Frankfurt Rights Meeting 2024 Session One moderator Barbara Geier and the Federation of European Publishers’ Enrico Turrin. Image: Frankfurt Rights Meeting
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Also in Today’s Rights Edition:
Frankfurt Rights Meeting: FEP Vice-President Sonia Draga on the Polish Market
Rights Roundup: On the Road to Franfurt 2024
A ‘Very Present Phenomenon’
In the first session of the 2024 Frankfurt Rights Meeting on Tuesday (September 3), the title of the program’s focus was The TikTok Effect? The Rise of English Language Exports Through Social Media.
A look at the upcoming three weeks’ digital sessions and the program’s in-person reception on the eve of Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 16 to 20) is here, with registration available at EventBrite. For our Rights Edition readers, this is a reminder that you can register for any or all of the remaining three online sessions and the in-person keynote reception featuring Madeline McIntosh, publisher and CEO of Authors Equity.
You don’t have to be present during the live presentation of a given online session; a recording is sent within a few days of each session to registered participants, especially helpful for those who live and work in time zones far from Frankfurt’s.
No Laughing Matter
The first program on Tuesday featured:
- Lisanne Mathijssen-van Hoorn, senior commissioning editor with HarperCollins Holland (Netherlands)
- Marleen Reimer, associate director of subsidiary rights with Sourcebooks (United States)
- Moderator: Barbara Geier, writer, and translator (United Kingdom)
The opening of the September 3 event was given over to a look at some pertinent statistics from the Brussels-based Federation of European Publishers‘ (FEP) deputy director Enrico Turrin. For those who at times have shrugged at worries about international markets being affected by a rising tide of English exports, this session indicated that the time has arrived to take the issue seriously.
“I can say that the phenomenon” of English-language exports rising, in part, through social-media stimulation, he said, “has been very present in the minds and the operations of our members.”
Those FEP publishers are, of course, among the most active and advanced of the international publishing industry in the EU bloc. FEPs organizational membership features 29 national publishers’ associations.
Background: The English-Language Exports Issue
Piper Verlag’s Felicitas von Lovenberg speaks at the 2024 Scuola per Librai Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri (UEM) in Venice. Image: Fondazione Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri
Felicitas von Lovenberg of Piper Verlag in Germany was among the first to mention this to Publishing Perspectives in 2023, amid our planning sessions for the Scuola per Librai Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri (UEM), the private “school of booksellers” conference series in Venice under the supervision of Stefano Mauri, president of Messaggerie Italiane and of Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol (GeMS, which reaches its 20th anniversary in 2025); Alberto Ottieri, of Messaggerie Italiane and president of Emmelibri; and the Fondazione Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri secretary-general Nana Lohrengel.
“This cultural change toward reading the English edition is becoming a real market force, and it’s threatening the whole diversity of publishing.”Felicitas von Lovenberg, Piper Verlag, Scuola UEM
Lovenberg spoke compellingly in the UEM’s international Publishers’ Round Table of her concern to a packed audience at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in the former San Giorgio Monastery.
“We all see, luckily, the rise of a new audience for books, the younger readers, which is very heartening to all of us,” von Lovenberg said, in part, “but they bring a different cultural mindset to the bookstores and to us as publishers.
“So what we’re seeing in Germany—and the pandemic has very much accelerated this cultural change—is that more and more people want to read the original just like they watch it on Netflix in English, and as they watch films. And they’re much better at English, so they like to read the English books, which come at a cheaper price.
“Germany has a fixed book price, but that does not apply to foreign books and also usually the English editions, of course, come out earlier, at least in many instances. What we’re seeing is that if you’re a publisher of international bestselling authors, sometimes you’ll have a case in which the English version is selling even more than the German translation.”
Von Lovenberg would go on in her comments in late January to tell the Venice audience, “It would be much more beneficial to have the German publisher produce an English book alongside the German translation and to distribute it within Germany, Austria, and Switzerland,” although this might involve format changes and some understandings with international partners.
She was unequivocal in her emphasis on this element of the marketplace: “This cultural change toward reading the English edition,” Felicitas von Lovenberg told us, “is becoming a real market force, and it’s threatening the whole diversity of publishing. It also means that translation, in the long run, will undergo a deep, deep cultural change.”
Turrin: Looking for Markets Most Affected
Image: Frankfurt Rights Meeting, Federation of European Publishers, Enrico Turrin
By way of introduction in the opening Frankfurt Rights Meeting session, Turrin said he considers the matter of English-language exports rising in comments from members “with a mixture of interest and concern.”
The comment he heard first on the issue came to him in 2022. This aligns with the time frame in which publishers speaking to Publishing Perspectives began to mention what they referred to as a growing desire among many consumers to read books originally written in English without translation. In other words, a reader in Maastricht might be found seeking out the original English publication of a novel instead of that book’s translation and publication in Dutch.
