The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest event of its kind where publishers, authors, film, games, information and communication technology, distributers and multimedia companies meet every October in Frankfurt, Germany. Publisher Raelene Gorlinsky with Editor Rebecca Hill from Ellora's Cave Publishing attended this year.
Here's the impressive breakdown:
7,384 exhibitors form 106 countries. 3200 events with 280,194 visitors. How do they organize such an enormous event? How wonderful to see the bottom line from all these countries: No matter the language or culture, people love books.
Ellora's Cave had a nice mention in an interesting article in Publishing Perspective about the book fair and the industry news. The article mentioned that although nine countries reported a decline in sales, the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon has caused a sharp increase in erotica sales. The UK saw a 192% growth in erotica sales and also a 384% rise in romance sales.
The most promising markets right now are India and Brazil.
For erotica, the primary markets are North America, Western Europe and Japan. Japan prefers erotic suspense, not so much paranormal like shapeshifters and vampires.
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| Raelene Gorlinsky at the EC booth. See Something Wicked This Way Comes in the Background??
I found this on the Publishing Perspective and I thought was interesting. "Top 10 Buzz Words at the Frankfurt Book Fair" by Edward Nawotka. Here are my thoughts.
1. Discovery - Discovery means a lot of things to authors. Name recognition, having readers, reviewers, editors and/or agents find you and your books. Mr. Nawotka felt bookstores are still the best place for readers to find your books. But many authors are eBook first or eBook only authors so those books won't be in the store. They will be in the online store.
2. Digital First - Ebooks are here to stay and growing.
3. Metadata - a buzz word all around, that and SEO (search engine optimization). They agreed that good metadata drives sales.
4. Erotica - Mr. Nawotka said, "Erotica is not porn." No kidding. Thanks to E. L. James countries who hadn't been interested in erotica before were looking into foreign rights at this conference. Yay!
5. Pricing - Elasticity, or adjusting pricing to get books selling then raising the price to get profits is good business sense.
6. BIC - Brazil, India and China. These were the hot markets people at the conference were talking about.
7. Analytics - Stats aren't enough. Some of Amazon competitors were considering sharing their secret consumer stats to help publishers. Hmmm. distributors and publishers HELPING eachother. What a concept.
8. GAMA - Acronym for Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon. Need I say more?
9. Story - Publishers and agents continue to say this and they are right: It's all about the story.
10. Haka - It's a new Frankfurt dance craze. Sounds like fun.
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