Missed Our Masterclass? Replay: Behind the Scenes of International Book Fairs: Frankfurt Opportunities

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Lindsay Jones: Hello and welcome to our masterclass. Today we're going to be talking about what goes on behind the scenes at international book fairs. My name's Lindsay Jones. I'm the CEO of DropCap. I'm really happy to have everyone with me here today.

As we go through the presentation, please feel free to drop any questions or comments you have into the chat box. There'll be some time at the end, and I will try to address as many questions as possible. Without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and get started.

What Are International Book Fairs?

So the first question: what exactly are international book fairs? This is a great question—just Book Fairs 101. What actually are these things? Why are they important?

International book fairs are gatherings of the publishing industry. These take place throughout the year, typically in the spring and fall, where book trade professionals meet face to face to conduct business. Rights licensing is a major focus of these fairs.

There are a few that are the big ones:

Frankfurt Book Fair (fall) - This is what we'll be talking about more today. The Frankfurt Book Fair received over 115,000 trade visitors last year. That's just trade visitors—there were another 100,000 visitors that were members of the public who weren't part of the profession. So by far, this is the biggest book fair of the year and one of the most important. It's one of the book fairs where almost everyone in the industry attends, and it has over 6,000 exhibitors. This is the time of year that a lot of rights buying and selling takes place.

London Book Fair (spring) - This gets over 30,000 visitors.

Bologna Book Fair (spring) - This is specifically for children's books and has about the same attendance as the London Book Fair.

For us here at DropCap, we typically focus on our adult titles at the London Book Fair and then our children's titles at the Bologna Book Fair, since they occur very close together, usually within a few weeks of each other.

As you can see from these pictures, there's a lot of people there, there's a lot of booths, the hallways are typically packed, and you're walking down aisles that are just lined with exhibitors and people showing books. There's a lot to take in, and it's hard to stand out when you're one of thousands of exhibitors. That's what DropCap helps with, and we're going to talk a bit more about that.

How Are Rights Bought and Sold?

Method 1: Exhibitor Booths The first way is for exhibitors to pay for a booth to display their books at the book fair. Typically when an exhibitor has a booth—this is usually a publisher—they have their books with them and they pre-book meetings with their network of rights buyers. They may meet with hundreds of rights buyers throughout the course of the fair to pitch them on the books that they're showcasing in the booth.

Method 2: Walk-In Traffic Another way that we connect with rights buyers during the fair is walk-in traffic. Having a booth lets an exhibitor, whether that's a publisher or an agency like us, showcase the books and attract people walking by. As you saw from previous pictures, there are thousands of them actually walking by every day. A nice cover can attract the notice of a rights buyer that doesn't necessarily have a meeting, but will step into the booth and browse and then talk with someone who's in the booth about the availability of the book.

Method 3: The Rights Center The other way that rights are bought and sold—and this is important—is in the rights center. Every major book fair has an area called the rights center. As you can see from the photo here, there are many, many tables. This is just a small fraction of them. Agents book just a table. They typically are pitching rights buyers from a catalog and may have a few of their front list titles on hand to show, but they're not using that whole big booth to show off their clients' books.

This is how we participate in the London Book Fair, which is, as you know, a bit smaller than Frankfurt. It can be very effective, but you lose that important walk-in traffic when you go to the book fair just in the rights center.

The other important thing to know about the rights center is that only trade professionals can enter the rights center. So if you were to attend as an author, you typically can't get into that area. It's very restricted.

What Are Rights Buyers Looking For?

When we're showing books to rights buyers during our meetings at a book fair, obviously an eye-catching cover is going to be one of the first things that makes them point to it and say, "I want to see that one."

Other things that they're looking for are topics that are going to fit their market. These trends can change year to year. They're different depending on where the rights buyer is coming from. Sometimes they're looking for very specific things, sometimes they want something a little more broad, but the common theme is that the topics are universal. They can apply to many different people in many different walks of life. They're not just solely focused on the US.

The example I always like to use is that if your book is about the US healthcare system, it's probably not going to do well internationally. So that might be one that you do not send to a book fair. But if your book is about business or self-help, or is a children's book, or is talking about wellness, those are topics that are popular all over the world and can do really well.

