I’ve spent more than half-a-year of my life in Frankfurt, one week at a time. My first Fair was 1976 so this would have been my 39th if I attended them all. I think I missed two, so that’s 37. I love it and I get enormous commercial benefit from it. I can’t understand people who are in our business who don’t; it attracts the top executives from just about every publishing company in the world.
But, like just about everything in our business, it is affected by the digital revolution.
It stands to reason that gatherings of publishing people (or any other kind, really) that require travel time and expense should diminish in a world where email and Skype and Google Hangouts are a normal part of everyday life. But the venerable events just keep going on. It was more than five years ago that I wondered how long BEA could last. They have an extreme challenge because BEA’s DNA is that it is for publishers to show their wares to bookstores, and the number of bookstores has dropped precipitously for years. And London Book Fair, despite venue issues over the years which have them moving again next year, seemed from my visit last April still to be going strong.
The concerns I expressed five years ago that BEA might disappear have, so far, proven unfounded. Good show management that has brought in other players ranging from bloggers to meetings of BISG and IDPF, digital publishing’s trade association, have, at the very least, postponed what seemed to me to be inevitable. Of course, they have their own venue change to navigate and it will be a tougher one because they’re leaving NYC for Chicago in 2016. That is going to be extremely disruptive.
Frankfurt is an entirely different beast. It is really two mega-events that stretch over five exhibit days: Wednesday through Sunday. Set-up day is Tuesday, so it is really a week-long commitment. For the global book trade, and specifically for those of us in the English-speaking world that are the dominant players in worldwide publishing, it is a unique opportunity to trade rights face-to-face, on metaphorical steroids. Books published in English can have anywhere from zero to a dozen or more foreign language editions which, cumulatively, can bring in very significant revenues. What Frankfurt has done for us for years is provide an efficient venue for those deals to get made.
For German publishers, however, Frankfurt is also an opportunity to meet the public. For the non-German exhibitors and attendees, this is mostly a nuisance but a minor one because the English-language hall has been as far as is geographically possible in the Messegelende (which is about a dozen Javits- or McCormick Place-sized buildings on a vast campus connected by buses and moving walkways; 5-7 minute walks from one meeting to the next can be minimized by experienced fairgoers’ planning, but are unavoidable) from the hall which houses the Germans. (Art book, sci-tech, and other language publishers are a lot closer.)
Global companies use Frankfurt as an opportunity to hold global meetings. I could see on the meeting signboard at my hotel that Hachette and Quarto had meeting rooms booked for the day before the Fair opened from 9 to 5. These are senior management meetings that bring the heads of various regions into the same room; the rights directors and acquiring editors who will be working hard at the Fair aren’t necessarily part of those conversations. This is built into the travel rhythms of the big global companies. And the CEOs are often not fully occupied at the Fair itself. I don’t know if it is part of Frankfurt’s marketing plan to help facilitate these global meetings, but it should be. It cements the commitment of the biggest companies to that spot on the calendar.
(By the way, the global meetings combined with the long-in-advance planning publishers do for Frankfurt make it particularly challenging to run a successful conference ahead of the Fair. Michael Cader and I had a Publishers Launch event for three years — we didn’t do it this year — and both recruiting speakers and gathering an audience was harder than it has been for any other event we’ve done. People schedule their Frankfurt time tightly, and in advance, so you have to have powerful programming posted well before the event to compel people to plan to take a full day of Frankfurt time to attend.)
But it was really obvious this year that Frankfurt — at least that part of it which is about English-language publishers buying and selling with non-English markets — is shrinking.
I stay at the (now Meridien) ParkHotel, which has the Casablanca Bar off the lobby. It has, for years, been the main hangout for the Brits at Frankfurt and, in years past, you could hardly get through the lobby to your room on Tuesday night, Wednesday night, or Thursday night. This year, the crowd hardly spilled out of the bar at all.
But what was really stark was the empty Halle 8 (this year for the last time, the English-language hall) on Friday. Up until about ten years ago, Frankfurt ran through Monday morning and Sunday was the last “real” day of action. My pal Charlie Nurnberg of Sterling was always the last big US executive there working; he always made deals there on Sunday. The biggest big shots had all gone home, and Charlie made himself accessible to lots of smaller players, who were delighted to sell to (or buy from) Sterling. The important point is that there were people for him to meet that day to do business with. Powerful people went home early, but lots of business was still being done.
People hated staying through Monday so the Fair in one recent year relented and eliminated the Monday, and Sunday became the last day. Pretty rapidly, Sunday became a desolate day. This was so much the case that in the past couple of years I’ve managed to persuade Gwyn Headley of fotoLibra, my British pal with whom I share a stand and then — most years — drive back to London, that we could leave on Saturday afternoon and get back to London on Sunday evening, rather than doing it all 24 hours later.
Doing this requires some arranging. The story is that you get “fined” if you abandon your stand early. (I have seen lots of deserted stands over the years and I haven’t actually met anybody who admitted to having been fined. But I have friends who work for the Frankfurt Book Fair, I have partnered with them on conferences — I know them — and they all insist to me that it is true, so I take it seriously. I never yet left not wanting to have my stand again next year so I figure they can enforce the fine.) To avoid that problem, you hire a local young person to sit at your stand. They can’t do any business for you, of course, but they prevent you from being fined. This year doing that cost me 180 Euros. It’s worth it to get back to London a day earlier.
In the past few years since Monday was eliminated, Saturday became quieter but Friday continued to be kinetic and active. It was well known that the top execs, particularly the British ones, left after Thursday, but top editors and marketers were there in force through Friday. Not this year. Friday was the new Saturday. My Logical Marketing partner Pete McCarthy and I had a dozen meetings or more each day on Wednesday and Thursday. I had three on Friday. I had none on Saturday. We made a wisely efficient decision having Pete go home on Friday morning. (Frankly, his time is much more valuable than mine.)
You could have rolled a bowling ball down just about any aisle in Halle 8 on Friday and not broken any legs.
This is not really surprising. Global rights trading used to be an annual event, particularly for illustrated book packagers and publishers who had bulky samples and boards that needed to be seen for decisions to get made. Now it is a continuous effort with PDFs easily moved around the world in milliseconds. And that’s on top of the fact that there are fewer and fewer illustrated books and a consequent reduction in illustrated book packagers and publishers.
Next year the English-language publishers move from Halle 8 to Halle 6. On one hand, this takes us closer to the rest of the Fair and we do a lot of business with Europeans who will be more proximate as a result. It moves the English-language publishing world closer to the kids’ books publishing world (and they overlap, of course) and that’s good. But it also takes us from a hall where we’re all on one floor to one with a smaller footprint where we have to navigate three floors. Going up and down escalators only might pad time between meetings by three minutes or five, but when you’re scheduling a sit-down every 30 minutes (as many of us do, at least on Wednesday and Thursday), that can mean reducing the productive time by 15 percent or more.
And while it puts us considerably closer to the tram stop that can take us into the Fair, it also puts the German public which uses that same tram that much closer to us as well. This is going to be particularly disruptive to the b-to-b trade business on Saturday and Sunday.
The Frankfurt Book Fair will remain an indispensable stop for the global publishing community, but it might have a real battle on its hands trying to remain a five-day event. I don’t have 37 more Frankfurts to go, but I think I’ll see more changes in publisher behavior around it before I’m done than I’ve seen since I started attending.