The London Book Fair and me …
There’s a spot in Kensington Olympia, an empty carpeted square that ends in a service lift, where you can lay flat on the floor. All the human chatter about books comes to you as a low and single-toned disembodied roar. Close your eyes and you can drift for a while out of the exhibition hall’s vaulted cavern and into the vastness of dreamland.
Refreshed, you can insert yourself into the throngs and seek out a meeting or two.
The trick, like at a debutante’s ball, is to have your dance card filled before the show begins. Never clear on what I want to get out of the London Book Fair, I have few meetings booked for my single day.
As a writer, you don’t belong at a Book Fair. It’s like a wild fowl dropping down into the processing line of a duck farm.
Over the years I’ve known small independent publishers like myself invest in a stand. They do so once and regret the effort and expense. The Fair isn’t where booksellers discover new titles to stock.
In the past I’ve been interested in finding new printing and mailing options, distribution deals, and in scouting international stands for subsidies on books in translation. This time I was only interested in marketing possibilities: we have all the books, the distribution, could do with some affordable printing options in the US but they weren’t apparent in London’s halls. So my meetings were with Edelweiss, Bookbub and Publisher’s Weekly. It’s good, as ever, to find the real people behind the institutional names. And I’ve come away with strategies to use what these businesses have to offer more effectively.
What I hoped for was information on using AI in publishing. It’s a pennies business in which it’s hard to reap back the costs of book production let alone make a profit. AI and typesetting anyone? I know it’s around but I didn’t find it on display.
In talks on audio book production I did at least find acceptance that small houses need the support of AI for their audio offerings to be cost effective. One interesting development is publishers offering three AI alternatives to their actors’ narrations, because many readers give up reading when they’re uncomfortable with a performer’s voice.
And then there’s my writer’s side. Of old I’ve kept the dates of the London and Frankfurt Book Fairs in mind, knowing not to submit any work to agents or publishers in the surrounding weeks. The Fairs consume them. This time some of that book fair momentum worked to my advantage. My nonfiction My Head for a Tree sold to Profile in the UK and Greystone for North America some while ago. I submitted my ‘final’ draft last month, buoyant with self-confidence. The Greystone team were flying in for the Fair. Suddenly everybody was reading my submission.
Book Fairs are where people in the trade meet each other. They’re huge, personal, networking events. I feel most at home at the back of the hall, in the closed-off rights section where literary agencies have their bare tables. I dropped in on my agent Patrick Walsh of Pew Literary. He had the buzz – and it was welcome. Back in October my previous submission of a ‘final’ draft had been rejected. In my mind, it was because I’d been following direction and it was now time to do it my way.
The buzz? Everyone agreed. This draft really works. I sat down with Rob Saunders, the founding publisher of Greystone, who confirmed his enthusiasm. We’re due for Spring 2025 release.
My Head for a Tree will be ready to be traded at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. I won’t be flying in to get in its way.
Writing tip:
Move time phrases, such as ‘in the afternoon’, to the beginning of the sentence. It will help your sentences flow.
Check out some piece in the New Yorker to see this trick in effect. Why does it work? It’s to do with rhythm, and avoids the regular thump thump of the subject + verb + object structure that begins most sentences.
What I’m reading:
Ben Goldsmith’s God is an Octopus. On grief, the afterlife, and recovering balance by working with nature.
It’s really well written. And I suspect a ghostwriter had a hand in it. Why? Debut books are seldom this well crafted. The book’s driving force is a man’s grief for the death of his teenage daughter: it takes time and skill to control such trauma inside a book’s structure. This is Ben Goldsmith’s story and likely his words, but I can see how the words and the details were elicited by steady conversation and artful questioning. It’s those details that allow the reader inside the story, and so allow its patient unfolding.