An Anniversary Musing #7; London Book Fair Now

OK, so the first time going to London Book Fair in 1999 wasn't a perfect experience, but there was little doubt that I was going back.

I might not have known it in the earliest months of 2000, but that was the year when I finally moved my commission needle from the low 30Ks into the middle 30Ks and started the upwards trend after five long years of investing in the business for returns not all that much more than break-even. I did feel comfortable enough to upgrade to a snazzier looking Hilton that I walked jealously past in 1999 on my way to and from the Fair. I had a few more appointments that year than the year before, and a higher percentage of those were appointments worth having, and you could say the same for each year thereafter. I got a new computer which allowed me to migrate the catalog to AppleWorks, which was slightly more advanced and did away with the cut-and-paste of images into the catalog, which slowly grew more pages and which went from Staples and me stapling to a local print shop that would staple it for me and by the mid 2000s to having somebody else desktop publish it, though it was quite a long time before we finally updated the last page that still retained touches of the original WriteNow 1999 appearance. There was the one fun year of 2001 when I got campyllobacter somewhere in London, which started to make its full effects felt on the plane ride home. I had a fun visit to the bathroom the moment I got through customs, and was in the ER getting rehydrated a few days later. That was also the last year pre-9/11 when you still got a hot snack in coach for the second feeding on the evening flight home. There was the first year when somebody actually sat down at the table and made an offer for something at the Fair, which I don't go to the Fair expecting but I'll never complain when it does. In 2002 or 2003 I introduced the "Dead Until Dark Chocolates" to the table, and then a year or two after that I got a year or two out the Speed of Dark Chocolates, and now everyone knows that there will be chocolates waiting when they visit the JABberwocky table.

The first year I attended, the International Rights Centre (IRC) had fewer than 200 tables. That number crept up over time, as did the bookings for publisher booths, and in 2006 the organizers decided that the event had outgrown the Olympia convention centre and moved it to the Excel Center in the Docklands, a more modern facility that Reed Exhibitions had been using for other things like conventions of arms dealers. That year is worthy of special note. For the Docklands was a miserable and ugly and awful experience. Essentially, Excel is a big convention center surrounded by a hotel village and very little else. Imagine having the event someplace like Bayonne, NJ, and that's kind of like this. The only transportation is the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), small trains that run without human intervention. Maybe arms dealers liked this, but publishers did not. The DLR was horrible to take back in the evening when everyone was heading back from Excel to the civilized parts of London all at the same time. It wasn't much better in the morning. It was much further to travel back to a good restaurant at night or to do other kinds of things that people in my line of work want to do with their evenings. The convention center might have been newer and shinier than Olympia, but that didn't make it very nice. The particular thing I will always remember is that the closest bathrooms to the convention hall with the IRC weren't in the hall or even on the same level as the hall. You had to walk out of the hall, downstairs, past the staff locker room, and only there could you find a men's room. I felt pretty strongly that this was as miserable a design decision as when the Newburgh Beacon Bridge was built with only one lane of traffic in each direction.

This was also the first year that I had company with me for the Fair, as the agency's first full-time employee Steve Mancino went along. Steve had no experience having LBF in a civilized setting and didn't mind the Docklands all that much. But let's just say that other than for Steve most publishing people enjoyed finer things in life than arms dealers. There was such a rebellion against having the LBF at ExCel that the people who organize the Frankfurt Book Fair started to arrange a competing event for LBF in 2007. Reed Exhibitions felt that this was not a good thing. They somehow managed to sneak in and take the dates at Earl's Court out from under the competing event and it came to pass that London Book Fair moved from being Sun-Tue in March to being Mon-Wed in April.

Earl's Court is much more civilized for we publishing folk. You are steps away from the Tube to get to the restaurant or party or cultural event of your choice in London. It does mean that the airfare and hotel aren't going to be as value priced because it's more during the peak season than mid-March, but I can roll with that punch now.

