality it’s just another readjustment of the retail market. We’ll still sell books, only in diff erent channels. Remember how book clubs used to be so important?

However book sales are down across the board; year on year in the UK they are currently down by 4.6%

(Nielsen BookScan TCM). How much of this is simply down to the economic climate we don’t know, but whatever the reasons, this is not good news for anyone in our business.

In the face of deep cuts, we’ve heard a lot about the cultural infl uence of libraries -- the same argument could be used for bookshops on the high street. But there are also good commercial reasons why we need them, otherwise publishers may fi nd that they may be caught between a rock and a hard place. And this is not just about the dominance of a few multinational corporations, it’s a bigger issue.

In bookselling, discoverability is a key factor. Book Marketing Ltd (BML) states that nearly half of all purchases in bookshops can be classifi ed as “impulse” purchases. However online, this fi gure drops to less than a quarter. Furthermore, as Marc Parrish at Barnes & Noble (which is building up some very useful data comparing print/bookstore sales to digital/online sales) put it to Business Week, “the consumption pattern of books is shifting” as “the discovery model on ereaders is shifting: people buy a narrower set of books”.

In his blog on www.idealog.com, industry guru Mike Shatzkin states that he had thought that as more books are sold online, sales should be moving to the long tail, but that it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. Instead, he says, “it would appear that ebook sales are even more concentrated across a smaller title band than print”.

Could some new ingenious algorithm sort it out? I would argue that Amazon has been around for more than 15 years and it still hasn’t come up with anything that recreates the serendipity of a good bookshop.

And here’s another thing. Newspapers, that useful tool for marketing publishers’ wares, are selling fewer and fewer copies every year, with the three “quality” dailies and Sundays down on average more than 10% over the last year alone (ABC circulation fi gures). Sure they are online and some are very good at it, but how many readers get past the front page?

Th is over-reliance and concentration on bestsellers (and the discounting that inevitably goes with it) is pushing the book buyer down an ever narrowing tunnel, and it is becoming more and more diffi cult to shed light on the fantastic range that publishers produce.

If bookshops are forced to compensate by diversifying too much into other products to keep their margins up, then the book range will be further diluted and publishers will suff er even more. Publishers might get away with selling some books in niche outlets selling upmarket goods,

but they’re hardly going to make up

A shop window for ebooks



Sydney Davies argues that bookshops are essential in putting a wide range of books – and ebooks – in front of readers

Sydney Davies

Nearly half of all purchases in bookshops can be classifi ed as

“impulse” purchases, but online, this fi gure drops to less than a quarter

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and persons with print disabilities – to develop innovative solutions to facilitate broader legal access to copyright works for the print disabled.

Two pilot schemes, with the aim of implementing networks of Trusted Intermediaries for the cross-border transfer of fi les and works in special formats, now exist: TIGAR (Trusted Intermediary Global Resources) – a WIPO initiative; and ETIN (European Trusted Intermediary Network) – an EC initiative.

Th e European initiative resulted in a Memorandum of Understanding, which was signed in September 2010 by IFRRO, and others including the European Writers Council, the Federation of European Publishers and the European Dyslexia Association.

Facilitating legal access to copyright works in digital environments requires interoperability. IFRRO is actively involved in the development of technical standards and identifi ers, and various projects to build rights information and management structures for the 21st century.

ONIX for RROs standardises repertoire and distribution data. With Bowker (ProQuest), Nielsen and the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, IFRRO is a founding member of the ISTC (International Standard Text Code), the unique identifi er of the text in a publication, with agencies in 10 countries just two years after its launch. Th e ISTC supplements the ISBN and allows us to keep track of the text in any granularity and whatever form it has been published.

IFRRO – with Bowker and others – is also a founding member of ISNI (International Standard Name Identifi er), the unambiguous unique identifi er of names used by authors and publishers of copyright works. ISTC and ISNI are open ISO standards.

It is in the interests of both users and creators that copyright material be made available as widely and effi ciently as possible, while ensuring that authors are encouraged to continue producing new works and publishers have the incentive to publish them. IFRRO has a central role in this.

Olav Stokkmo is Chief Executive and Secretary General of IFFRO.www.iff ro.org ■

reliable information and constructive suggestions for policy-makers and others; and ensuring that the interests of authors and publishers are properly addressed and respected.

At IFRRO we believe that interchanges between interested parties on a voluntary basis often provide for the most appropriate solutions. We therefore participate in stakeholder dialogues and platforms, which have led to proven results. Tools to facilitate the digitisation – and making available by libraries – of works, which authors and publishers have decided not to commercialise, have been agreed. Th ese include recommended guidelines for works registries, rights clearance and licensing, and model licensing agreements.

IFRRO supports the European Commission’s aim to provide legal certainty for access to orphan works contained in publicly accessible libraries. Th ey should be administered through collective management and licensing, and the conditions for uses should be decided by authors and publishers of the categories of works concerned. IFRRO is already working to facilitate ease of access to works that are protected by copyright, while ensuring that authors and publishers are properly remunerated.

To further enable library digitisation projects and to implement solutions proposed for the handling of orphan and out-of-commerce works, IFRRO took part in the EC-sponsored ARROW project – a system to identify the authors, publishers and rights status of a work, to build an orphan works registry and smooth the process of rights clearance and copyright licensing.

Th e piloting of the system in France, Germany, Spain and the UK revealed time and cost benefi ts of between 73% to 97% by using ARROW, as compared to manual searches. At a conference in Brussels in March this year EC Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes expressed high ambitions for ARROW, which she said had “huge potential”. Th e EC-sponsored ARROW Plus project will increase the number of countries using ARROW, and broaden its scope to include visual material.

IFRRO and its members are also contributing – with organisations representing authors, publishers

I FRRO (International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations), with

its 131 member organisations, is the biggest existing network of organisations representing authors and publishers in the text and image-based works sector, writes Olav Stokkmo. It is made up of 76 RROs and 55 national and international publishers’ and authors’ associations in some 70 countries worldwide.

RROs are collective management organisations set up and governed by authors and publishers. Active on all continents, IFRRO’s mission is to increase the lawful use of copyright works, and to eliminate unauthorised copying by promoting effi cient collective rights management.

Copyright is at the top of the agenda globally, with initiatives to digitise and make available cultural heritage, orphan and out-of-commerce works, and to improve access for libraries and persons

with print disabilities. Collective management and licensing are vital elements to enable legal access to intellectual property, and the EC has announced a proposal for a Directive on Collective Management in 2012.

