Sunshine
and Noir
BookExpo America
Lands in LA, With Bouts of 'Book Fair Fatigue'
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (JUNE 2003)
By
nearly all accounts, it’s a beastly time for a book
convention. You’ve got the gangrenous economy. War-torn
travel itineraries. SARS shut-downs. And cash-strapped
rep groups (who’ve already splurged for sales conferences
on the east coast). Throw in a liberal dose of what
some are calling “book fair fatigue,” and BookExpo
America, which rolls into the Los Angeles
Convention Center from May 28 to June 1, is facing more
than its share of the usual pre-show scuttlebutt. “We
certainly have been watching the world situation pretty
carefully,” says BEA Vice President and Show Manager
Greg Topalian, whose diagnostics nonetheless
put the gig admirably on target: BEA is slightly larger
than last year, at 300,000 sq. ft., and will top 2,000
exhibitors, on par with recent years. And though flocks
of foreign publishers and many domestic players say
they’re sitting this one out, Topalian predicts good
vibrations all around: “All of our registration numbers
look great.”
Chalk that up, in part, to no small amount of pump-priming
among the Hollywood crowd, with Reed-owned Variety
helping spread the good word. “We’ve done a lot
of promoting to the film and TV development community,”
Topalian says. “You’re going to see ten times as many
Hollywood folks at the show as you ever will anywhere
else.” You’ll see some of them on Friday, May 30, at
any rate, when Variety Editor-in-Chief Peter
Bart presides over a free panel of film industry
vets, “From Books To Blockbusters” (it’s at 10:00 am
in Room 411), with Robert Bookman of Creative
Artists Agency, producer Peter Guber, and
Fox honcho Tom Rothman. Down on the show
floor, a number of Hollywood studios are setting up
shop in Baker & Taylor’s booth — among them
Paramount, Disney, MGM, and Dreamworks
— to tout the “unique cross-merchandising opportunity”
represented by DVD tie-ins such as Harry Potter and
Lord of the Rings (officials cite the dreamy DVD profit
margins as one way Hollywood synergy can help booksellers
stay afloat). As for actual Hollywood deals taking place,
well, make sure your rental car’s fully gassed up. “The
film people, as ever, seem amused by it all,” one scout
reports, “with the trend being to say, ‘I’m not really
spending time at the fair itself.’”
‘A
Long Trip’ to LA
It’ll
take more than a few Winnie the Pooh DVDs — or even
the sight of perky Ellen DeGeneres, performing
at 9 pm on Saturday, May 31 at The Wiltern, benefiting
the Book Industry Foundation — to get the blood
pumping, especially when it comes to far-flung foreign
publishers. “I have the fewest number of clients ever
attending,” reports scout Mary Anne Thompson.
“Even my ‘diehard’ clients aren’t making an appearance.
It’s a long trip, and not really a rights fair anymore.”
As with other scouts, her clients revamped their plans
after attending the London Book Fair and realizing
“that yet another book fair wasn’t necessary.” Those
who will be making the trip include a New Age editor
from Egmont Richter; two representatives from
AW Bruna (Holland); the Editor-in-Chief of Kadokawa
Shoten (Japan); a nonfiction editor from Droemer-Knaur
(Germany); and film client National Geographic Films.
While its value as a rights fair may be open to question,
Thompson adds, it remains as always a first-rate opportunity
to survey the smaller publishers, and to check out marketing
and promotional ideas.
“I
think LA adds a glimmer of sunshine to BEA, but not
enough to entice the hordes to come,” adds Todd Siegal
of Franklin & Siegal Associates. “We only
have five publishers coming to LA, but that’s more to
do with our other clients having been to the London
Book Fair than any war-related stuff.” For those who
may want to drop by, Siegal’s show-going clients are
Hodder (UK), Unieboek (Holland), Norma
(Colombia), Damm (Norway), and China Times
(Taiwan). A few others have trickled through New York
ahead of the show, including Forum (Sweden),
Heyne (Germany), and Hayakawa (Japan).
Still, international travel jitters have wreaked havoc
on clients’ schedules. Siegal’s Swedish publisher was
only given clearance to fly (anywhere at all) two weeks
ago, he tells PT, and SARS-stricken destinations
such as China are still verboten. For other scouts,
it’s a numbingly familiar tale. “Most of my clients
never intended to attend BEA this year,” says Jutta
Klein, though two that were — German clients Hoffmann
& Campe and the Bertelsmann Club — scrapped
their BEA plans after hitting the London Book Fair.
