The mood at this year’s London Book Fair (LBF) was buoyant and hopeful about the evolving publishing landscape, despite the ongoing squabble between the tech sector and creative industries over copyright and artificial intelligence (AI). Thousands of publishing professionals gathered at Olympia over three days to make deals, network and catch up with each other in person, and engage in cultural conversations. This year, Midas PR kindly invited me to attend and provide some personal perspectives in a write-up — so here you go!
How to Build Lifelong Reading Habits?
Adam Ridgway, Director of LBF, hailed the opening day as being a dynamic start, with James Daunt (founder of Daunt Books, MD of Waterstones, CEO of Barnes & Noble) and David Shelley (CEO of Hachette Book Group and Hachette UK) making keynote speeches flagging up the importance of boosting reading for pleasure. As they explored changes in the US book market, Daunt observed that “kids are in the stores everywhere on both sides of the Atlantic” so bookshops need to be more “engaging” and “vibrant” to appeal to them so that book-buying-and-reading become a habit.
The fact that children are much less likely to grow up as readers if their parents don’t read was also discussed. New research from the NLM-National Institutes of Health has shown that the greater the reading habit of the mothers, the greater the reading competence of their children.
Facing the Tech Tsunami
The Society of Authors in the UK has been campaigning about about the threat to creative careers posed by AI, while France’s leading publishing and authors’ associations have filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly using copyright-protected content on a massive scale without authorization to train its AI systems.
Silencing the Truth
An American publisher from Knopf, and a New York Scout I spoke with, are concerned about the Trump administration’s impact on censorship and its free speech violations — reflected by the new method used by Zuckerberg’s Meta to try to cancel the memoir Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. A former New Zealand diplomat and ex-director of global public policy at Facebook, Wynn-Williams’ allegations of sexual harassment and statements about Facebook’s relationship with China reveal Facebook’s impact on democracy. The new way to try to shut down the publication and distribution of a book exposing the truth is not to serve defamation — it is to claim the book is injurious to the company’s business operations.
Claudia Piñeiro, the third most translated Argentinean author after Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar
Our Translation Book Club met on the eve of LBF at Hatchards, Piccadilly. It was attended by over forty avid readers and fans of bestselling Argentinian writer, Claudia Piñeiro, creator of “a new literary genre: paranoid fiction,” according to the late great Ricardo Piglia. Piñeiro’s novels have been translated into thirty-three languages. She was International Author of the Day on the opening day of LBF. Alongside her publisher Carolina Orloff, from Charco Press, Piñeiro discussed Elena Knows, now a Netflix movie, as well as the importance of dark humour when writing about tricky subjects (living with Parkinson’s in this instance), the unreliable narrator, what has changed in Argentinian society and more. Podcast out soon.
Other engaging sessions from authors included insights from Elif Shafak, Adele Parks, Bobby Palmer, and Monica Ali. Serving as the Reading Ambassador for the Beijing International Book Fair, the author and screenwriter Liu Zhenyun took centre stage in a session alongside Jenny Niven, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and Nicky Harman, literary translator, with moderator Alicia Liu. They discussed the international appeal of Chinese literature and its impact on Chinese storytelling, highlighting how Liu’s works — translated into over thirty languages and adapted into films and stage productions around the world — are bridging cultural divides.
The Bookseller of Jerusalem
As always, the English PEN Literary Salon held a series of well-attended illuminating talks. The two-part conversation about how publishing is responding to global geopolitics and regional conflicts included questions along the lines of: What are the ethics of acquiring and platforming writers from countries in times of crisis? How do publishers avoid the trap of conflict being seen as a sales opportunity? Why does the industry focus on some conflicts and seemingly ignore others?
With a focus on Palestine and Southwest Asia and North Africa, the panels addressed the way the industry treats war, oppression and genocide, and assessed the point at which point amplifying becomes profiteering. The first panel included Mahmoud Muna, known to many as the bookseller of Jerusalem. He helps running the family’s two bookshops – notably the Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem’s Old City, recently raided by Israeli government forces.
Independent Publishing on Both Sides of the Atlantic
The big five — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan — dominate the $150B global book publishing market, chasing and dictating trends and access, invariably leading to the industry being flooded with similar books. The standard view is that 95%+ of the books that get published do not make a profit for their publisher. Although the literary imprints of the leading publishing conglomerates are more often than not underpinned by the success of commercial lists, they are famously risk-averse.