IFRRO’s tasks include: fi nding solutions to challenges posed by demands for enhanced legal access to copyright works; providing accurate,

How IFFRO supports copyright


Olav Stokkmo


Let us show you how to take charge of your Digital Distribution in 6 Simple Steps…

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music CDs, games and musical instruments with books in various languages. Th is added a whole new dimension to the conversations.

Th is is a special time in the life of the series that revolutionised how the world learned about information technology, and then applied and expanded that learning to every area of human interest and endeavour. As we embrace new technologies, Dummies continues to evolve to give consumers the information they want, wherever and however they want it.

We can provide our customers with various ways to access our content, through ebooks, enhanced ebooks and mobile apps, as well as Dummies.com, with its arsenal of how-to videos and subject specifi c articles. Th ese platforms off er new ways for us to fulfi ll For Dummies’ core purpose of enriching people’s lives by making knowledge accessible. Th rough our rapidly growing digital platform, we have already seen notable successes in providing our customers with must-have apps, including Spanish For Dummies and Digital SLR Photography Toolkit For Dummies. As these opportunities for digital content on the Dummies platform grow in all of our language markets around the world, we will have even more to share, discuss, learn from and grow with at future Frankfurt gatherings.

I often think back to the early days when the standard publisher response to selling foreign rights for this series was: “Oh, that might be OK for you Americans, but not for the [fi ll in nationality of the publisher].” And now we meet with Dummies publishers from every continent except Antarctica. It’s funny, because now it seems obvious to everyone that Dummies was, and is, a great idea. And in the ten years since Wiley took over the series, it has become more global and more accessible than ever before. Twenty years of making everything easier has been a lot of hard work. And a lot of Frankfurt Book Fairs!

Marc Mikulich is VP Brand Management and International Rights at John Wiley & Sons. ■

readers; sex, on the other hand, had a more global appeal! Sex For Dummies would go on to be the most widely translated in Dr Ruth’s book writing career.

By following the same consistent approach, For Dummies is able present any topic in an easily accessible way to meet the needs of all consumers. Expanding into more general topics and reducing our reliance on computing books also proved to be a good strategic move, as it ensured the brand

would ride out the dot.com crash at the turn of the Millennium.

By the time Dummies came to Frankfurt as a Wiley imprint in 2001, there were more than 100 million Dummies books in print globally, and they had been translated into 30 languages. Under the Wiley umbrella, the imprint was able to expand its subject range through local publishing in Australia, Canada, Germany and the UK, complementing the foreign language editions.

Th e mandate of publishing consumer/business/lifestyle topics, as well as local interest, was extended to licensee publishers too. Th is has proved to be successful with Editions First in France, which published one of the bestselling Dummies titles published in a language other than English – L’Histoire de France Pour les Nuls. All of this has helped to make our Frankfurt Roundtable meetings more dynamic than ever, with original publications from all these locations being shared for consideration and adaptation.

Th e Dummies brand licensing programme, which began in the US in 1996, also began to explore foreign language markets, creating opportunities for cross-selling and bundling software, videos,

T his year Wiley will mark 20 years since the inception of the For Dummies series in

November 1991 and ten years since the Company acquired the brand. It also marks 20 years since the fi rst foreign rights to a For Dummies title were off ered and licensed at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

In 1991, IDG Books Worldwide was exhibiting at Frankfurt for the fi rst time. We came with a small list of computing titles, including one that stood out for its audacity – DOS For Dummies.

At that time, most computer book publishers did a decent job of helping beginner computer users do their work, but often the books were as jargon-fi lled as the user manuals they were designed to replace. We asked: “What if a computer book helped the user and was actually fun to read?” And thought that readers needed a book that acted as a trusted friend, using a lighthearted approach to make concepts manageable. DOS For Dummies was the fi rst computer book to defi ne and speak to this audience.

Th e book sold out its initial print run of 7,500 copies in less than two weeks, and in the fi rst 14 months, the book sold more than 1.5 million copies. In late 1991, the fi rst foreign edition was published in Dutch. Th at title, Eerste Hulp Bij DOS (First Aid for DOS), was typical of the early foreign language Dummies, avoiding the delicate question of the title, and the bold yellow and black cover design. French, German and Spanish publishers followed suit with L’Essentiel du DOS (Essentials of DOS), DOS Feur Ahnfanger (DOS for Beginners) and DOS Para Inexpertos (DOS for the Inexperienced), respectively. All tried to be “not for dummies”. And all failed to make a similar impact as we had done in the US.

But once noted, they got bolder, L’Essentiel du DOS was republished a year later as DOS Pour les Nuls, with the trademark cover. And sales in the fi rst quarter exceeded L’Essentiel’s sales for the whole of the previous year.

Two years later, Dummies books were being published in 17 languages, and we held our fi rst Dummies Roundtable meeting of these publishers at Frankfurt. We presented new titles, discussed marketing and sales activities, and learned from each other. With everyone serving a diff erent language market, we could freely share best practices and collectively strengthen the brand. Th e tradition of Roundtable meetings expanded to include London Book Fair and continues to this day. Th is year’s Roundtable will be special for this anniversary, but each meeting is distinctive for the unique exchange of ideas that it fosters. I always look forward to it.

At Frankfurt 1995, we had special guest author Dr Ruth Westheimer on the stand with her attention-getting title, Sex For Dummies. By then, the series had expanded beyond computing, with Personal Finance For Dummies publishing the previous year. Of course, personal fi nance was a title for American

20 years of Frankfurt For Dummies

The Dummies Man cuts the birthday cake; below, the Dummies Roundtable meeting



Marc Mikulich explores why they are so successful, and looks at where they go now

March 7 - 11, 2012 Organized by

in to this technology. Any review I get, or award nomination, or indeed any praise from a fellow tweeter, is immediately retweeted by Carole to her 6,500 followers, by her colleagues as well, by my editor, Wayne Brooks, my publishing director, Jeremy Trevathan, and by the whole team at my US publishers – so upward of 50,000 people see this each time.

Th en there are the real, out of the blue, bonuses of celebrity endorsements. Just a few weeks ago, Joan Collins began tweeting to her 35,000 followers about how much she loves my books. To have such an iconic fi gure doing this totally off her own back is a true money-can’t-buy advertisement.

Word-of-mouth is that elusive alchemy that no marketing director in the world, with any budget, can ever buy. It is the elixir of bestsellers. I believe from my own experience that using Twitter, Facebook and my blog, has helped to fuel that word-of-mouth, and that gets stronger by the day as my numbers of followers continue, hopefully, to rise.