As the business grew, we expanded our presence at the Fair. We started to split a second table with Baen Books, and in 2011 we took the second table all to ourselves. After an ill-fated attempt at having three people from JABberwocky attend in 2010, which turned into two of us getting there by way of Paris and one never making it because of the Icelandic volcanic ash crowd and two-thirds of our appointments not making it either, we did have the entire office over for 2011. We had close to 80 appointments over the course of the week including around 75 at the Fair itself. Where most of the appointments used to be about going over and introducing our list to people, now there are markets like Germany and France where we've sold the JABberwocky list so extensively that we can spend time on other things, discussing what's happening with the authors someone's publishing, or maybe gossiping, or kind of whatever. Almost all of the appointments are with people that we are doing business with or could be doing business with, in 1999 one-third of the appointments were with people not worth scheduling again and this year it's certainly no more than two or three of the 80 people we met with that we wouldn't try and meet up with again. I now know and accept that almost everyone will be late, so I'm much better at taking advantage of the time to get through some of the day's paper.

I can't take all the credit for the much more substantial amount of business we're doing. I started to attend LBF in 1999 just as it was beginning to cement itself as the spring supplement to the Frankfurt Book Fair that takes place in October. From fewer than 200 IRC tables in 1999, there were 575 in 2011, and they were sold out a couple of months before the Fair. I was surprised this year by how many people we were meeting with from China or smaller Eastern European markets or Scandinavia where we've hardly had any appointments and certainly not productive ones in prior years, and that is certainly a combination of greater attendance and broader relationships.

I hate to say this where the people at Reed Exhibitions might see it, but LBF is important to our business. Over the early months of 2011 I've had this nagging sense which I haven't totally researched by checking year-over-year activity that we've not done as many deals as I'd like in translation for people not named Charlaine Harris. After the experience of 2011 when we were making many first-time contacts with publishers in all corners of the world and renewing our acquaintance with many people whom we did not get to see in 2010 because of the ash cloud, I am reluctantly forced to ponder that the deal volume in early 2011 may have something to do with the lack of an LBF in 2010 when 80% of overseas visitors didn't make it in and 65% of our meetings vanished with mostly only UK and French publishers making it to our table.

There are agencies bigger than ours with client lists much longer than mine that don't have the presence we do in London. Some of this business, some of it, has fallen into our laps. You represent a Charlaine Harris who was one of the top ten or twelve authors in the US in 2009 and has that TV thing going and will continue for many many years to be a major author, you can sit back and deals will happen. But I always thought there was too much of that when I was at Scott Meredith, and I've had this missionary impulse to go out and make things happen for JABberwocky in the translation markets. I can understand why others don't. Nobody makes a lot of money selling rights in Slovenia for $1200. And while there's this little voice that says I'd be just as well off not to spend the energy and effort to set up that appointment with the publisher in Lithuania that contributes to the second table and the second and third employee going to LBF, I can't shake the belief that the agency ends up being bigger than the sum of those individual deals. All of us working at and represented by JABberwocky have come a long way since 1999.

An Anniversary Musing #6; London Book Fair Then

In the earliest years of JABberwocky I was not making much money, but I was making a little teeny tiny bit each year. My break even for my first year was somewhere at maybe $24-25K in gross commission and I ended up doing something like $30-32K. And I did that for my first year, and my second and third and fourth and fifth years as well. Sometimes I'm not sure I'd have started the business if I'd known it would take so long to start growing it.

Nonetheless, it was still a tiny bit more each year than the bare minimum necessary, and as the years progressed I never wavered in the belief that if I was making enough each year and building a backlist and creeping toward having royalty income as well as advance income that I could let out the belt and spend an extra dollar or two.

