Publishers Weekly - March 20, 2017

director at Pan Macmillan, agreed. “The
industry is feeding off the chaos in the
world outside,” he said, “rather than
being depressed by it.”
The fair officially kicked off just one
day after a vote in the British Parliament
cleared the way for Britain to begin the
formal process of exiting the E.U. The
vote means a two-year clock will soon
start ticking on the U.K.’s trade negotia-
tions with E.U. members.

“The U.K. now has around two years to work out what type of country it wants to be in the future,” said Stephen Lotinga, CEO of the U.K. Publishers Association, at a standing-room-only panel on March

14. “One of the reasons U.K. publishing
is so successful is because of the type of
country we are—open, diverse, interna-
lion to Diep; in France,
Fayard bought the titles.)

In addition to a lack of big books coming out of London, there also seemed to be a dearth of seven-figure deals.

Nonetheless, international publishers and agents reported brisk business.

Many said that the political uncertainty in the U.K. and America had infused this year’s fair with energy. “I think it’s a case of hands across the ocean,“ said Will Atkinson, managing director and publisher of the U.K.’s Atlantic Books.

“There are bad things happening on
both sides [of the Atlantic],” he added,
referring to the uncertainty surrounding
Brexit in the U.K. and the Trump
administration in the U.S. “It’s a group
hug.”
Anthony Forbes Watson, managing

News

p ho t ob yan d rew r i ch a rd al ba n es e

Above: The uncertain political climate did not deter large crowds from attending this year’s LBF. Right: Ian Hudson (l.) of DK and Stephen Lotinga of the U.K. Publishers Association discussed the impact of Brexit on publishing.

Publishers Keep Calm And Carry On

Despite political uncertainty, it was a busy, buoyant 2017

London Book Fair

If the narrow hallways of Olympia seemed a little more jammed than usual at the 2017 London Book Fair, they were. Although final attendance has yet to be announced, LBF director Jacks Thomas confirmed that pre-registrations for this year’s fair, which ran March

14–16, were up by a double-digit percentage, likely boosted by a weak pound and two straight years of positive industry sales.

With talk at the fair focused on the record-breaking advance (reported at

$65 million) Barack and Michelle Obama earned for a pair of books they will write, no single book emerged as the big one of the fair. As many insiders predicted, the nature of the Obamas’ deal—which was announced a week before the fair and left the industry in shock over the sticker price—was the subject of gossip at the industry meeting. (With Penguin Random House announcing at the start of the fair that it would publish the two books internationally in English, Spanish, and German through its subsidiaries around the globe, some of the biggest foreign deals for the Obama books came from the Netherlands and France.