It has been said that, “New technology is like a steamroller. You are either sitting on the steamroller or you are part of the road.” I would agree with that, but with one caveat: if you handwrite a letter drunk, you can always rip it up the next morning. But never, ever tweet or post on Facebook drunk. I did once, slagging off the BNP and mistakenly called them the UKIP. Th e barrage of abuse I got the next day was far worse than my hangover! And I had to feel sorry for a very high profi le crime fi ction journalist who fetched up in his hotel room, clearly very much the worse for wear, and banged out tweet after tweet after tweet complaining about the lack of porn channels on his hotel’s television. Quite what his very attractive wife said to him the next day was strangely absent from all social networking sites…

© 2011 Peter James / Really Scary Books Ltd ■

Another, of incalculable value, is the self-promotion potential. Th is year, mindful that my new hardback, Dead Man’s Grip, was coming out head to head with the new James Bond book, Carte Blanche, by Jeff ery Deaver, I put extra special eff ort in – seeding the book to my fans months in advance; giving links to the Amazon and Tesco sites for advance purchasing; and in the weeks before the May 26th launch, I tweeted the opening chapter, 140 characters at a time! We beat Carte Blanche to No. 1 one week by just 94 books, and kept it off No. 1 the following week too. It was a narrow, but utterly crucial margin. Do I think my social networking helped? Undoubtedly it played a role.

An important aspect of this is that my fans feel that they are talking to me and bonding with me. Take this example of a tweet from a female fan this week: “It’ll be gr8 when we read these parts in your book, social media used this way is brilliant!! All these insights into what’s coming in future novels are fascinating!”

I’ve also learned so much about what my readers like and dislike. One early lesson was that you can be as brutal as you like to a human being, but never, ever, ever harm an animal! Another real eye opener

has been hearing which characters in my Roy Grace series they love and which they loathe – and most especially of all, the ones they love to loathe! And of course the on-going hook of Roy Grace’s missing wife Sandy provides me with the ability to do a huge amount of teasing of my readers!

It’s invaluable to have behind me a publishing team and an agent, Carole Blake, who are so plugged-

T o tweet or not to tweet? Th at is the (140 character limit) question. And what

about Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Google+ and Blogging? Or – erm – just getting on with writing a novel. (Wozzat? – Ed. Do peeps still read ’em 2day?)

In February 2009, I bumped into my friend Anthony Horowitz, literally, on a wet chute in the Wild Wadi water park in Dubai, where we were both guests of the fi rst – and fabulous – Dubai Literary Festival. Full of glee, he told me he had started tweeting, and within three weeks had amassed a (seemingly amazing then) 41 followers!

I was already an avid blogger and, at that time, a disenchanted MySpace user, which I found was hijacked by people trying to sell things, and was reluctant to take on something else that would mean yet more demands on my time, especially as I was also toying with Facebook. But Geoff Duffi eld, Group Sales and Marketing Director of my publishers, Pan Macmillan, got very excited when I discussed it with him and urged me to have a go at both.

Now, two and a half years later, I have 4,500 Twitter followers and 15,000 acolytes on Facebook, and I genuinely think the eff ort I put into both is worthwhile in several diff erent and very important ways.

First of all, I can have direct, real-time communications with my fans – something that would have been impossible a few years ago. Here’s a post by one on my Facebook page today: “Peter… For a man that writes about the darker sides of human nature… You are always so cheerful on here… Always look forward to reading your posts whilst waiting for the next book! :-)”

Before email, fan letters to authors were a slow process, often taking a month or more to arrive. Th ey’d be posted fi rst to the publishing house, and after a couple of weeks of being shunted around the mail room would get forwarded on to the author’s agent, and a week or two later, fi nally

hit the author’s doormat. Worried about stalkers, like many authors, I used to reply on my agent’s headed paper. I do still occasionally get these snail mail letters. Th ey arrive in a small envelope, with spidery handwriting – a sure sign of someone elderly. I received one two weeks ago, from a retired building engineer, telling me I’d confused concrete and cement in my last novel, and very sweetly explaining, over six barely decipherable pages, about ballast and gravel, and what the diff erences were. I’ll never make the mistake again!

But research help is one of the greatest of all the virtues of the social networking sites. Frequently

on Twitter and Facebook I will ask my mortuary technician fans for the latest model of band-saw used for removing skull-caps in post-mortems, a cruise line fan for the fuel consumption of a particular ship, my criminal fans how to steal a 2011 model Audi A4 (diffi cult), and my farmer fans how to stop our aggressive hen, Myra Hendley, from killing newly hatched ducklings in the run (eat the hen).

To tweet or not to tweet?

Research help is one of the greatest virtues of social networking sites…Another, of incalculable value, is the

self-promotion potential



Social networking – a vital tool or the digital equivalent of timewasting fag breaks? Peter James is a convert

Peter James: bonding with fans

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that brands do with Facebook,” says Berlucchi. “If a publisher brings value to the community by bringing editors and authors in to contribute to the conversations with reviews, insights, etc. they will benefi t greatly. If they try to hijack the communities by trying to overtly sell books, I think that would backfi re.”

With a choice of places to interact, keeping ahead of the competition is crucial. Anobii believes that the key is features, saying: “Readers will be attracted by the features that resonate most with their reading habits. For example, if you belong to a book club, you will want features that give value to readers in a book club.”

Readmill is based on the premise that creating an open platform for social reading is central, hoping to make social reading available on any reading device – a principle also shared by Open Bookmarks.

Bob Stein, who gave the keynote speech at TOC, says of his new project, SocialBook, that he hopes that its traditional aspects of social reading – conversation, comments, experts’ notes – combined with author engagement will create a uniquely rounded experience. Th e Institute of Network Cultures, at the Unbound Book Conference in 2011, reported that SocialBook’s creators want “to build an ecosystem for publishing that assumes that books are places where people gather. Works will appear in the browser, not in mobile apps or proprietary non-browser-based readers. Th is is made possible with HTML5.”

With so much thought given to this growing market, it will be interesting to see how retailers and publishers try to sell to and interact with these audiences, and how those audiences will respond.

Sophie Rochester is Editor of the Literary Platform. www.theliteraryplatform.com ■

ask questions directly from their Kindles, or post them to Amazon Author Pages.

