At Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair), overall attendance was up to a record 286,425 visitors from more than 150 countries, but attendance for the fair’s three days for the publishing industry slightly declined—by .02 percent. Saturday and Sunday’s public attendance levels saw a 3 percent rise.
Drawing wide press attention was a conflict that can be seen as a sign of the times: the tolerance-of-intolerance debate. This issue played out mainly at the publishers’ and trade-show level—rarely among authors. Germany this autumn has an especially edgy political climate, with groups on the far right clashing with moderates and groups on the left. Frankfurter Buchmesse’s administration decided to allow a few right-wing publishers. One, Verlag Antaios, included Bjorn Höcke, leader of the hard-right Alternative for Germany party, in a book presentation. The result was protests and scuffles; in addition, a rightist publisher’s stand was burgled during the fair, and there were reports of at least two serious attacks on partisan fair attendees.
What’s underway not just at Frankfurt but also at September’s Göteborg Book Fair in Sweden is soul-searching about what freedom of expression really means. In the States, this is sometimes referred to as the ACLU problem because that venerable civil rights organization defends the rights of people and organizations that ACLU members find distasteful. Frankfurt’s administration is defending, as Göteborg has done, its policy of free-speech advocacy. Frankfurt Book Fair director Juergen Boos says, “We categorically reject the political position and publishing activities of the New Right. At the same time, as organizer of the largest international trade fair for books and media, we are obliged to uphold the fundamental right to free expression.”
In business-oriented news from Frankfurt, Simon & Schuster’s UK chief, Ian Chapman, said that his house will be cutting back on production by 100 titles this year. The goal is more marketing focus on fewer books in a deeply crowded marketplace. If more houses follow suit, this will mean fewer available contracts for authors.
When Simon & Schuster’s global CEO Carolyn Reidy was asked about self-publishing during a press briefing, she said that independent publishing is “huge” and has “taken away some consumers” from the trade in the US market. “I think it makes us focus more on what we do for the author,” she said. “Self-publishing makes us make sure our game is as good as it can be.”
The book fair produces a program for German-language indie authors, and Porter again led Publishing Perspectives’ program for indie authors in English—with IngramSpark, PublishDrive, and the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) participating. In panel discussions, Wattpad’s Ashleigh Gardner and Hachette Romans’ Cécile Térouanne described their partnership, in which Hachette in Paris offers book contracts to Wattpad writers. It’s going so well that the partnership has already exceeded the number of planned titles.
But the acceptance and progress of self-publishing (or, rather, the sluggish acceptance and progress) in most countries (the US, the UK, and Germany are the exceptions) was probably best represented by Guillaume Dervieux, vice president and CEO of France’s Albin Michel publishing house. He said that self-publishing is all but anathema to “what we are doing” in the trade. In self-publishing, he said, every manuscript “is accepted and each title is invested with the minimum amount of means. We do exactly the contrary. We reject a lot of manuscripts, and we concentrate all our means and effort only on the ones we choose with passion.”
Bottom line: Amid the political noise and more than 4,000 events at Frankfurt this year, the major trade personalities signaled their belief in the strength of print books, with Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle referring to a “massive stabilizing effect on physical retail” at the fair’s opening press conference. Brian Murray, HarperCollins’s CEO, told Zeke Turner at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) that “screen fatigue” is shoring up print’s dominance. Of course, it’s rare to hear anyone note Amazon’s retail hegemony. They talk format much more than sales channels—as when Reidy said she sees younger readers showing a fondness for print, referencing Rupi Kaur’s Instagram-based poetry book (see earlier item). But Reidy characteristically sounded less willing than some to write off digital. A development beyond ebooks, a “new form” still ahead, she said, may yet surprise us with its viability. We think Reidy’s right. And we wouldn’t get too comfortable.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