The rights buyers that we meet with—when we sit down with them, we say, "Okay, what types of books are working well in your market right now?" And then we're going to tailor our meeting based on what they say is working well and what they're looking for. We're going to be pulling books off of the shelf to show them that fit those topics.

Throughout the course of the meeting, they might look at twenty, thirty, or forty books, and then they might say, "I only am interested in seeing five of these after the fair." That's how every meeting goes. We're doing those back to back—over 100 of them throughout the course of the fair. We're really trying to quickly determine what types of books this rights buyer is going to be most interested in, and then we're going to follow up with them after the book fair in more detail with a PDF of the book to review.

Other things rights buyers are looking for are domestic success like sales, awards, endorsements. You don't need to be a huge bestseller, but they want to see some sort of evidence of audience building. They want to see what your credentials or background are as an author. They're looking for many different things that suggest the book is going to perform well. They're making an investment in that book when they're licensing it.

Why Do We Exhibit in Person?

In the age of Zoom, we could just have meetings. We have a whole platform that we use to pitch books to our rights buyers throughout the year. So what is the point of still attending book fairs? Obviously, the attendance is hundreds of thousands of people, so we're all still doing it.

The reason is that buyers can get a better feel for the size and the quality of the books when they see them in person. We've often been surprised after seeing a book on screen for several months when we actually get the physical copy in our hands at the book fair. Sometimes it's much smaller than we expected. Sometimes it's much bigger. And that can actually impact how we pitch it, to whom we pitch it, and how it's received.

Illustrations and graphics are definitely more eye-catching when you see the physical book in your hands. It's easier for our rights buyers to assess the quality of the illustrations. It just doesn't compare to seeing a beautiful full-color children's book on the screen versus holding it in your hands.

Books that a buyer can touch and feel—they're going to remember that book better when they go back to their editorial teams and say, "These are the books that we're considering based on what was pitched to us at the book fair."

Finally, a face-to-face pitch from a trusted agent is always going to be more impactful than conducting business behind the screen. Obviously we do that all throughout the year because we're licensing books regardless of whether a book fair is going on, but it's really important for us to maintain those face-to-face relationships. Our agents have spent over 25 years each working in this industry. They know the people that they're meeting with, and those people trust them when they pitch a book and say, "I think this would work well for you."

How Is DropCap Different?

This is a really great question that I like to address because we are doing things a little bit differently from other agencies. Like I mentioned at the beginning, many agents are getting a table in the rights center. We do that as well, so there's nothing wrong with that, but by having a booth at the book fair—having a place where we can capture walk-in traffic and show more than just a few select titles—we find that brings in a lot more business for us and we're able to plant the seeds for a lot more licensing for the rest of the year.

Usually it's just publishers that have booths. It's very few, if any, agencies that have booths, so we're unique in that way.

Our platform, DropCap Marketplace, as you can see here in the picture, provides all of the information we need at our fingertips. The publishing industry in general, and rights licensing specifically, is still a little archaic. Many agents are still pitching books, even at book fairs, out of catalogs. Sometimes they have to flip through a bunch of pages to see if rights are available in a certain language. We have all of that information in our platform. We're able to look it up on our computers while we're in a meeting with someone immediately and know what rights have been sold for that book, any special information like awards or endorsements it's received.

Our agents have built trust and relationships with our buyers over decades. Sometimes I talk to a lot of authors that maybe tried sending their book to a book fair with companies like Combined Book Exhibit or others where it's being displayed at the fair, but there's no proactive pitching. There's no relationship building going on. No one is actually there to sell their book to rights buyers. It's just sitting on a shelf.

So it's very important that when we bring books to book fairs, we're taking those books down off of the shelf all the time and presenting them to our buyers who trust us. When we say "this book would be a good fit for you," they're going to write that down and say, "Okay, I want to know more."

We typically pre-book over 100 meetings when we're preparing for the book fair. We've already started booking meetings. Two of our agents—their Wednesdays and Thursdays are almost completely full already and we're only in July. So we pre-book those meetings and then we typically have 50 or more unbooked meetings—people who were passing by and we have an impromptu sit-down with them.

We walk away from the fair usually with over 150 individual half-hour meetings that our team has conducted. Each of those meetings results in maybe five, ten, or twenty books that that individual rights buyer wants to learn more about after the fair.