Th e fl ipside of this is that established reading platforms are considering their retail options. Last year GoodReads started to sell ebooks, initially by selling out-of-copyright ebooks and then later enabling authors to sell ebooks directly via their platform.

But how do these worlds of social reading and social retailing sit together? Berlucchi explains: “Anobii is a social retailer at heart as we are combining the power of the social network to help people discover new books – which we will then hopefully sell to them too! Th e social reading component of our off ering is focused on giving additional value to people who buy ebooks from us, through a set of features designed to enhance their reading experience.”

James Bridle, founder of Open Bookmarks warns, however, that: “No single service should try to do everything. Good ereaders should connect to good social reading services and let readers make up their own minds about how their data is collected, handled and distributed. Th is is

the danger of Amazon’s Kindle infrastructure; in eff ect, Amazon owns not only your books, but your experience of them.”

Th ere are also some ground rules for publishers wanting to engage with social reading platforms: “I think publishers can participate in the community in a similar way

D igital platforms are enabling people from around the world to

share their reading experiences. GoodReads, which was launched in 2006, boasts more than 5.6 million members, adding more than 180 million books to their shelves, and describes itself as “the largest social network for readers and best place for discovery in the world”.

But they’re not the only business building itself around social reading. Copia launched its social reading platform last year with built-in social features “to make reading and studying a shared experience”, encouraging readers to share notes, highlight text and bookmark important pages. LibraryTh ing aims to connect people with the same books, while Shelfari (launched in October 2006 and acquired by Amazon in August 2008) is “a community-powered encyclopedia for book lovers”.

Th en there is Kobo Books Reading Life, which connects “your reading life with friends on Facebook, discovering and sharing favourite books and passages, characters and places”; ReadSocial, which allows readers to “weave conversations (and) create virtual groups that fl ow across diff erent reading systems”; and Wattpad, which positions itself as “the best place to discover and share stories”, describing social reading as “a new form of entertainment where you can interact and share stories across text, video, images and through conversations with other readers and writers”.

At this year’s Tools of Change Frankfurt Conference, representatives of Anobii, ValoBox and Readm ill explained where they believe social reading or social retailing will go next.

With so many social reading platforms, Anobii CEO, Matteo Berlucchi, explains how they intend to stand out from the rest: “Th ere aren’t yet any platforms

that allow readers to socialise while reading an ebook in a structured way,” says Berlucchi. “Th e main ereading platforms only off er notes and highlights sharing with all other readers at present, which I wouldn’t really classify as social reading. Th ere are a couple of start-ups looking at social reading, but they are just out of the gate. Anobii stands out against the rest because it is based on a social network. Anobii users can follow each other (like on Twitter) and this is something that I am not aware readers can do on Kindle, Kobo, etc.”

Kindle has indeed started to consider some social reading features. Th is year it launched its @author feature in a limited beta release on Kindle and Amazon Author Pages. Th e aim is “to connect readers with their favourite writers and their books”. Readers are invited to

A year of social reading

There are also some ground rules for publishers wanting to engage with social reading platforms…

“If they try to hijack the communities by trying to overtly sell books, I think that would backfi re”


Sophie Rochester


Sophie Rochester looks at the proliferation of social reading platforms and at what distinguishes them from each other

BUILD AND DISTRIBUTE eBOOKSDELIVER TO MANY PLATFORMS AND DEVICESSELL IN YOUR OWN LANGUAGEREACH A GLOBAL AUDIENCE

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of America and India-based Foundation Books, with announcements of new partners imminent. Th ese early adopters have been quick to see that, unlike the traditional publishing model, a service like this allows the publisher to be agile in responding to an exceptionally fast-moving market.

Another reason for Cambridge’s confi dence in our new off ering is the success of the Cambridge Books Online (CBO) ebook delivery platform, which, from launch last year, has attracted institutions from more than 30 countries, with new customers coming on board every week. Customers already familiar with CBO will fi nd UPO very similar in concept, off ering access to thousands of titles in a fully searchable environment, with the frequent addition of new titles and comprehensive library support tools. Th ree functionality upgrades a year will ensure that the UPO site is consistently developing according to users’ needs.

Libraries can buy a wide range of subject-based collections or make an individually customised selection of titles from the 12,000 currently on off er. Th e primary customers are university libraries, but we are also targeting corporate libraries, specialist libraries, medical schools, law

F rom the earliest days of publishing, diff erentiation has been the name of the

game. Putting clear blue water between your off ering and that of your rivals is the accepted way to do business and consolidate your own niche.

So setting up a state-of-the-art electronic product to off er your wares and then opening it out to your rivals is far from the traditional approach to business. But, although we are a publisher with a long history, we don’t always do things the traditional way. Recently launched, University Publishing Online (UPO) is Cambridge’s new service for academic publishers, allowing them to off er their products over an integrated ebook and digital content product.

UPO will off er access to a potentially vast variety of academic works in one place, by providing libraries with ebooks, journals and other materials from academic publishers worldwide. Our aim is to make it one of the largest and most signifi cant repositories of digital academic material in the world.

An ambitious objective, but one that we are confi dent is achievable given the benefi ts of such an off ering, especially to small academic presses which, to compete in the modern world of book retail, need an ebook presence that they can’t aff ord to develop alone. Quite a few smaller publishers don’t have an easy, cost eff ective route to sell content directly, other than through a major aggregator, with whom they have little control and run the risk of getting lost in big packages of thousands of titles. UPO off ers them a much better option to develop their presence and one that is completely cost and risk free for them.

Already signed up are Liverpool University Press, the Mathematical Association

Star-crossed love, Martial arts, and supernatural evil meet at the abandoned tracks in the quaint town of Middleburg . . .

. . . Th e overall eff ect is that of a summer action fl ick, with all the expected over-the-top situations, sequences, and dialogue. —Publishers Weekly

Sixteen Clocks are ticking:

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F R A N K F U R T F A I R D E A L E R

An academic treasure tHannah Perrett introduces a tradition-challenging new model for marketing academic books

Hannah Perrett


and access material previously unavailable online – an especially valuable off ering for students in developing countries where the cost of access to a wide range of materials can be prohibitive. Having this range in one place will help drive down the costs of studies in these emerging economies.

We have already seen signifi cant interest from publishers, but we are determined to focus on academic publishers.

It is important to stress, also, that we do not demand a Cambridge-branded “one look fi ts all”. Dr Andrew Brown, Director of Academic Publishing, says: “A key concept of UPO is to preserve the individual identity of each publishing partner, as every academic press makes a unique contribution to the world of scholarship through its own particular process of selecting, editing and presenting material. We very much want to respect these diff erences.”

