LONDON, April 17 — You might be forgiven for thinking that the London Book Fair is about books and authors — and of course in a sense it is. It is just that few books and even fewer authors are seen here.
Rather, with the public excluded from the fair’s site, the hangarlike spaces of Earls Court One in west London, thousands of book editors, agents and scouts are able to indulge in their favorite pastime: schmoozing.
They do so every fall at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but increasingly London is their gathering place in the spring, above all for the lucrative part of the publishing industry that involves selling foreign rights for English-language books.
So no, this three-day book fair, which closes on Wednesday, is not a celebration of literature or high-profile authors in the way that, say, the Salon du Livre in Paris draws crowds of devoted book lovers and ranks as an important event in the city’s cultural calendar.
At the London Book Fair, what is on display is the art of the deal.
The first floor of Earls Court One resembles any industrial fair, with exhibitors’ displays designed to attract attention. Large publishing groups, like Hachette Livres, Random House, Penguin Group and HarperCollins, also use their stands to sell their books — in English for export or for translation — to distributors and publishers from around the globe.
On the hall’s second floor, though, is the industry’s real engine room, the International Rights Center, where in a well-honed ritual, publishers and agents sit at bare tables — no laptops or fixed telephones — and hold a succession of intense 30-minute meetings of sparring and parrying, of pitches and offers.
Think speed dating.
“This book fair is about face time,” said Ed Victor, a long-established London literary agent. But these meetings are also about whether you want to see someone again, said Gaia Banks of Sheil Land Associates, another agency here. “You’re thinking about building long-term relationships,” she added. “It’s all about trust.”
That, in turn, tempers the approach of publishers and agents who come here intent on creating a buzz around an author or a manuscript. “You have to be able to deliver the goods,” said Tracy Fisher, director of international rights at the William Morris Agency. “You have to know your buyers. You can end up with egg on your face if it doesn’t work.”
Still, Ms. Fisher said, it is William Morris’s practice to try to “get the buzz going” on a couple of books at each fair. This spring, she noted, the agency is pushing two manuscripts it received last week: “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga, a former journalist from India, and “Atmospheric Disturbances,” a first novel by Rivka Galchen, an American of Israeli extraction.
Nonetheless, the consensus is that no “book of the fair” has emerged so far. Not that this has dampened the generally optimistic mood of the publishing world represented here; it is simply that, no less than an unexpected hit movie at the Cannes film festival, a book that has publishers falling over one another with inflated offers inevitably adds energy and excitement.
“You won’t get a ‘book of the fair’ as you did 10 or 15 years ago,” said Tom Weldon, managing director at Penguin General, one of Penguin’s divisions. “With the Internet and all the other information that is out there, you no longer get huge deals here. The hard work is about foreign rights and exports.”
But the fair is also, as Mr. Victor put it, “a gathering of a tribe,” where friendships are formed, loyalties are tested, gossip is exchanged, grumbling is voiced. And this spring there was even applause that the fair’s organizer, Reed Exhibitions, decided to return the event to its traditional neighborhood of Earls Court after a near-disastrous adventure last year.
For the March 2006 fair, Reed Exhibitions moved to a new exhibition building in Docklands in east London. So furious were publishers and agents at the inconvenience of Docklands that Reed Exhibitions only narrowly avoided finding itself competing with a new London book fair — in Earls Court — organized by the Frankfurt Book Fair.
But now normality has returned, with Reed Exhibitions saying that 23,000 publishing professionals from more than 100 countries have signed up for this year’s fair. The 702 standholders also include national representations — Spain is being called the market focus this time — as well as start-ups, like Public Eye Publications.
This small British publisher, set up last year by Steve Brookes and his wife, Anne, to publish a book of garden tips, had the bright idea of copyrighting the phrase “the greatest in the world” in Britain and the United States. And eager to be noticed, it used the fair to release its newest book, “The Greatest in the World Sex Tips,” by the British actress Julie Peasegood.
Then there are those visitors who have come fishing for business. In one crowded passageway, for instance, Chen Xiaolian, the president of Jin Hua Guang Hua Printing and Clothing Company of Suchou, China, was hovering with two assistants whose job it was to stop passers-by. “Would you like printing?” one assistant asked. “We do good printing of books in China. Very cheap.”
In contrast, few authors were on hand to pitch their books, if only because their readers were not inside this building. But the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, now promoting his latest book, “The Witch of Portobello,” had no trouble filling a large room with fans of his popular spiritual self-improvement books.
The fair also organizes scores of small seminars for professionals, covering everything from “The eBook Challenge” to copyright issues. One that seemed particularly pertinent to British publishing, with its endless stream of biographies and memoirs by soap opera stars and soccer heroes, was “The Cult of Celebrity: Commercial Reality and Legal Pitfalls.”
For many British editors, this boom has damaged more traditional literary publishing because even mainstream bookshops now promote celebrity books to the detriment of others. John Blake, whose company, John Blake Publishing, frequently puts out celebrity-focused books, went further, noting that Internet and supermarket sales were making bookshops “sadly irrelevant.”
However, Eddie Bell, a literary agent who also specializes in celebrity books, insisted that such books are “not dumbing down but creating a vast new class of readers.”
And he added, “The cult of celebrity is throwing a lifeline to publishing.”
Some highbrow editors and agents in the International Rights Center may find this a tad distasteful. On the other hand, the fair’s daily newspaper headlined its edition on Tuesday with news that HarperCollins had bought Andre Agassi’s memoirs for Britain. And as with every such book sale, the question that interests most publishers is simple enough: Will the book earn back its advance and make a decent profit?
