The Bookseller.com

7th September 2008

Katherine Rushton is chief reporter on Broadcast, and was formerly senior reporter at The Bookseller.

Building from scratch in Beijing

03.09.07

The 14th Beijing International Book Fair took on a new identity at the weekend, when most UK publishing staff cleared out and the great Chinese public moved in. Queues of eager fairgoers grew outside the gates, although many of these were admittedly for a careers fair which opened in the same centre, and sat in neat and silent rows with their heads buried in something called the "Talent Gazette".

But plenty of people were headed to BIBF as well, and there are anecdotes about members of the public pestering Chinese publishers to translate their meetings with UK rights folks into Mandarin so that everyone could hear. I was struck by something the fair director told my colleague last year: that it would be "inhuman" if the public was not let in. Goodness knows what would have happened to Neil Gaiman if the public had been in the fair on Friday, when he broke from a film tour to do a book signing. He was still kept hard at work by jittery Chinese fans who queued round the block of stands and posed for photos.

It's probably the same sense of excitement and interest in celebrity that swiftly turned a sales pitch for Victoria Beckham's style book into a bidding war. That was one of BIBF's biggest coups this year, I thought: the fair broke free of being a relationship-building platform for foreign forays into China, and established itself as a place to launch your biggest new books and watch the bids stack up. It also marked an important moment in the evolution of BIBF's identity, from being a largely academic and educational show to being a must-attend event for trade publishers too.

Before I came to Beijing, I had heard all the talk about the importance of publishers being in China, the world's largest population, the number of new English-language learners and all the rest. But it was only when I came and saw it for myself that the penny finally dropped.

At the moment, the UK trade scene in China is largely dominated by large publishing groups glad-handing and making big, political press announcements. But although they  have more money to play with than the indies, what is interesting is the tiny scale of their teams out here. The launch of Penguin China by Jo Lusby two years back makes many indie publishers in the UK look like corporate giants. It's a story of one woman (multi-talented but brand new to book publishing); an "office" below a washing line in her back bedroom; and a nimble approach to getting things done.

Because all UK publishers must (at least for the moment) partner with a local company before they publish in Chinese, all it takes is the right property and a skeleton staff to come up with a plan and find the right partner—well within many indie publishers' reach.

Setting up here will be tricky to monetise for the moment, but costs are low and there are any number of schemes to encourage international dialogue with Chinese publishers which will help to get indies started. The Chinese are eager for cultural exchange, and when it does come, it will pay to to be here.

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