We’ve had a rich and interesting day in Frankfurt so far at the Publishers Launch conference, which kicks off the pre-fair forums. A bookseller-focused post is listed separately, and we’ll have more reporting tomorrow, with additional reports coming in from paidContent and The Bookseller. The event starting with a look at the larger competitive landscape of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook to set context from UK analyst Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis. He reminded the audience that “Amazon is a mechanism for capturing the conversion of commerce to ecommerce. As each sector becomes susceptible to ecommerce it captures” that sector […]
Book Fairs
Trends Continue In Busy Pre-Frankfurt Week
As promised last week, we have looked again at deal reports from October 1 through October 7 (so it does not include the new wave of Monday announcements), to see if last-minute activity would change the analysis of this season’s deal patterns leading up to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The big trend observed in September–significantly higher fiction sales, driven by higher than ever sales of romance and women’s fiction–continued apace. (Fiction sales were once again significantly higher in this period than ever observed before.) Children’s sales finally rose, after registering unusually low in September, and the total number of US […]
Executives Gathering
This year’s official Franfurt Book Fair “ceo panel” doesn’t actually have any publishing ceos on it this year, but our Publishers Launch Frankfurt event next Monday features separate presentations from seven innovating c-level publishing executives (Dominique Raccah at Sourcebooks; Rebecca Smart at Osprey; Rick Joyce at Perseus; Anthony Forbes Watson of Pan Macmillan; Ken Michaels of HBG USA; Stephen Page of Faber; and Charlie Redmayne of Pottermore; plus former Macmillan president turned Providence Equity partners advisor Brian Napack). We’re joined by additional publishing executives from Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, Russia, Spain in broad coverage of digital innovation from within […]
The Deal for Frankfurt: Fiction Surges On Romance Boom
With the Frankfurt Book Fair about a week away, it’s time for our regular look at dealmaking patterns and trends in advance of the show. As usual, we try hard to let the data tell the meaningful stories. If you had asked for our impressionistic view based on the recent deal report flow and community chatter, we would have said that the flow of newsmaking nonfiction deals has seemed higher and that fiction–at least for unexpected new properties–has seemed light, with few new properties driving a lot of talk and intense rights sales. But the actual data tells a somewhat […]
Initiatives: Pratchett Exploits His Own Multimedia Rights; S&S Seeks to License Author Videos
Author of the Discworld series (and many others) Terry Pratchett has launched a multimedia production company that holds and will exploit exclusive rights to his work for film, TV, merchandising and digital media. Called Narrativia, the company is led by managing director Rod Brown. A writer, director and producer of commercial TV for over two decades, Brown produced the adaptation of Pratchett’s Hogfather and The Color of Magic. The announcement indicates that they company “is already working on a number of Pratchett-related TV and film projects with high profile production partners and scriptwriters.” Among Simon & Schuster‘s new offerings at […]
A Small Alert for Frankfurt Travelers
The German division of Lufthansa airlines cancelled 300 flights on Tuesday–one-sixth of their scheduled flights–“as cabin crew launched a second round of strikes in a row over pay and conditions that threatens to drag on for weeks and cost Germany’s biggest airline tens of millions of euros.” The union and the airline have been failed to agree on a new contract for 13 months now. 200 flights out of Frankfurt, including a third of their longer flights, were cancelled today.