Ever since we started selling books and audiobooks on a serious level, we had talked idly about going to the Frankfurt Book Fair … one day. Well, today was that ‘one day’! When we were planning to walk the Camino and working out the logistics, we used the Frankfurt Book Fair as our end point and worked backwards from there, making sure we had enough time to finish what we wanted to do in Spain, then make our way to Germany and fly home from there after the Book Fair.
It all worked really well, apart from the bit about not finishing the walk. But that’s okay, Greg is greatly improved and we’re already talking about what we’ll do when we come back to finish our Camino.
And so to the Book Fair. We organised a hotel close to the Frankfurt Convention Center, where the Fair was held. As it turns out, the Hotel Excelsior is also right opposite the main railway station in Frankfurt, which will be handy for us tomorrow morning when we catch the train to Munich so we can fly home. Because of the Book Fair (presumably), it was very difficult to get a flight home from Frankfurt, so our travel agent Ayra at Thor World Travel got a bit creative and booked us flights from Munich instead.
We had originally planned to spend the 2 days that the Fair was open to the general public there, but in reality one day was enough. We got to the Fair at around 10am this morning and left at around 2pm, and by then we felt we had seen everything we wanted to see, and we were feeling a bit overloaded with information. We could have spent a bit more time, but some of the publishers that I was most interested in visiting and talking with had either closed or taken down a lot of their display by the time we got to their booths late in the morning. More on that later, but to put it mildly, we were not particularly impressed.
The one thing that really stood out about the Book Fair was the crowd – lots of people, including many kids and young adults – and nearly all of them were there for the books. The real ones, not the e-thingys or the digital whatnots. It cost members of the general public between 7 and 14 euros to get in, so it was great to see so many people there.
We spent most of our time in one of the International Halls, where the Australian, UK and US publishers, distributors and other book-related people were. Ironically, the 2 best contacts we made were both from Adelaide – Michael Bollen, who owns Wakefield Press and whom I have been meaning to contact for a while, and Dave Bell, who has self-published a gorgeous book called ‘The Gardener’s Guide to Growing Money on Trees’. Beautiful photography with clever, witty prose and a really good quality hardcover publication. I’m looking forward to renewing contact with both these guys when we’re all back in Adelaide. I also got to check out a few upcoming titles from Murdoch Books and ACP (Women’s Weekly Cookbooks), and collected a few catalogues to go through later.
To anyone thinking of attending a future Frankfurt Book Fair, I would strongly advise that you go on the Saturday and not the Sunday. When we visited the DK/Penguin Books stand at around 11.30am, the display had nearly all been packed up in boxes and even though there were still a few books out on shelves, it was very difficult to even get to them without tripping over stacks of boxes.
But the one that really annoyed me was the Random House stand. It was located at the far end of Hall 8, so it was probably around 12.30pm by the time we got to it. And it was closed! Quite a few Random House reps were standing around, but there were bars across both entrances to the large booth, and the reps seemed to be mainly just telling people that they were closed. Now, we paid the same entrance price as the people who visited the Fair on Saturday, the Fair advertised that it was open until 5.30pm on Sunday, and yet 2 of the largest Australian publishers were closed or very close to closed when the Fair had at least 5 hours still left to run.
We walked through one of the Fiction/Non Fiction halls, which was packed with people, and as it was a lovely sunny day, there were plenty of people outside as well. It was very encouraging to see so many people at the Fair – it’s certainly reassured us both that there is still a market for ‘real’ books, and that there will be for quite some time to come.
Greg discussing geeky stuff at the No Starch Press stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair
Judy outside the Frankfurt Book Fair
