We spoke with Ziv Lewis, foreign rights/acquisitions manager of Kinneret Zmora in Israel, about the difficulties of dealing with his country's new Fixed Price Law, the joy of reading "Hebrish" and the "game-changing" novel his house is releasing this year.
In the Israeli market right now, what sort of books are succeeding?
Israeli readers are notoriously trend-resistant and eclectic in taste. Historically our bestseller lists have tended towards more literary fiction but possibly in response to recent events (war in Gaza, Fixed Price Law) publishers are in extreme caution-mode. It's also worth noting that we published our first e-books just four months ago. We are selling strongly on multiple platforms, but mainly to tablets since e-readers never established a foothold here. Local publishers are diversifying and looking for the elusive new revenue streams. Kinneret has established an extremely successful creative writing school called The Drawer, where many of our top authors and editorial team teach.
You're known for acquiring strong literary voices. What do you look for in the novels you acquire?
A transformative experience. I love that feeling of a tangible shift when I exit a book a slightly different person to the way I entered it. Something has changed forever. It's rare, but when it happens it's a special feeling, a sense of connectivity. Books like Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, and Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena all had that effect on me. I'm still very much an idealist in that respect: I believe in the power of the written word to spark change in the reader. And if enough readers are behind this kind of book, it can result in a tiny change in our collective consciousness. I also look for freshness, innovation and a sense of playfulness. Shani Boianjiu's The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, for example, is written in a kind of no-man's-land in between English and Hebrew, Hebrish if you will. It's breathtakingly inventive in its use of language.
What's the biggest challenge facing Israeli publishing, and how is Kinneret attempting to meet that challenge?
There's no doubt that our greatest challenge is coming to terms with the Fixed Price Law (referred to here as The French Law), which came into effect February 2014. In a misguided attempt to try and curb rampant discounting, the Law has had a disastrous effect on the industry. Sales are down dramatically, acquisitions have been cut, and there have been industry-wide lay-offs. It's harder than ever for a first novelist to break through, and established authors are earning fewer royalties. Israelis have become accustomed to buying bundles of books at discount, so our biggest challenge has been to convince readers to buy new price-protected titles rather than the pre-Law discounted titles still available in the stores. We have experimented with pricing, but one year later we are still struggling to reach sales of more than 30% on frontlist (price-protected) titles. The market needs re-calibration and consumers need to be re-educated. The Law fails to include any restriction on the discount the chains demand from the publishers (which is higher than ever), so I fear that the current situation is unsustainable. We either need to scrap the Law, or radically amend it.
Tell us about a book you're excited to publish in the near future?
Unable to restrict myself to one book, I'll mention one fiction title and one nonfiction title for 2015. Sheila Heti's genre-busting semi-autobiographical How Should a Person Be is alternately funny and heartbreaking, cerebral and sexy. It's very much a book of the moment. Similarly, Adam Grant's brilliantly optimistic and game-changing Give and Take is a real gift of the book. I believe it will resonate strongly with the current growing number dissatisfied young people in Israel struggling for a better social fabric and a more caring society.
