Hanser Verlag’s stand in Hall 3.1 at the 2022 Frankfurter Buchmesse. Image: FBM, Anett Weirauch
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘They Like To Read English Books’
In recent years, publishers and rights directors in various non-English-language markets have increasingly noted that their consumers are requesting English editions of books originally written in English, rather than translated versions.
There’s a new rights agreement in place in Germany, that may provide a viable response to this trend.
On Wednesday (January 22), the Borsenblatt carried a staff report on how Carl Hanser Verlag in Munich has acquired exclusive publication and distribution rights to the American author TC Boyle’s forthcoming No Way Home not only in German but also in English for the European Union markets and other nations in Europe.
As Anja Sieg writes at The Bookseller, translator Dirk van Gunsteren’s edition in German will be sold starting this autumn in Germany.
The May 2023 German edition of TC Boyle’s ‘Blue Skies’ in Dirk van Gunsteren’s translation
In the spring of 2026, Hanser will release its English-language edition to time with the publication of the book in the United States by WW Norton‘s Liveright imprint.
Publishers in several non-English markets have spoken of struggling to sell translations in their own languages that could vie in the marketplace with original English editions—a sign of a growing consumer base that reads in English.
So entrenched has English become as the linga franca of the era that educational programs and frontier-breaking film and television have created a big and growing demand for English texts.
In an interview by Adam Soboczynski at Zeit Online says, Hanser’s publisher Jo Lendle is quoted saying, “We sold 120,000 copies of Boyle’s previous novel Blue Skies in Dirk van Gunsteren’s brilliant translation, and 25,000 copies of the original were sold in German-speaking countries. … Before we stumble like the Dutch and Scandinavian publishers, whose translations can no longer compete with the originals, we prefer to take preventative measures.”
Jo Lendle
Sieg at The Bookseller makes the point that many booksellers will welcome European editions in English because making international orders for consumers who want them can be time consuming.
Nevertheless, what may be a solution to a growing problem for publishers in Europe—the Hanser deal is a test, as Lendle describes it—will be closely watched by literary rights agents and rights directors, as well as by publishers and authors, to see how this new outing goes.
This first-time deal for Hanser reportedly has been made between Jo Lendle, TC Boyle, and Boyle’s Stateside agent, Georges Borchardt. In the United Kingdom, Boyle is published by Bloomsbury.
‘People Want To Read the Original, in English’
As we reported in October around the sessions of the 2024 Frankfurt Rights Meeting, Felicitas von Lovenberg of Piper Verlag in Germany mentioned this to Publishing Perspectives in 2023, amid our planning sessions for that year’s Scuola per Librai Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri (UEM) in Venice—this year’s edition of which is getting underway this week.
Von Lovenberg on Friday (January 31) will join us in the Mauri School’s Publishers’ Round Table again in Venice, as she and her colleagues discuss Constants and Variables of the Publishing Profession in the program, to be live-streamed from Italy.
Related article: Piper Verlag’s Felicitas von Lovenberg speaks at the Mauri School in Venice on a demand for English books in English in Germany. Image: Fondazione Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri
“We all see, luckily,” she said in the 2023 discussion, “the rise of a new audience for books, the younger readers, which is very heartening to all of us. But they bring a different cultural mindset to the bookstores and to us as publishers.
“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, 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.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on international translation and publication rights is here, more on the German marketplace is here, more on the work of Hanser Verlag is here, and more on the Mauri School at Venice is here.
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