So when a piece of direct mail showed up in the box talking about London Book Fair in March of 1999, I started to ponder if maybe I shouldn't finally see London. There were some things to do first. One was to check with my co-agents in translation markets that some of them did in fact attend the Fair, so that I would have a few people to meet with if I went. Another was to see if I could do an air/hotel package for under $1000, which I felt would allow for a total budget including the fee for my table and my incidentals, that wouldn't creep too much over $1500 total for the trip. On that account, it helped greatly that the Fair took place in March in those days, because March was off-season and the package rates were cheaper, and this I knew because that was still a time when AAVacations advertised in every Sunday's NY Times Travel section (print ads in newspapers, who ever heard of such things!). It also helped that the Fair went Sunday thru Tuesday back then, so I could do it in just five nights, arrive on Friday to have some time for the jet lag, and leave on Wednesday. So yes, I would have some people to meet with, I found my air/hotel package for under $1000, and I pulled the trigger.

I knew I'd need a catalog, so I put one together myself using an extremely primitive word processing program, maybe hadn't even moved to AppleWorks yet and was using WriteNow. To add some imagery to the catalog, I had to print out images, and get out scotch tape and tape them into place in the catalog. It wasn't the snazziest thing, it was run off at Staples, but it was my first ever rights catalog and I was very very proud of it.

The AirTrain JFK hadn't opened, and I didn't have much money. Getting to the airport meant hopping on the subway with a relatively big suitcase since I had to pack three ensembles with sportcoats, and then squeezing into the Q10 bus for a long ride to JFK during the middle of rush hour so the bus was very very crowded and not really designed for going to the airport with luggage, but it was the option one had.

The hotel experience was not pleasant. I got what I paid for. I was in the top eaves-y floor of a tourist class hotel near Marylebone Station. The single rooms on that floor had a small bed and a small aisle next to the bed and a small bathroom and shower with hardly any closet space or desk space. The TV hung over the bed. The phone was on a niche over the headboard. I learned that I was never again going to take the airport transfer as part of my package, after waiting in Heathrow for an agonizingly long time for my van to depart, and then having it meander through London dropping everyone else off first, even with limited geography realizing at one point that we were very close to my hotel and then having the van head into Bayswater to drop off someone before finally doubling back to drop off yours truly.

No Google Maps or Mapquest back then, but I had carefully mapped out as best I could that I was within reasonable walking distance for Joshua of the Olympia exhibition center, which meant around 50 minutes. But a pleasant 50 minutes, a chunk of it cutting on the diagonal through Kensington Gardens. When in London, I kept my map book with me at every moment, as the streets had this habit of curving, or changing their names every few blocks and then changing back.

I had something like 22 appointments at the Fair, and maybe a third of those I shouldn't have even bothered with because there was little in common with the publishers I was meeting with and the JABberwocky list. Everyone was late for their appointments, and I was antsy, and I interpreted late as meaning people would not show up at all. So I spent a lot of time sitting at my table stewing waiting for people to show and not getting anything done. I spent a lot of time worrying about appearances that everyone would wonder if I had a right to be at the Fair because I just had 22 appointments and spent half the day doing nothing while everyone else was engaged in very very important business. I had lots of time to walk around and see who else was at the Fair and if anyone might perhaps be willing to accept a catalog that I didn't actually have an appointment with. I had lots of time to go downstairs and roam the aisles of the Fair looking at all of the stands from all of the British publishers that would surely want to be in business with me if only they had a better idea of what wonderful things I had to sell them. Right!

But for all of that, the Fair was clearly better than this makes it sound. Sure, a third of the appointments weren't worth it but that did leave two-thirds of them that had some merit, getting to meet for the first time some of the agents in overseas markets that had been working with my list for only a very short time in some cases or in others dating back twelve years to my earliest sales at Scott Meredith. I was getting to see actual bookstores in another country and educating myself a little about the marketplace in the UK. And of course it was London. And I have to say that it was pretty much love at first sight for me and London. The city seemed to have something interesting on every block, and seemed to be full of life on virtually every block, and it was all knitted together with an extensive tube system. And all those helpful markings at the crosswalks that told you to "look left" and "look right," and everybody jaywalked or crossed when it was safe regardless of what the light said just like at home. I loved walking around the West End.