(On the other hand, French clients Presses de la
Cité and France Loisirs are making the trek
to BEA after all, as will Val Hudson from Headline,
who’ll be putting in quality time with LA-based authors
and associates.)
If SARS or London aren’t keeping them away, there’s
always Operation Iraqi Freedom to foul up plans. “We
had quite a lot of problems setting up schedules,” reports
Ornella Robbiati, Editor-in-Chief for Italian
house Sonzogno, “because when we started fixing
appointments war was still on, so many Americans weren’t
sure to go.” Though she’ll be making the pilgrimage
as usual, Robbiati affirms that London has increasingly
made BEA redundant when it comes to rights. “If you
meet a publisher or agent at the end of March, it’s
quite unuseful to meet him again after a couple of months.”
By Robbiati’s lights, BEA has suffered in two further
respects: “ABA [as it was formerly known] used to be
held each year in a different town and it was a nice
way for foreigners to ‘tour’ America,” she says. “Secondly,
one could see the marketing tools with which big companies
supported the launching of books. But now nothing is
really new anymore, and it’s getting more difficult
year after year to take samples.”
Beyond the absentee foreigners, some of the show’s other
constituencies may be spotty, particularly commission
rep groups. Christopher Kerr’s Parson Weems
clan will have two out of six members present, while
Ted Heinecken of Chicago-based Heinecken Associates
is sending three out of seven reps, citing the low number
of midwestern accounts expected to attend. (His group
is showing up out of loyalty to their regional associations
— the Great Lakes Booksellers Association and
the Upper Midwest Booksellers Association — who
are as always soliciting titles for the Christmas catalog.)
Meanwhile, Don Sturtz and his colleagues at Fuji
Associates are sitting out this BEA completely,
as is Sandra Hargreaves and her Vancouver, Canada–based
sales group — partly because they’ll shortly be heading
east for BookExpo Canada. Reps confirm that the
regional bookseller fairs are increasingly where they
find the action. Further dampening enthusiasm on the
selling side, it might be added, Borders is not
sending any buyers this year, only management representatives.
As publishers have cut back in the last two years on
their own staff attendance, explains sales and marketing
consultant Sally Dedecker, commission reps get
saddled with more than their fair share of booth duty,
yet another show disincentive. For a glimmer of sunshine,
however, Dedecker says that up until a few weeks ago,
BEA was a complete nonstarter. Then her phone started
ringing, with domestic and foreign clients clamoring
to meet in LA, and the fair became an instantly attractive
proposition. That ought to warm the hearts of show promoters,
who point out that over 800 publishers come to BEA that
do not attend any other book convention. “London and
Frankfurt are wonderful,” Topalian says. “You should
go to those. But BEA is a totally different market.”
That view is endorsed by Jan Nathan, Executive
Director of the Publishers Marketing Association,
who says the west-coast venue means a cornucopia of
small and mid-size houses. “Whenever we come west with
BEA, we see a huge contingent of great mid-sized publishers
based both on the Pacific Coast and in Colorado and
Arizona, which are hotbeds of growing publishing companies,”
she says. As for the dearth of rights sales, a little
pause in the action may not be a terrible thing. “I
think there are too many foreign rights fairs in existence
right now,” she says. “We could all be on the road attending
one show or another as it relates to foreign rights.”
Back
at the Buchmesse . . .
On
that note, a travel advisory just in from the Frankfurt
Book Fair — which of course will remain at the Messe
until 2010 — where fair spokesman Holger Ehling
has a word for those who haven’t yet made hotel reservations.
If the hotel insists on a five- or six-night minimum
stay, Ehling says, kindly inform them that the fair
and the Frankfurt Hotels Association have agreed to
banish the minimum-stay requirement, and that they’re
welcome to contact Frankfurterhof chief Herr Leitgeb
for an explanation. (Some of the hotels have conveniently
forgotten about their pact.) In other Frankfurt news,
the organization has announced that the guest of honor
at the 2004 fair will be the Arab World. Fair officials
are working overtime to include dissident writers, seeking
the involvement of International PEN and other
groups. We hear that Cuba was so smitten by the gesture
that it proclaimed Germany the guest of honor at its
13th International Book Fair in Havana (it runs February
5-15, 2004). This year’s Havana fair reportedly hit
30 cities around Cuba after its January 30 opening,
selling three million books and attracting 3.5 million
visitors countrywide. Dr. Bernd Wulffen, the
German ambassador to Cuba, assured the press that more
Deutsch-Caribbean culture swapping was on the way. As
he told Radio Havana, “We will sign a cultural
agreement very soon.”
©2003
Publishing Trends
