Last night’s fabulous launch party for The Good Sleep Guide was a huge success at the Wellcome Collection,
Hannah - Press Officer
The London bookfair is one of the essential events on the annual publishing calendar and this week publishers and agents from all over the world gathered at Earls Court which now feels like the rightful home of the fair – once, hideously, we all went to Excel at Docklands which was a disaster - to talk about books and even buy and sell. Once upon a time deals were struck right there at the table, sometimes impressive ones, but these days that’s less common and there wasn’t a lot of buzz about ‘big books’ at London this year. Plenty of chat about ‘soft years’, the recession that’s here or the one that’s about to arrive and what’s ‘tough’ as well as reports of falling co-edition sales.
Nevertheless, it was lively. Downstairs among the big publishers’ stands where power people meet and greet the aisles filled up with editors rushing to meetings and International were doing their stuff selling books for export.
Upstairs, in the international rights centre where rights folk and agents congregate, we sat all day at our tables with back to back half-hour appointments with publishers from all over the world. Mostly they make it, sometimes they get lost and either don’t come at all or turn up hours later looking bewildered or worn out or both. We talk the books up, make notes from which we will compile reports back at the office and eventually send out parcels of books with high hopes. On the subject of lost publishers, spare a thought for the American editor who went for a drink at the end of the day, then got caught up in the melee of fans arriving for the Chelsea game, couldn’t get a taxi and couldn’t work out how to get anywhere from Earls Court (and who could blame her?) and ended up in Willesden Junction instead of Notting Hill. She missed her dinner….
A book fair is also a place where you will pay £4.00 for a small packet of crisps and a cup to coffee and spend a lot of time in the queue for the loo. An ever present ingredient is gossip, who’s here and who isn’t and why and what’s going on at that company and why did that person leave and where are they going? Last but not least, ever optimistic would be authors trail around in hope of finding a publisher or an agent – ‘Oh yes, you should send that to …. Jake, Ken, Judith, Carey, Hannah, Andrew or Clare (fill in the blank). No, I’m afraid they’re not here today but you can contact them by email.’ You can only hope that some day their dreams might come true.
Rae - Rights Director
A few snapshots from the London Book Fair, which ended yesterday.
Earl’s Court all dolled up for us publishing types
The busy and beautiful Random House stand
It’s not that easy to sell books on the Internet. That might sound like a slightly odd assertion given the vibrancy of the online bookselling scene. Amazon, of course, is one of the best-known global Internet retailing brands around, new entrants like Play.com are starting to challenge their dominant position, and even bricks-and-mortar bookshops like Waterstones and Borders are increasingly focussed on their online presence. Ebury and most other publishers are at it too.
But being able to pick up a book, flick through the pages, read the odd paragraph here and there to get a flavour of the writing… these pleasures are more or less denied the casual online browser. And yet music fans can easily enough listen to snippets of album tracks and sample new artists and genres by casually surfing the Web.
For me, at least, a thirty-something digital migrant, nothing will ever beat the feeling of weighing up a brand-new book on a bookshop table, turning it over in my hands, cracking the freshly-printed spine, inhaling deeply (yes, new books have a distinct smell to them as any true bibliophile will testify) and getting stuck in. But, for those who prefer their fun on-screen, we have the answer.
The new Random House widget is the Internet’s answer to ‘try before you buy’ – a way of looking inside not only at the jacket but at some of the content of a range of our books.
The subject of publishers’ content being made available online is rather a controversial one, leading amongst other things to the “theft” of a laptop from the Google stand at last year’s Book Expo by ex-Macmillan CEO (and my old boss’s boss’s boss) Richard Charkin. But encouraging more of our readers to sample more of our authors’ great writing ultimately has to be a good thing.
Personally, I’m still quite keen on the ‘feel and sniff’ part of the experience.
Each to his or her own, I hear you cry…
Ben - Sales Director
Despite being an avid cook, since moving into my new flat four months ago, I have been living without a stove or an oven. In the kitchen there has just been a gaping hole, waiting for that shiny appliance to slot in. Last weekend, we finally bought it. A beautiful, stainless steel Indesit gas oven. Brilliant. The first night, I made roast potatoes, on Monday night I made roast duck with a tomato and mushroom sauce, and last night I decided to make my first recipe from Delia’s How to Cheat at Cooking - lasagne.
I have to admit, I cheated at cheating. I couldn’t find any tinned mince, so I spent the extra 20 minutes cooking that all up. And there was no pre-grated parmesan cheese in the supermarket, so I had to grate my own (grating 3 tablespoons of parmesan is a pain in the ass, let me tell you!). But other than that, I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter and oh my, it was delicious! The saltiness of the sundried tomato sauce was the perfect complement to the creamy cheesy sauce. Definitely one to be repeated…
Katie - Digital Marketing Exec
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