The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

Ian Taylor is founder of Ian Taylor Associates a sales agency and consultancy service for the Chinese book market. He was formerly international director at the Publishers Association.

Blip year for Beijing

08.09.08

The 15th Beijing International Book Fair came to an end on Thursday 4th September. It took place in Tianjin, 120km Southeast of Beijing and there is no doubt that it fell just a bit short of the real thing.

The fair has grown steadily over the past few years, in line with China’s booming economy, constrained only the available space, but this year the fair had shrunk a bit. Chinese publishers cut back their stand size and staff attendance numbers. Given a choice some Beijing publishers might have chosen to stay away but they did not have a choice. Foreign publisher numbers were also down, with some Americans unable to get a visa in time as a result of the Olympic -period tightening of visa application requirements. But despite this most foreign publishers present reported a good fair with high quality meetings and some advantages in being around when competitors were absent. To be in Tianjin also seemed to signify seriousness about the China market that was valued by Chinese publishers.

Jo Lusby, general manager of Penguin’s China office admitted that it was a quiet fair for her, but that this was only partly due to the location. Jo pointed out that the Olympics had closed Beijing down for a month before the fair making preparation impossible and setting back some projects. The Sichuan earthquake tragedy had also put marketing initiatives for Penguin Classics in Chinese promotion, but she was confident of a very lively autumn and year end.

There was undoubtedly a lower level of buzz, for what is normally a noisy fair and a lot fewer parties. The annual party given by Mr Li Pengyi’s Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, did not make the transition to Tianjin, though the Publishers Association/UK Trade and Industry party did and was much appreciated. On the Palgrave Macmillan stand Clare Hodder, head of rights, and Malgosia van de Westelaken lamented the lack of parties but took comfort from the fact that they had sold Chinese language rights to the 8 volume Dictionary of Economics to Economic Science Press for a £50,000 advance.

Luc Kwanton, of Taiwan and Shanghai based rights agent Big Apple Tuttle-Mori Agency, pronounced himself “underwhelmed” with the Tianjin venue, which he found difficult to find his way around, but in the run up to the fair he was pleased to have sold Peoples Republic of China (PRC) Chinese language rights for The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch for US$100,000 and got the same figure for Taiwan Chinese language rights. He was also pleased that Chinese publisher CITC had bought the new Richard Branson book for $50,000 on a one page proposal.