The Bookseller.com

30th August 2008

Anja Sieg is The Bookseller's German correspondent, and international editor of German trade paper Buchreport.

German optimism

20.12.07

It is the season to be jolly and fittingly things are finally looking up for the German book trade after three dismal years in a row. Most booksellers and publishers are cautiously optimistic that 2007 will leave them better off than last year, provided that the tills continue to ring loudly during the Christmas period.

The "shopping season" in Germany is traditionally defined by the four Sundays in Advent. Serious holiday shopping really begins just mid-week before the first Sunday (2nd December) of the quartet, and this year was no exception. While retail in general had a quiet start, booksellers came strongly off the blocks, with sales for that first week up on last year's figure by 7.8% and a resounding 19.5% for the following week.

While these figures are impressive, there are two reasons for the trade not to rejoice too strongly. For a start, 7.8% growth is not enough to make amends for last year's poor performance: in 2006 the first week of the holiday season was down a whopping 8.6%. Second, there are clear signs that the large book chains, such as Thalia, Weltbild and Hugendubel, are creaming off Christmas sales with their huge marketing budgets while small independent book-sellers are continuing to fight a losing battle. Add to this the big question mark over the damage soaring prices for fuel and food will inflict on consumers' spending spirits and the picture suddenly looks only half as rosy for German booksellers.

But booksellers and publishers seem determined not to let these arguments spoil the upbeat mood. And in contrast to previous years their optimism is not based on wishful thinking but on hard facts. Last month was the strongest November in 10 years with sales up 5.9% on November 2006. Year-on-year sales in 2007 are up 3.8%. Even discounting the Harry Potter factor—the German translation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published on 27th October with a first print run of two million copies—sales in November were ahead by more than 2%.

German readers are well known for having an appetite for anything English or American, but it is German-speaking authors who are currently all the rage. A new breed of young, commercially successful, home-grown literary talent is calling the tune, led by Julia Franck who recently won the prestigious Deutscher Bücherpreis for her novel Die Mittagsfrau (The Lunch Lady).

To defy statistics claiming that German youngsters prefer iPods to books, 2007 seems to be the year of children's book author Cornelia Funke. The German-born author, who now lives in Los Angeles, has all three books of her bestselling Inkheart trilogy at the top of the charts, with the recently launched Tintentod (Oetinger)—which Scholastic/Chicken House will publish elsewhere as Inkdeath in 2008—hot on Harry Potter's heels.