Next year - I'm already planning it! - I will stay for the whole Fair. It was a difficult decision but with friends in Berlin and Brussels to visit in one week before my week in London, I decided to miss Sunday, the last day of the Fair. Unfortunately, this meant leaving Maggie, Richard and Adrian alone to tidy up our much-loved NZ Society of Authors stand on the Monday, and also missing a more relaxed day.
Saturday was a lovely day - Hall 3 was total madness on the Friday and over the whole weekend, as the public come in to look at the pick of German publishing (many of them in fancy dress - wonderfully entertaining!) - but in Hall 8, the English-speaking Hall, it was much more laid-back. I visited the Princeton University Press stand and had a lovely chat with the two staff there - one of my brothers is a professor in the classics department at Princeton, and I adored the town and the university when I visited them some time ago.
I decided to visit the Harvard University Press stand as well, to find their two staff also in leisurely chat mode, a big change from how busy all the stands had been from Wednesday to Friday. The more relaxed pace meant I was able to pluck up the courage to ask them what it would take to publish an article in the magnificent Harvard Business Review, to which I subscribe. They were very helpful and I came away with a great book on creativity, an area of great interest (see my other blog).
I'd been warned that authors were not really welcome at the Fair as it is a business-to-business trade affair, with publishers, agents and scouts the main players. But all the publishers I visited were extremely helpful and I was very happy to leave materials with them about Niki Harre's book and my own, for their publishing, editorial and rights staff to consider after the Fair.
Two New Zealand authors (Tui Allen and Mervyn Noel Whitley Jnr) and Sylvia, a German author living in Finland whose second name escaped me, also spoke at the seminar. I've now read Tui's book, a remarkable vision, while Mervyn and Sylvia are really pushing the boundaries of what a book can be.
Next year will be fun - Brazil is the 2013 guest of honour - so I will finish another book or two and come again.
And in one of those serendipitous encounters for which the Frankfurt Book Fair is so famous, on Sunday morning on the train to the main station en route to catch my train to Berlin, I met a charming Malaysian publisher - the second I'd met who wanted to know how to go about becoming the guest of honour. Thanks to marvellous expositions from Carole Beu and Maggie Tarver, I am confident that with their help, I can pull together a list of key New Zealand contacts for the Guest of Honour programme, including a list of contacts from the New Zealand publishing supply chain - authors, publishers, printers, booksellers and of course the Book Council. Malaysia as Guest of Honour in 2015 or 2016? A great plan!
Now for the real work - following up on the wonderful contacts made at the Fair and coming up with a plan to fund my writing!
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