By Emily Williams Part II: Scouting Changes with the Times NEW YORK: Last week in Part I we looked at the essentials of how scouting works. Many of these essentials—recognizing a great manuscript when it crosses your desk, cultivating a wide network of close relationships across the industry, understanding your clients’ needs and serving them well—will always remain the same. …
French Literary Agents Stage a Quiet Revolution
By Olivia Snaije PARIS: Until very recently, literary agents have been viewed in France with suspicion and the very topic seen as taboo. Traditionally, authors would submit and sell books directly to publishers. Agents were viewed as mere interlopers, interfering with a privileged relationship between author and publisher and introducing a mercenary, Anglo-Saxon element into the closed publishing circuit. But …
Inside the Secret World of Literary Scouts
By Emily Williams Part I: How It Works NEW YORK: For five years I was an international literary scout. That means for five years I groaned inside whenever anyone asked me what I did. Scouting occupies a strange niche in book publishing, itself a rather inscrutable business from the outside, and after a time most scouts resign themselves to working—very hard—at an …
Los Angeles Adds Glam to Guadalajara
By Chad W. Post Since launching the Guest of Honor program at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) in 1993, Guests of Honor at have included Colombia, Chile, Puerto Rico, Peru, Catalonia, Brazil, Italy, Quebec, and even New Mexico, but 2009 marks the first time that a city has been awarded this honor. This year’s fair, which runs from November …
Bonus Material: Deals Taking Longer, says Dutch Rights Manager
By Emily Williams The Netherlands has always occupied a curious place in the European book business. Although a small country, it has an unusually high percentage of book consumers and an extremely active publishing industry that often outstrips much larger markets in speed and competitiveness for the biggest international books. The country also produces its own domestic literary stars, which …
What’s the Buzz: E-Reader Matrix, Digital Rights Seminar, Libri’s Unfortunate Error
By Hannah Johnson and Siobhan O’Leary Looking for a good e-reader but don’t have time to research each device? Let me introduce you to the E-book Reader Matrix, a wiki created by the people behind MobileRead. For each device listed in the matrix, you can find out how much it costs, what file formats it supports, its size, weight, battery …
German Buch News: DVAs Hot Madonna
By Siobhan O’Leary The debut novel by German author Rolf Bauerdick garnered quite a bit of attention among international publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, according to BuchMarkt. Publisher DVA reports that his book “Wie die Madonna auf den Mond kam” (Madonna on the Moon) has now been sold in eight countries, including the US (Knopf) and UK (Atlantic), France, …
Independent vs. Corporate Publisher? The Question is Moot, Argues Agent Ira Silverberg
By Chris Artis In the US, the conventional wisdom has always been that a writer must make his career either with a large corporate publisher or with one of the dozens of smaller independent houses. The thinking was that since the corporate and indie publishing worlds are so different in terms of priorities and styles an author and his collective …
Seen and Heard: Frederike Doppenberg, Editor, Athenaeum – Polak & Van Gennep, Amsterdam
“I’m here trying to discover new, contemporary classics from countries whose literature is not so well known, such as India, China and Turkey. But a personal interest of mine is Italy. I speak Italian and think there are some wonderful books from there that still need to be discovered and translated. One example which we’re publishing is Andrea Bajani’s Se …
Profile: Transatlantic Literary Agency
By Emily Williams Samantha Haywood, agent and rights director for Transatlantic Literary Agency (TLA), lives out the ocean-straddling name of her agency, splitting her time between Toronto, home to the agency’s headquarters, and Amsterdam, where she now lives with her family. Being part of an eclectic team of agents with footholds in Canada, the US and Europe keeps Haywood sensitized …