Independent and small presses provide an alternative route for great books that don’t fit the corporate mold, or are missed for a variety of reasons. They take risks on innovative, marginalized, or unconventional voices, thereby creating a rich literary landscape with a wide range of stories, styles and subjects. Without them, many now well-loved and well-established authors would not have reached readers.
In the UK the likes of Fitzcarraldo Editions, Pushkin Press, Notting Hill Editions, Sort of Books, Myriad Editions, Peepal Tree Press, Bluemoose Books, 404 Ink, Jacaranda Books, Comma Press and many others are the lifeblood of innovation, fueling growth. Most have ethical business models and engage in good PR and distribution over sheer profit. Being highly community-oriented, they support local bookshops and literary festivals.
Two new arrivals on the independent publishing scene are Open Borders Press, an associate list of Orenda Books; and Linden Editions.
The launch catalogue of Open Borders Press features international heavyweights Olivier Norek and Andrey Kurkov. The new novel LOVERS OF FRANZ K. by Burhan Sönmez’ (president of PEN International) will be published by Open Borders in April.
Linden Editions was set up by three publishing friends and a joint desire to publish outstanding literary works of fiction, narrative nonfiction, reportage, and essays, as well as some modern classics, in translation. Voracious by Małgorzata Lebda, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, was being heavily touted at LBF.
In the US, presses such as Transit Books, Tin House, Graywolf, Milkweed Editions, Coffee House, Akashic Books, New Directions, Melville House, The Feminist Press, New Vessel Press, Open Letter Books — which recently partnered with Deep Vellum Publishing, and acquired Fum d’Estampa Press — champion experimental writing, poetry and avant-garde storytelling. Publishing work that challenges traditional narratives and fosters artistic growth as opposed to just commercial success is becoming increasingly essential given the changing cultural landscape Stateside.
A moot point discussed with a couple of Americans I spoke with was how institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Foundation, and PEN America might be impacted by the new political regime. Could funding from major philanthropists, or nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, become essential for survival?
The UK & International Book Markets in 2024
Steve Bohme, Research Director at NielsenIQ BookData, gave an informative overview of the buying trends of consumers in 2024 backed by data from seventeen different countries. He gave a global-scale view of these trends, the essence of his findings can be read in this Publishing Perspectives report.
Although Bohme states, “strong fiction and rising prices countered declining nonfiction,” a key takeaway from this year’s London Book Fair was the dominance of strong non-fiction over fiction, which I was told was lacklustre, with few standout titles. A couple of industry insiders suggested that the romance bubble — particularly romantasy — is showing signs of bursting.
Five Books to Keep an Eye Out For in 2025
I was strongly advised to look out for THE standout debut novel from the Clegg Agency in New York which has a distinctive voice, a compelling storyline and exceptional writing. Don’t You Miss It? follows four college friends who graduate and celebrate by spending a weekend in Maine. When one of them is killed by a deck collapsing at a bar, the ensuing narrative explores how the three survivors deal with the freak accident.
Beyond that, three must-read nonfiction titles were flagged up:
Muskisms: a 50, 000 word essay by two journalists looking at and the social conditions that created the world of Elon Musk and his extreme, excessive form of capitalism.
Social Gravity: about social psychological processes whereby extreme ideas become mainstream through normalization and conformity created and enforced by the algorithms of social media.
Secure: about the importance of connections, by one of the co-authors of the book Attached.
Olympia: an Historic Exhibition Centre
A £1.3 billion redevelopment project, Olympia is owned by a consortium and is still being transformed into a global cultural hub incorporating a live music venue, a theatre, two hotels, shops and office space. The exhibition centre where LBF was held dates back to the late 19th century and is considered to be a major architectural landmark.
Image is one thing, reality another. There was grumbling about the high prices at the cafes inside Olympia, leading to more meetings taking place outside the venue than usual. Part of the ceiling collapsed in the International Rights Centre — miraculously injuring no one — and rain poured in on Thursday, so there was a scramble for buckets to catch the rainwater.
If the consortium which owns Olympia aims to make it a world-class cultural hub, quality, affordability and safety must be prioritized.
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