Cost and What's Included

Here's what it costs to go to the book fair with DropCap:

• 1-2 books: $699

• 3-6 books: $1,399

• 7-12 books (two shelves on a panel): $2,499

• Up to 24 books (full panel): $3,999

If you do have up to 24 books, we can do a full panel as part of our booth. This is what a lot of our publishers do, and it has your company logo at the top of the panel, so we include your branding.

What's Included:

• Your books displayed in our booth for us to pitch and for our buyers to review during meetings

• A dedicated page in one of our rights guides - This is a PDF that we create, like a catalog that's distributed to over 2,700 of our rights buyers

• Featured in our virtual book fair booth - This is what we use to present books when we meet with people over Zoom

• Social media promotion before, during, and after the book fair by our fantastic content team

• Post-fair media kit for your own promotional use that includes photos of your book at the book fair, our social media efforts, and information about the fair

Important note: If you choose to attend the book fair with us, DropCap will represent you for any deals that we may generate as a result of the book fair. If you have your own agent, this might not be the best fit for you. We want to make sure that when our buyers are talking to us and looking at a book at the book fair, when they come back to us and say "I'm interested in this," we can act on that right away.

Next Steps

If you are interested in sending your book to the book fair with us—and again, this is Frankfurt, taking place October 15th through 19th—we will send an email after this masterclass with a link to our book fair application, or you can go to the link provided.

We're going to be approving those applications on a rolling basis until our deadline of August 22nd.

Why do we have an application?

When we're planning our booth, we want to make sure we have a good balance of books. We want to make sure we have fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and young adult books. We don't want it to be balanced too far in one direction. We have buyers that buy all different types of genres.

We do have an approval process to make sure the book being submitted fits with the criteria for the types of books that our rights buyers are looking for. We want to make sure that it's of good quality and that there's a print version of that book that we're able to show in the booth. If you only have an e-book and you're not able to get a printed copy of your book, this might not be the best fit for you.

Timeline:

• August 22nd: Payment due to secure your spot

• September 5th: We must receive books by this date

• October 15-19: Frankfurt Book Fair

Once accepted, we will send you a payment link and our address for you to ship one copy of your book to us. We only need one copy of the book, and that will be consolidated by us and sent to our freight forwarder to get shipped to Germany. So the shipping for you will be domestic. We will do the freight shipping—that's included in the cost.

Q&A Session

Susan: My book is a self-published middle grade environmental fantasy. Can you give an idea how well middle grade is doing with foreign buyers?

Lindsay: That's a good question. I think middle grade is doing really well right now. Honestly, there isn't really any specific genre that I would say is not doing well. There are sub-genres that maybe are trending versus not trending. In Susan's specific case, environmental fantasy or cli-fi is a trend that we're seeing in fiction. And we're also seeing good sales with middle grade.

I don't typically say "this genre—don't do that" unless it's too US-focused. As the agents, we might have ideas about what's going to work well, but we're always surprised when we go to the book fair and hear from our rights buyers about what they're looking for. We want to present as broad a swath of genres as we can because trends are changing all the time.

Kelly: My historical novel will be published in January. It will be on display at the IBPA booth at Frankfurt and have an author Q&A before the fair. Would it be advisable to promote it at Frankfurt through DropCap too? IBPA won't negotiate a contract—it's not an agent.

Lindsay: Yes! We have a great relationship with IBPA and we have many authors that choose to exhibit in both of our booths. I think it's a great idea because you're increasing your exposure. IBPA is, like she said, not an agent. We always let them know which books are also exhibiting with us. We put little bookmarks in them with our booth number. So if someone sees your book at the IBPA booth, they know where we are if they want to talk about rights.

It's increasing your exposure. We're communicating with IBPA about any books that we are both bringing to the fair. I think it looks very professional. We do offer a 15% discount on the book fair if you are a member of IBPA, so check your member benefits.

Valentina: My dream is to attend a book fair one day. Do you think it's worthwhile for an author like me—I have self-published my book—to attend in person?

Lindsay: That's a fantastic question. My honest answer is that it is typically not going to be advantageous for you as an author to spend the money to attend the book fair yourself.

What we've seen with authors when they attend the book fair is that they're not able to talk to a lot of the decision makers because they don't have the contacts. Many of the major booths, like the big publishers like Penguin Random House, will not even let people into the booth that do not already have a meeting. I've talked to a lot of authors who've gone to the book fair who want to connect with agents or editors, and they're very frustrated by the end because they're getting so many no's.

