"You know they're spending money when there's carpet," Rich Johnston, the founder of the British comics news site Bleeding Cool, says, gesturing at the rich royal blue carpeting lining the Grand Hall of Olympia London. He's been at the fair for more than 15 years running, and in the years "when there's no carpet," he said, "you know things are a little bit tighter" for the sponsors.
By that measure, commerce is good for the international book business at the 2024 London Book Fair. By most measures, in fact. The hope among literary scouts, agents, and publishers was that the LBF's move to March from April in years past, making it the first major rights fair of the year, would lead to more dealmaking. And while the general consensus among agents and publishers is that the weeks leading up to the fair are as busy as the fair itself, the rights business in London appears to be brisk.
Among the big books at the fair announced on Tuesday is a forthcoming memoir from Swedish tennis legend Björn Borg, who will publish his autobiography with Norstedts, the Stockholm-based house, next year. A representative of the publisher said international interest in Borg's book is "enormous."
American publishers in town for the fair are taking advantage of the proximity to continental Europe to pack in post-fair business visits as well. Brian Murray, CEO of HarperCollins, for example, will head to the Vatican the weekend after the fair to meet Pope Francis, whose next book HarperCollins will publish globally.
The hall, meanwhile, is loud and crowded—the phrase "dull roar" comes to mind—with many attendees pointing to the promising number of Americans in town. The queue for the main stage has been lengthy all day, and the stands of the major publishers are jam-packed, as are many of the stages where panels are being held—the Literary Translation Centre and Tech Theatre in particular.
AI is a major theme at the fair, and has been at the center of conversations both on the various stages and the show floor. A group of London Book Fair staffers—mostly volunteers, many from local graduate programs in literature and book publishing—was needed to keep crowds from swarming the buzzy panel entitled "Publishers, Copyright & AI: Taking Action," featuring Claire Harper, head of global rights and licensing at Sage, and Sarah Fricker, group head of legal at the Institute of Physics. The panel was moderated by the Copyright Clearance Center’s Chris Kenneally.
At this point, the question of AI is not whether publishers will use it, but how to use it in a way that enhances the business while preserving its spirit. "AI, from a publisher's perspective, is not without challenges, but there's also opportunities as well—and honestly, one important feature, with these extra tools, is that we need to think about how they affect us," Harper said. "We want to be using these responsibly in our publishing practices—finding that balance of using AI to save time, but also still making sure it's responsible and ethical."
International politics are also front and center. As fighting continues to rage in both Gaza and Ukraine, an undercurrent of concern among the publishers present is palpable—as is a hope that the book business might still contribute to, and expedite, finding peaceful resolutions to both conflicts.
"There's a buoyancy, an energy to the show this year that is transcending the specter of political darkness that we're feeling, both in the U.S. and the U.K.," says Ibrahim Ahmad, executive editor at Viking Books. "I think the sort of pervasive optimism that we're going to keep doing what we're doing, and keep publishing the best books we can publish, is really palpable."
That buoyancy, derived from the belief in the power of a good book and in the good books can do is omnipresent, at every level of a business that begins, of course, with the author. At Tuesday’s Author of the Day conversation, author Taylor Jenkins Reid discussed just that.
When informed by Leonel Teti, editorial director of Urano World for Spain and Latin America, which publishes Jenkins Reid's books in those markets, that her books have sold “over 15 million copies around the world” and are “published in 42 languages, 44 territories,” Jenkins Reid said, "I actually just learned everything you just said. I don't keep track of any of this stuff. My husband has a habit of Googling me every day for fun, and so he probably knew all that, but I don't. I've never really been focused on numbers as much as the reason why I write—the hopes of giving you a really fun thing to do on the weekend."
Jenkins Reid added: "The honor that it is to be able to do that for so many people is something that I take very, very seriously. It's one of the great fortunes of my life to have the opportunity to do."