Above all, we want to make UPO a market-responsive,

constantly developing and innovating product, in line with Cambridge’s overall strategy of commitment to electronic development. UPO is just the latest manifestation of our determination to explore non-traditional ways to fulfi l a traditional mission.

Hannah Perrett is responsible for growing global academic and professional ebook revenues at Cambridge University Press, and for developing the sales, marketing and development strategy for Cambridge’s epublishing. You can fi nd Cambridge University Press in Hall 8.0, stand C901. www.cambridge.org ■

libraries, further education colleges and public libraries.

We know that fl exibility of purchasing plans will be all-important. We are launching with perpetual access, where customers pay an up-front fee for content and then a small annual hosting fee, and by the end of this year we will off er subscriptions and a limited concurrency model. We are also exploring other models to make the service as fl exible as possible for our customers.

One model we will not be adopting, however, is “pile them high, sell them cheap”. Th is undermines the value of content and could open us up to accusations of underselling to benefi t our own products – something that is completely contrary to the ethos of the new service which is to bring similar publishers together and give them access to a wider audience, while off ering users anywhere in the world a treasure trove of material. For us, UPO is all about our core mission to advance learning and research worldwide.

So what are the benefi ts for libraries, universities and students? Because it is based around scholarly presses, UPO allows libraries to ensure that they are providing the fi nest scholarly research and, because it is a multi-disciplinary resource, to provide something useful to the whole university rather than just one department.

For students, UPO can be accessed on PCs and laptops, and is also compatible with the iPhone and iPad, with other channels and technologies being explored. Students can fi nd more content in one place, giving them unique access to research. UPO also allows them to create personal libraries


e trove

The ethos of the new service is to bring similar publishers together

and give them access to a wider audience

agreement will be exclusive with the distributor having the rights to sell a publisher’s titles in the local market. But do they carry inventory or not? If they do, they will typically buy on consignment and pay for the costs of shipping, storage and returning any that do not sell.

If they do not, they will show out-of-stock or an only-to-order status, but be obligated to get the book if they get an order. Th e great majority of the publishers they represent already have many thousands of titles set up at Lightning Source, which allows their local Australian distributor to order directly from Lightning Source Australia. Th is is already driving additional sales – as well as saving a lot of carbon and cash.

Th e absence of a wholesaler in the local market and the paucity of local inventory has meant that local booksellers, both physical and internet, have struggled to compete with the off shore vendors, who have access to large inventories, can often supply faster and cheaper and aren’t obliged to pay Australian GST (Goods and Services Tax).

Th e Aussie book trade, as with many others, is going through some big changes at the moment. Th e loss of the Angus & Robertson chain, the growing infl uence of the off shore retailers and issues around parallel importation are all still playing out. However, the arrival of Lightning Source, is giving the local book trade a boost. Australian publishers and distributors are now able to realise the supply chain benefi ts that their counterparts in the US and UK have access to.

And booksellers are benefi ting from greater availability of local inventory – especially important for the Australian-based internet players. Virtual inventory is a pretty attractive number Down Under.

It remains, of course, to be seen whether the arrival of Ingram in Australia will have any positive eff ect on the Australian batting and bowling. I think their problems go a little deeper.

David Taylor is Senior Vice President, Content Acquisition International, Ingram Content Group and Group Managing Director, Lightning Source UK. He is also Director of Lightning Source Australia. ■

Source does do a signifi cant amount of that.) Th e genuine POD model allows a publisher to sell the book fi rst and then print it as no inventory is required before a sale is made. So far more than 23,000 publishers have placed six million titles with Lightning Source, reaping benefi ts including reduced inventory, increased sales due to improved availability and cost savings in the supply chain.

In Australia, the decision on whether or not to carry inventory presents a particular dilemma. For the local offi ces of the larger UK or US publishers, carrying the inventory speculatively in Australia involves signifi cant transportation costs, usually carried by the local Australian operation; not carrying the inventory means, typically, an off er to the local market that is poor in terms of availability and costly in terms of transporting the book from inventories held overseas – even if a sale is made.

Clearly an Australian POD operation off ers a compelling solution that is fi nancially and environmentally attractive, and improved availability drives sales rather than seeing them leach off shore to non-Australian internet vendors.

Many publishers that already had thousands of titles set up with Lightning Source in the US and UK are making these titles available for local fulfi lment via Lightning Source Australia. Th ere is no extra cost as the title is already set up for production. In addition, publishers are now moving titles into POD just for the Australian market to avoid shipping costs and to improve availability of their titles locally.

Th e domestic Australian publishing scene is a healthy and vibrant one with a wide variety of small and medium sized publishers. Some already used Lightning Source to get their books into the North American and European markets, but the arrival of Lightning Source Australia has further galvanised the market, with more companies choosing this option.

For third-party book distributors in Australia, who represent many hundreds of US and UK publishers, the arrival of the Lightning Source model has been welcomed – they face the same dilemma about inventory. Th e typical distribution

A s all the management textbooks will tell you, one of the most critical success

factors when entering a new market is timing, writes David Taylor. Ingram Content Group’s decision to bring the Lightning Source print-on-demand (POD) model to Australia in 2011 chimed most happily with the astonishing success of the English cricket team Down Under. Four years before would have coincided with a truly pitiful display and would have made market entry a much more painful proposition; maybe not for the Americans for whom cricket is a game of complete baffl ement, but certainly for the English employees at Ingram.

Leaving aside this happy coincidence, the opening of the fi fth Lightning Source POD plant, in Melbourne, has come at a time of great change in the Australian book trade. Also some Australian-specifi c factors make it, probably, the most

perfect place for POD anywhere in the world.

Before we get into these, let’s be clear about what is meant by POD. Th e Lightning Source model is a unique combination of single-copy digital printing linked to a network of reselling channels and third-party distributors. (It is not short-run digital printing, although Lightning

Lightning Source in Australia


David Taylor


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Bowker receives direct feeds from publishers, as well as price and availability information from the main distributors. Bowker also has links to third parties who supply additional content. All of these important links to industry players allow Bowker to deliver up-to-date, accurate information that users such as media companies, libraries and government institutions have come to expect.

As the world moves on from the tenth anniversary of 9/11,

books will continue to lay down a historical narrative and refl ection of social understanding and personal resolution of such events. Post analysis will always prove interesting and Bowker will continue to be the facilitator through its Books In Print database for many key media companies around the world.