I just wouldn't want you to spend the money to travel to Frankfurt, stay in Frankfurt, and go to the book fair—it's a big cost if you don't have very specific ideas and plans of what you're going to get out of it.

That being said, Frankfurt attracts a lot of visitors who are not members of the book trade. If you want to go just because you're curious to see what it's like, if you want to feel the energy, there are twelve halls at Frankfurt. It's huge. There's so much to see. They do a really fun cosplay contest for students on the weekend of the fair. So it can be a great experience. But just make sure you understand why you're going and what you're paying for.

If your goal is to get your book in front of rights buyers, it's better to send it with an agency like us than to try to go there and do it yourself.

James: I have a memoir of life in post-war Ireland and London. How well do such memoirs do?

Lindsay: That's a really good question. Memoirs can be very tricky. It requires a publisher that works specifically with those types of books. When we talk about broad appeal versus niche topics—books with broad appeal like self-help, wellness (I don't mean broad in a good or bad way, just that a lot of people are interested in those topics)—those are going to be much easier to license than a more niche topic about a personal experience in a very specific area and time.

There are certainly publishers who publish those types of memoirs. They license those types of memoirs and they do really well, but you're going to be presented to a smaller pool of rights buyers. It can take longer to place your book if it's a niche topic or a personal memoir of that nature.

Anthony: My publisher, who's a client of DropCap, is representing the book for me. How is the process different?

Lindsay: If it's going through your publisher, I can't necessarily guarantee that your book is going to be one of those books that is selected to go. I would have to know more information. Why don't we touch base afterwards? You can send me an email and we can figure out what to do if you want to work with us directly or if your publisher will be sending your book.

James: My book is about a kid from [another] planet coming to Earth.

Lindsay: So YA fiction. Yes, buyers are very interested in YA fiction. Fantasy and YA fiction continues to do really well. There's no reason I would say don't send a book that's YA fiction. It's doing really well. I would send it and see what the response is from the rights buyers.

Susan: Which countries are typically buying rights?

Lindsay: All countries. We meet with rights buyers all over the world. We do a lot of business in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, all of the European countries, Germany, France, South America, really all over the world. We do Arabic licensing. So there's really no narrow answer to that. It's everywhere, and it depends on what the trends are in particular markets.

Whitney: How do novels compare [to business and wellness books]?

Lindsay: I mentioned business and wellness because nonfiction books do typically license more quickly. There's a lot of demand, especially in what I would consider growing markets like China and India, where they have a lot of people and not a lot of their own authors. Their publishing industry is less mature than the US or UK or Germany. So they're licensing a lot of content. Those types of books—they might even just look at the title and be like, "That sounds interesting. I'm going to license it."

Novels we do really well with. We have a great fiction licensing program. However, it can take longer to license a fiction book like a novel. A publisher is going to spend usually more time planning the acquisition. It's going to have more competition sometimes.

That being said, fiction typically comes with a higher advance than nonfiction. So the nonfiction may license faster, but the fiction, when it is placed, will typically command a higher advance.

Renee: I have a seventh edition grant writing book that won an Axiom Award for the fifth edition. Does the award still apply?

Lindsay: I would say yes. Typically when we're presenting books, we consolidate the listing with the multiple editions. So if you're on the seventh edition, we might note that, but the awards information, all of the sales history, that's all going to be part of the same listing. I would still highlight that award even though it was for the previous edition.

Final Thoughts

We got through all the questions, which I'm really excited about! If you have any questions following this masterclass, please feel free to email me at lindsay@dropcap.com. I know it's a big investment deciding to have your book at the book fair, so we want to make sure you're comfortable with that investment and that we answer any questions that you have.

We would love to have your books with us. We always have a great time at the book fair and we always get a lot of business from it. So it's a great opportunity for you as an author to get that exposure.

I've been in self-publishing for many years, and honestly, what we do for the book fairs is one of the highest value marketing services that I've seen in my career. You're getting your book in front of real people, which is just always the hardest thing to do. So I highly recommend it if your book fits into the criteria that we talked about.

Thank you, and again, feel free to send any questions. Have a good day!