It's just twelve years since that first trip to London Book Fair, but it seems like an entirely different life. We'll take forward to the present in the next Musing...

Ashfall, Part 2

Window Shopping at the Louvre
So when we left off on this here, Eddie and I were collapsing in our hotel rooms after a very long day full of unexpected surprises on the way to London Book Fair.

One bank
I got a pretty decent night's sleep, and I had one goal for my morning in Paris before we headed off to catch the Eurostar. I wasn't in Paris if I didn't go to the Seine, which looked close enough for a round trip walk if I kept about my business. Down by the big department store and the opera house, stop at one chocolatier that's been around for 80 years then on next block see one that's been around for 90 years and realize you picked the wrong one. Down to the Louvre, walk along both banks of the Seine because I don't want anyone to think I'm slighting the left or the right bank or vice versa. Emerge near big old buildings and think "gee, I bet Benjamin Franklin visited some of these."

Another bank
It was a wonderful and delightful morning, in part because of the unexpectedness of it.

We then found our way to Gare du Nord and checked in at the mobbed counters for the Eurostar, with all services booked until some time the next day or day after at this point because everyone was trying to take the train. It was while reading newspapers in the departure lounge that some of the joy of the experience started to fade, as it became clear that the ash cloud which diverted us wasn't just a one day thing, and that I'd gotten a lot of chocolates to give away at our table at London Book Fair to people who might not be coming if things didn't resolve themselves pretty quick like. This did not make me happy.

Tilt your head; my luxury "tip up" seat between cars on the Eurostar

But there wasn't much time to mope with my eagerly anticipated first ride on the Eurostar about to begin. But we were in for a surprise, which explained why we had to go through a staffed check-in gate instead of the automated. Our very expensive first class seats weren't seats in the actual train. No, we were luck to get "tip-up" seats, the jump seats in the entry vestibule between cars. Kind of like being told that your first class seat on an airplane was the jump seat next to the galley door. It wasn't quite as bad as all that, because we did get to sit in actual seats for the first leg of the journey to Lille, where more people would be getting on and we'd be getting the boot. And it was a very nice meal service. And it certainly made for a train ride to remember.

Eddie enjoying the meal service on board the Eurostar in our first class accommodations
I've always been a fan of high speed rail in theory, and I loved partaking of it in practice. The train moved slowly until right around DeGaulle airport when it finally heads off on its own dedicated tracks, and then it speeds along, my does it speed along. In the US we're lucky to match the speed of cars on the interstate, here we just zoom by. The countryside was beautiful, the French landscape as full of churches as the British landscape can be of castles. And churches.

Peter V. Brett signing at London's Forbidden Planet
Alas, the Book Fair ended up being pretty much the debacle I'd started to fear it might be when I was reading newspapers at Gare du Nord. Peter V. Brett had come up a little before us, he was one of the last planes to land at Heathrow before it was shut down and we got to Europe just before the European airspace closed pretty much completely. My second employee Jessie Cammack was supposed to come out the next day and never made it. All in all, two thirds of our appointments cancelled. And we got to sit around the Fair during the downtime wondering if/how we might ever get home.

Thanks Emma/HarperUK for getting us the artwork and John Berlyne at Zeno Agency for designing these nifty signs, which more people will see on blog than at the ash-interrupted London Book Fair
Because Peter was out in support of the UK launch of his Desert Spear, which we knew would be big, and because the book has in general been quite big on a global basis, we decided to show the flag by taking out some signs in the Rights Centre, and also by having a meet and greet for our sub-agents and Peter's publishers in attendance at the Fair to meet with Peter at a Russian restaurant a short walk from the Fair. Hardly anyone to look at the signs, and we had 12 people for our big event instead of 35, which was very deflating. But those who attended had a very good time, and I would recommend Nikita's in London to anyone looking for some good Russian food and drink.

In the end, UK airspace reopened in time for Peter, Eddie and I all to return on time on our originally scheduled flights, but in ways good and bad it was a week to remember.