Jo Grange is Marketing Manager at Bowker UK Ltd. Visit Bowker in Hall 8, stand M935. ■

(by Khaled Hosseini) would have had the same appeal had Afghanistan not been put at the forefront of people’s minds due to the search for Osama Bin Laden?

Th e common research tool for both of these articles was Bowker’s Books In Print database. Th is has been a major reference tool for librarians, researchers, bookshops and analysts for many years now, but it is only the publication of articles such as the ones above,

and also two mentions in US Today in August, that the value and use of such a database across the media, has been brought to the public domain.

Bowker, however, has been at the forefront of collating bibliographic data for many years in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. Being the offi cial ISBN agency for the US and Australia, the Books In Print database is well respected within the publishing industry and a major reference tool around the world.

L ast month saw the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the United

States. For many this was a time of refl ection on the sequence of events that led to the deaths of nearly 3000 people. Many books have been published over the subsequent years trying to address the reasons behind the attacks or conveying personal stories of those involved.

In August this year the BBC published an article entitled “Is Th ere a Novel that Defi nes the 9/11 Decade?” that examined the variety of books published in the US in the wake of the attacks, and how the subject had been interpreted into fi ction and non-fi ction works. It made reference to Bowker’s Books In Print database and cited, “164 such works have

been written so far – that either directly address the event or use it as a peg to hang greater literary concerns about love, life and loss”.

It wasn’t just the BBC which was examining the number of books directly published on the subject of 9/11 over the last decade. In the US, an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch looked at the books published around the whole subject area, and asked whether books such as Th e Kite Runner

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The BBC [using Books In Print] examined the variety of books

published in the US in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and how the subject

had been interpreted into fi ction and non-fi ction works

A n author dying doesn’t always mean the end of great characters, as publishers and

literary estates often ask new writers to pick up where the original creators left off , especially when it comes to mysteries and thrillers, writes Lenny Picker. No surprise, there are a host of great new off erings coming from some famous, popular series – there are a few blockbusters in the pipeline.

New “Holmes”After 120 years of writers, other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, trying to recreate 221B Baker Street, the Doyle Estate has tapped Anthony Horowitz to take up Dr Watson’s pen. Th is November, Mulholland Books will publish House of Silk, an account billed as too shocking to have been revealed before, and the plot of which has been kept tightly under wraps.

“Spenser” LivesTh e death of Robert B Parker in 2010 does not spell the end for his Boston PI Spenser and his small-town police chief, Jesse Stone. Michael Brandman (a collaborator with Parker on several “Stone” telefi lms) launched his series of “Stone” novels with Robert Parker’s Killing the Blues: A Jesse Stone Novel in September.

And in June 2012, Ace Atkins, who has amassed a following for his own gritty, historical crime novels, will also carry on the combination of sensitivity and hardness that distinguished Spenser from other contemporary private investigators, with an, as yet, untitled novel. Both books will be published by GP Putnam’s Sons.

Asimov’s RobotsIsaac Asimov’s iconic positronic robots again come to artifi cial life in a series of prequels penned by Mickey Zucker Reichert. Th e fi rst, I, Robot: To Protect, is set to come out in November. Reichert was chosen by the Asimov family to write three prequels to the short story collection I: Robot, focusing on the character of Susan Calvin, whom Reichert describes as “Isaac’s stony, almost inhuman, robot psychologist”.

More LudlumAt this point, Eric Van Lustbader has already written twice as many Jason Bourne international thrillers than

Bourne’s creator, Robert Ludlum. His sixth, published in July, Robert Ludlum’s Th e Bourne Dominion, will be followed in 2012 by Robert Ludlum’s Th e Bourne Upset.

But while Lustbader has Ludlum’s Bourne franchise all to himself, another Ludlum creation, Covert-One, will be entrusted to its fi fth author this October, when Grand Central brings out Kyle Mills’ Robert Ludlum’s Th e Ares Decision, which pits a microbiologist against a terrifying new bio-weapon. Th e challenge of writing in another’s style appealed to Mills, who found it “a really interesting exercise” that enabled him, after 10 novels of his own, “to learn a few tricks from studying Mr Ludlum’s work”.

Unfi nished Business: Spillane, Crichton…In some cases, the authors themselves are the franchises, and a few notable forthcoming works are posthumous collaborations. Th e patented combination of suspense, action and cutting-edge science that were the hallmarks of Michael Crichton’s bestsellers is present in Micro, coming from HarperCollins in November. Crichton left an uncompleted manuscript about a mysterious microbiology lab in Hawaii, and it was fi nished by Richard Preston, author of Th e Hot Zone and Th e Cobra Event.

Th e prolifi c Max Allen Collins has taken time off from his own Nathan Heller historical mysteries to honour a commitment to his late friend Mickey Spillane, who, in the last week of his life, asked Collins to complete a Mike Hammer novel, and arranged for his access to half a dozen manuscripts. Collins has recently completed his fourth Hammer novel, Lady, Go Die!, set for a 2012 release by Titan Books, an unfi nished sequel to the fi rst in the series, I, Th e Jury. Collins’ care with Spillane’s legacy was recognised this year when a Hammer short story he wrote, “A Long Time Dead,” was nominated for a Best Short Story “Shamus” by the Private Eye Writers of America. And this month, Hard Case brings out Th e Consummata, the second book in the Morgan the Raider series that Spillane set aside after about 25,000 words.

Lenny Picker is a freelance writer in New York City. ■

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The publishing landmarks of the early 21st century are probably JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer,

Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson, writes John Peters. Th eir multi-million-selling epics have been credited with turning an entire generation of teenagers (and a few adults) into avid readers.

But when they write the history of publishing in the early 21st century, I wonder if they’ll list other heroes, such as insurance salesman John Locke, who, in 2011, became the fi rst self-published author to clock up one million sales of digitally-downloaded books. Or Amanda Hocking, who signed a $2m contract with St Martins Press in March, on the back of hundreds of thousands of ebook sales on the Kindle Store. Th ey are unlikely heroes of a revolution in publishing where authors can disintermediate traditional supply chains and fi nd ways to go straight to market.

Th e ultra-conservative fi eld of scholarly research publishing was

quick to embrace online technology, but so far it has fi rmly resisted the messy, disintermediated, democratised philosophy of the digital era. Most academic publishers have stuck to the traditional business model and merely replicated their content online.

