Frankfurt Book Fair

Posted in Neem Tree Blog on October 20, 2019

Our first Frankfurt Book Fair was exhilarating, we’ve made lots of new friends and contacts and have exciting new opportunities for foreign rights! It was great sitting and catching up with fellow exhibitors. Thank you so much to the IPG for making it incredibly easy to exhibit and to the Publishers Association for enabling us to attend a drinks evening with the British Ambassador, British Honorary Consul and the Director of British Council Germany where the treat was a reading by Robert Harris from his latest book, The Second Sleep. We haven’t read it yet, but it reminded us of A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr, which is an all-time favourite read of ours. We also attended the International Publishers Dinner organized by the Sheikh Zayed Book Award and the Frankfurt Book Fair New York. The company was really interesting and very international with publishers from Ukraine and China, amongst others. We were seated on the same table as the team from Publishing Perspectives and two young Emirati women authors who were there to celebrate their award-winning books securing translation rights, the perfect dinner companions for a wonderful conversation. If you haven’t signed up for Publishing Perspectives, we’d really recommend it. The news provides an excellent global perspective on the industry (the publication is aptly named)!

We were very impressed by the senior sales team at Casemate and really excited and feel very appreciative to be working with them. Thankfully all the brochures we printed for Frankfurt, agonizing we’d produced too many, will be utilized by the US and UK sales teams. We will need to knuckle down this week and deal with logistical issues as books will need to be moved from their current locations with Gardners and Clays and onto the Casemate distribution system. We are also finding some technical issues loading up our first demy sized book on Lightning Source. Why can there not be just one demy size? We hope to get this dilemma done and dusted this week, well before the November 7th paperback publication date of Distant Signs. We are gearing up for the US blog tour for Distant Signs organized by the amazing Amy Bruno at Historic Fiction Virtual Book Tours @HFVBT. The tour kicks off on November 7th. Do join us!

A recent article in DW.com, the online arm of Deutsche Welle, says that in a September 2019 report commissioned by Christian Hirte, the government’s commissioner for eastern German affairs, ‘57% of citizens in eastern Germany felt like second-class citizens and that just 38% of those asked in the east see reunification as a success, including only 20% of people under 40.’  Former East Germany Still Lags Behind West . Is this the reason for the surge in support for the AfD in the September elections? Support for the AfD.

On a happier note, we are also sending the advanced review copies of Children of War and Modesty: A Fashion Paradox to print this week! We believe both books are highly topical. If you write book reviews and are intrigued by either of these titles, send us a private message on twitter or through our website for a review copy.

Until next week!