Author representation at a fair
Your title carried into the meeting schedule: pitched in person to foreign editors, scouts and co-agents chosen because they publish work like yours.
Home / International book fairs
I take your book into the room.
Frankfurt, Bologna, London. The deals that move a book across borders are made face to face, by people who are physically there.
Not a bookshop. A trading floor.
A rights fair is three or four days of back-to-back appointments between publishers, agents, scouts, translators, producers and foreign editors. What is traded is the right to publish a book in a country, a language or a format.
If you are not in the calendar, you do not exist that week. This is the single biggest reason good books never get translated: not quality, just absence.
- Frankfurter Buchmesse
- October, Germany
- Bologna Children's Book Fair
- Spring, Italy
- London Book Fair
- Spring, United Kingdom
Representing an author, or a publisher's whole list.
Publisher list representation
For publishing houses: your whole rights list taken to the fair, pitched title by title, with the meetings booked and the follow-up run afterwards.
Rights guide and sell sheets
The material a fair runs on: a rights guide, one-page sell sheets per title, and a clear statement of which rights are actually free.
Meeting scheduling
Target editors identified territory by territory, approached six to eight weeks ahead, and booked into the diary before the fair opens.
Post-fair follow-up
Material sent to everyone who asked, chased on a schedule, and negotiated if it becomes an offer. Most fair business is closed in the weeks afterwards.
Fair report
A written account of who was seen, what they said, what they asked for, and what they passed on. The silences are reported too.
A fair is three months of work, not three days.
Selection
Which titles go, and how each one is pitched in each market.
Materials
Rights guide, sell sheets, sample translation where it helps.
The calendar
Target editors and scouts booked weeks before the doors open.
The meetings
I take the meetings in person. You get notes on who said what.
Follow-up
Material sent, chased, and negotiated if it becomes an offer.