But the tide is turning, and all publishers need to get the right technology in place to operate in

the digital world. Bowker’s industry stats show that in 2004, 275,000 new titles were published, with a further 20,000 “non-traditional” books listed – less than 7% of the total output. By 2010, “traditional” titles had grown to 316,000 (up 14%). In the same period “non-traditional” titles exploded to 2.7 million – a 130-times increase.

And Locke, Hocking and other digital revolutionaries seem to have learned as much from Apple iTunes and the “open peer review” approach of the App Store, Trip Advisor, and the like, as they have from the publishing industry. Both authors price at iTunes rates. If you buy a song for a dollar and you decide you don’t much care for it, what’s lost? And why not take the advice of a fellow reader rather than the word of a paid critic? Th e subtext is not just to ignore publishers’ discouraging advice, but to ignore publishers altogether.

Revolutions typically come with weapons and bloodshed. In our

industry the weapons are words, websites, ebooks and Kindles. We need to understand this revolution, create some new rules (of choice, inclusivity, fair dealing and author engagement) and embrace the technology. And we need to learn from the unlikely heroes of this revolution – the authors, commentators and technologists.

GSE Research, in using Publishing Technology’s pub2web system to drive its online publisher platform, is determined to be part of that history. GSE is building a new publishing platform that will fully exploit the digital era, using semantic web technologies and a fl exible infrastructure as the building blocks to help drive new discovery routes into content, and create topic based channels, resulting in a product which is user centric and highly relevant.

John Peters is CEO of GSE Research Email: [email protected]. www.gseresearch.com ■

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Unlikely heroes


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CEO of the group and Chairman of Headline. Th is necessitated a much larger, frankly grander stand befi tting the new Hodder Headline PLC.

Although we were now a major player on the UK publishing scene and a more dominant presence in Hall 8, nothing had really changed. Headline remained true to its founding principles and the breakdown of the Net Book Agreement ensured that the combination of new pricing freedom, and particularly innovative sales and marketing, produced breakthrough sales for our star authors, especially Martina Cole, as well as for new writers – including Catherine Alliott, Lyn Andrews, Janet Evanovich, Neil Gaiman, Wendy Holden, Sue Monk Kidd, Jonathan Kellerman, Jill Mansell, Maggie O’Farrell, Sheila O’Flanagan and James Patterson.

In non-fi ction, we were the publishers of important books by international names including Lauren Bacall, Hillary Clinton and Jack Welch, as well as UK household names Kate Adie, Jo Brand and Cliff Richard. A key part of Headline’s non-fi ction has been sport, where we have published enduring icons Bobby Charlton, Paul Gascoigne and Martin Johnson, and brands such as the Sky Football Yearbook and the Playfair Cricket Annual.

Martin Neild, a stalwart of Frankfurt, took over as Managing Director of Headline in 2002. By now, we had a big team of people attending Frankfurt: UK and export sales under Kerr MacRae and a very dynamic rights department led by Sarah Th omson.

Headline’s legendary Export Sales Director, Peter Newsom, clocked up his 25th Frankfurt during this time, and Headline held a memorable party for customers from all round the world to celebrate this milestone.

Th e next step in our evolution came in 2004 – the year Andrea Levy won the Orange Prize for Small Island – with the acquisition of Hodder Headline by Hachette. Th is made us part of the most diverse publishing group in the UK and our stand at Frankfurt refl ected that. Th ere is a lot to be said for a federal structure, but it didn’t work particularly well when it

H eadline was born in 1986 when the founding directors, Sian Th omas, Sue

Fletcher and Tim Hely Hutchinson, raised £1.3 million of venture capital and opened for business. Th e aim was to publish only books that kept the Headline “promise of entertainment”, and to provide authors and customers with professional marketing and a unique level of friendly service and involvement. I joined as an editor in the summer of 1986, and have been here ever since.

Our fi rst Frankfurt was a cosy aff air. Only a handful of us went: we had lists to build and foreign publishers were very keen to work with us. Tim, who was in charge of non-fi ction, roared around the halls looking for books and packages to establish our non-fi ction list. One of his fi rst purchases was a terrifying book called, simply, Shark! It was a sort of non-fi ction Jaws, full of pictures of every type of shark. It was one of our fi rst bestsellers but, interestingly, it didn’t do anything to dampen Tim’s love of scuba diving.

Our stand was tiny: probably the smallest in the hall, but it was all we could aff ord and all we thought we needed. We had to assemble it ourselves and, as neither Tim, Sue nor I had a clue about DIY (despite the Headline folk myth that Tim personally erected the stand), we had to rely totally on Sian Th omas who was a demon with a staple gun and double-sided tape. Th ough there was barely room for the Headliners on the stand, it was nevertheless buzzing, and the crowd spilled into the aisles.

It was immediately after the 1991 Frankfurt that Sue made the pre-emptive acquisition of a fi rst novel in a two-book contract with agent Darley Anderson, by an author who would become a phenomenon – Dangerous Lady by Martina Cole.

We kept a pretty small stand until 1993, when Headline consummated a long courtship by buying Hodder & Stoughton, a distinguished publisher three times our size. Headline was the largest division of the new group under the leadership fi rst of Sian Th omas and subsequently Amanda Ridout. Sue moved over to Hodder, I became Fiction Director, and Tim was

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came to pulling together one stand for Frankfurt. Our new sister companies had their own stands and, in the early days, we were clustered together on Aisle G in what was then known as the Hachette Village. Last year though we made the transition to one group stand: it’s sleek, with a top deck to look down on the fair, but we are still able to maintain our own identities.

Th e Headline author dinner became a fi xed and enjoyable part of the Frankfurt calendar, with authors from Penny Vincenzi to Victoria Hislop and Andrea Levy partying the night away with a wonderful array of international guests.

Th is year there will be a dozen of us from Headline attending from the UK – export sales, editorial and the rights departments. It has been a great anniversary year. We have had nearly 20 bestsellers already, from new and established Headline authors. Th ese

include Andrea Levy with her Man Booker-shortlisted novel Th e Long Song, which won the Walter Scott Prize and was picked for the “TV Book Club”; and Maggie O’Farrell, whose novel Th e Hand that First Held Mine won the Costa Novel Award; as well as Karen Rose, Adele

Parks, Tasmina Perry, Jill Mansell, Sheila O’Flanagan, Simon Scarrow and Jed Rubenfeld, whose Th e Death Instinct was one of the R&J Summer Book Club titles. And Th e Family was a massive No.1 paperback from Martina Cole.