Among the national markets that seem to be raising the issue the most so far, Turrin told the Frankfurt Rights Meeting audience this week, are the Netherlands, Germany, the Nordic nations and the Baltics.
By contrast, he said, the issue is not as yet registering as significantly (as yet) in Eastern and Southern Europe. And while comments so far are frequently anecdotal, Turrin noted, they are still of strong concern because, of course, a diminution of demand for original English-language work in translation could impact some of the most commercially viable international-rights deals and trends over time.
The concern in this regard seems to have a trend line in YA and fantasy, Turrin has found, which ties easily with the social-media dynamic and the TikTok mention in the session’s title.
He talked through various points of data from European nations. For example, Belgium’s Dutch-speaking sector saw some 16-percent English content in 2023 while the French-language sector saw only 2 percent, per Nielsen figures. But he cautioned that the volatility of these observations can be heavy (as in a 22-percent jump in English-language sales reported by Flemish booksellers). In such instances, various energies of bestseller status and so on can drive a strong performance of one kind or another, and so such short-term assessments are to be weighed cautiously for now.
Image: Frankfurt Rights Meeting, Federation of European Publishers, Enrico Turrin
In looking at the German market, Turrin is seeing what von Lovenberg has spoken about, rating it as “strong impact” in that market of many English speakers.
He has pulled out from some GfK research a tantalizing figure reflecting 14 percent of parents in Germany reporting that they very often read aloud to their children books in an original language. As those who follow the work of Scholastic’s researchers know, much is said in the children’s book sector about the need for parents to read aloud to children. If this is done in a language other than that of a national market, then many young readers may be coming up reading something they’ll never need translated into their local languages.
Look back at Turrin’s chart above, and in the “Strong impact” note under “Germany,” you see GfK’s data indicating that in its 2023 market assessment, 14 percent of readers aged 10 to 15 were reading in an original language; 18 percent of consumers aged 20 to 29 said they were reading in an original language; and a genuinely major portion of the sample, 30 percent of those aged 16 to 19, told researchers they were reading in an original language.
Image: Frankfurt Rights Meeting, Federation of European Publishers, Enrico Turrin
By comparison to that 30-percent figure in Germany, many of us who have lived and worked in the Danish market won’t be surprised that Turrin reports on data showing that as much as 30 percent of surveyed readers were saying they had read one or two books per year in English, and that was five years ago. Many Danes, especially in the younger and middle-aged brackets, are handsomely capable in English and enjoy many forms of entertainment (film, television, etc.), as well as books, from English-language markets.
And even in Frankfurt’s 2024 Guest of Honor Italy, Turrin says, while a trend in English imports is comparatively small in Nielsen’s findings so far, publishers with the Association of Italian Publishers (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE) have mentioned seeing some strongly charting titles being read in English, “something you probably wouldn’t have seen in Italy five or 10 years ago.”
Again, caution is needed in these statistical indicators, as Turrin noted more than once, as the data, gathered from various sources, can be quite anecdotal and is in some cases quite recent.
Nevertheless, the rights community will want to keep an eye on this as a potential trend.
The idea of English as the de-facto lingua franca in international circles has been with us and confirmed for many years, but this may be an inflection era, if not the proverbial inflection “point.” It’s easy to understand a hypothesis, at the least, that various social media and their border-busting reach could certainly be delivering the drivers—however incompletely they may be tested and recognized so far—that might be fueling this trend in some places and to some degree toward reading in original languages.
Image: Frankfurt Rights Meeting, Federation of European Publishers, Enrico Turrin
While Turrin points out that the impact of social media could of course be power-spreading (our term, not his) English among users, there are also social-media-adept research subjects who tell surveyors that they do not believe this is behind their own readings in English. You’ll note in the slide above that reasons offered for reading in an original language is that a title isn’t available in translation (42 percent in the Netherlands) and—among the best of all reasons—for improvement of language skills (82 percent in Germany).
“What consequences for the translation market does a phenomenon like this potentially have, especially for ‘smaller language’ areas?”Enrico Turrin, FEP
And yet, he has had intriguing input about Latvian teens’ faculty for English growing, parallel to a declining level of capability in their native language.
What’s more, in Germany, Turrin notes, Michael Busch‘s Thalia chain has opened a bookshop for English readers in Münster. In another instance, he reports that Den Hague’s De Vries Van Stockum bookshop is planning to open an all-English shop directly opposite its existing store. How interesting is that?
“So the question now,” Turrin said in concluding his presentation Tuesday, “is what consequences for the translation market does a phenomenon like this potentially have, especially for ‘smaller language’ areas?”
It’s an interesting series of observations and, as Turrin said in his Frankfurt Rights Meeting commentary, an apparent trend for industry rights professionals to consider and investigate.
Image: Frankfurt Rights Meeting, Federation of European Publishers, Enrico Turrin
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Frankfurt Rights Meeting is here, more on digital publishing is here, more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here, more on international translation and publishing rights is here, more on international book fairs is here.