We have launched two outstanding new

novelists straight on to the hardback and paperback bestsellers lists: A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness and When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman. And we have a Man Booker-longlisted title with Far to Go by Alison Pick, and are looking forward to an outstanding autumn.

Th ere is no doubt we have come a long way. Today we are a powerful publisher of a broad range of bestsellers with annual sales of £40 million and a rapidly expanding ebook business. Our presence in Frankfurt refl ects this. We no longer rely on staple guns and double-sided tape to put up our stand, but we have stayed true to our original principles – of publishing books that will entertain their readers, and striving to provide friendly and effi cient service to authors and customers.

Book markets are changing at a faster rate than ever before, but Headline’s founding principles will not and, backed by the resources of Hachette, we have ambitious and innovative plans for physical and digital publishing to carry us through the next 25 years.

Jane Morpeth is Managing Director of Headline. ■

Tim Hely Hutchinson, Jane Morpeth and Sue Fletcher, with the original business plan, at Headline’s 25th birthday party

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that could act in place of a touch screen. Th eir products have always been thoughtfully designed, with assistive technology included in all of their devices as a standard feature. Now it looks like they are planning to take it a step further – raising the bar for accessible mobile technology.

Why would a company as smart as Apple care so much about this market segment? I would say that it is because Apple is getting a solid return on investment. My family will certainly continue to buy their products – not only because they are convenient and easy to use, but because we choose to support companies that make their products and services accessible to all people.

And there are examples from the publishing world too. Th e Hachette Book Group announced in June that it was making its website accessible to Americans with Disabilities, through a new alliance with eSSENTIAL Accessibility. A new tool will extend Hachette’s online services to individuals with physical disabilities.

“Readers are naturally curious about their favorite books and authors,” says David Young, Chairman and CEO of Hachette, “and our websites are rich with information. Providing the disability community with easy access to our sites helps foster the connection between reader and author. We are proud to be the fi rst publisher to work with eSSENTIAL Accessibility in this initiative and to provide a more comprehensive service to our physically disabled customers.”

Apple and Hachette are leading the way and proving that this can be good for the bottom line. I hope others in the publishing community consider reaching out to and embracing this virtually untapped market; it could be a real game changer across the board.

Debra Ruh is the founder and CEO of TecAccess and Chief Marketing Offi cer at SSB BART. Follow her blog at debra.ruh.tumblr.com; email [email protected]; or visit www.ssbbartgroup.com. See also ‘Accessible publishing – business case’ at www.rnib.org.uk. ■

mainstream public too. Curb cuts were created for people using wheelchairs, but everyone uses them now – for strollers, shopping carts, vendors delivering to a store, etc.

Text-to-speech was created for people that could not communicate in the traditional manner, but now many kiosks and automobiles have this feature. My Toyota communicates with me via simple commands and the keyless entry is convenient for people with disabilities.

Captioning was created for people that are deaf or hard-of-hearing, but is now used more widely – on TV’s in gyms, fast food restaurants and airports.

But sometimes the reverse can happen and something designed for the mainstream benefi ts people with disabilities. Outside the publishing world, one example is the front-loaded washing machine. A friend of mine, who is 3’ 11”, describes washing and drying clothes before the front-loaded washer and dryer were available. It is a funny story, but the interesting part for my purpose here is that she bought the front-loaded machines as soon as she saw them – even though she had not been in the market for these expensive purchases before.

Of course ebooks and POD are also examples; created for mainstream

convenience, they have become invaluable for people with disabilities.

One company that has seen the business opportunities of embracing our community is Apple. It is said to be taking steps to make its iPhone and iPad more user-friendly for people with disabilities. Since the products all use touch screens, someone with visual or mobility impairments can have trouble with the devices. However, in a recent fi ling with the US Patent and Trademark Offi ce, Apple has said it is seeking to patent a method for connecting its products to accessories

T he advent of print-on-demand (POD) and ebooks has gone some way to making

books accessible to more people with disabilities (PwD), but there is a long way to go. Part of the problem is that people think of disability in extreme or narrow terms, such as blindness and deafness, when it also includes many other types of disability, such motor and cognitive impairment, and, in an ageing population, increasing cases of visual and hearing impairment. And part of the problem is that some publishers seem to consider accessibility something that has to be done to avoid litigation risk rather than understanding the real opportunities to expand business.

But it is a potentially huge market. Statistics show that more than half the global population has a connection to disability.

• Th e American Association of People with Disabilities estimates that the number of people with disabilities impacts an estimated 1 in 3 households in the US.

• Worldwide, this group numbers 500-750 million people.

• People with disabilities have almost two times the spending power of teens and more than 17 times the spending power of tweens (ages 8-12) – two demographics often sought after by businesses.

• Th e New York Times reported that spending by travellers with disabilities exceeds $13.6 billion annually.

• Marketing studies of the Atlanta Paralympics (Solutions Marketing Group, 2003) reveal that even households with no disability connection felt goodwill towards companies that included people with disabilities in advertising and were more likely to buy their products.

• WE Magazine, a lifestyle publication for people with disabilities, reports that people with disabilities spend $700 billion a year on technology.

And as we age, more people acquire disabilities.

• According to AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons), 4 million Americans

turn 50 each year. Many adults will experience age-related physical changes that may aff ect hearing, vision, cognition and mobility after age 50. And while they may not think of themselves as having disabilities, they often seek out businesses that accommodate those changes by off ering more accessible services.

• Th ere are 76 million baby boomers in the US. AARP studies show that more than 46% of people over the age of 65 have a disability.

• Likewise, the 2000 US Census reported that almost 42% of older adults (65+ years) have one or more disabilities.

• In the same Census, the percentage of PwD is larger than any single ethnic, racial or cultural group. At 19.3%, the number of people with disabilities exceeds the next largest group – Hispanic people (14.9%) – by a fairly wide margin.

And these numbers do not include the family and friends that support inclusion for people with disabilities.

Th ere may also be unexpected benefi ts for publishers’ other customers. Many things that were designed for people with disabilities have, over time, benefi ted the

Taking the broader view of disability

It is a potentially huge market. Statistics show that more than half the global

population has a connection to disability


Debra Ruh with her daughter Sara


Debra Ruh argues that making digital publishing available to a broader range of people with disabilities is good for a company’s image, and good for the bottom line

Frankfurt Fair Dealer, October 13, Day 2

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Transcript of Frankfurt Fair Dealer, October 13, Day 2