At the entrance to the 2022 Literary Agent and Scout Center, the LitAg, at Frankfurter Buchmesse (once more a sellout this year). Image: FBM, Marc Jacquemin
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Also in Today’s Rights Edition:
FEP’s Deputy Director Enrico Turrin Looks at English Exports
Frankfurt Rights Meeting: FEP Vice-President Sonia Draga on the Polish Market
A Bid for a Royalty Statement Standard
As the pace picks up—along with the meeting requests—the approach of Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 16 to 20) becomes serious, of course, and you’ll be seeing more and more coverage from us to help orient you to programming and planning.
Our Publishing Perspectives Forum, for example—this year being staged at Frankfurt Studio in Hall 4.0 just off the Agora—is coming together with Executives Talks, audiobook strategies, new developments in artificial intelligence, independent publishing, Charleston Conference events, and more. We hope to see you in many of our sessions.
If you run into any trade visitors who are not yet registered on the new Frankfurt Connect platform, do tip them off: now is the time to get registered and familiar with it as the system is built out.
And here’s an event that’s not a part of our Forum but it’s one we’d like to flag for our Rights Edition readers today (September 6)—a special program of potential interest from the United States’ Book Industry Study Group, BISG. This is that highly respected organization’s first international rights meeting.
Unlocking Efficiency: BISG’s Proposed Standards for Translation Rights Royalty Statements
Frankfurt Friday, October 18, 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. CEST in conference room “Encounter,” Hall 5.0.
Briefly from the description of the session: “A royalty statement that lists a title only in a foreign language—or omits crucial details like the author’s name, product type, and publication date—is a time-consuming pain point for everyone in rights and royalties. We can streamline our processes and save hours of valuable time by providing consistent, comprehensive information upfront.
“We invite all international rights professionals to join us in becoming part of the solution. Attend our meeting with BISG, where we’ll make the case for standardized royalty statement fields. BISG will present a new, research-based industry standard designed to alleviate common pain points.”
Kris Kliemann
We spoke with Kris Kliemann, one of the English-language markets’ top consultants in rights management, who says, “The BISG Rights Committee’s members are devoted to finding solutions to the problems that take up too much time and keep us away from what we most enjoy: talking about books to publishers around the world. The business of trying to decipher and reconcile royalty statements is important work—and making it more efficient will benefit everyone from the translating publisher to the rights holder to the authors.
“Following a standard i.e. ensuring that specific and useful data is included on every statement for every contract and book published, isn’t difficult to do, but simply hasn’t been codified until now. We’re looking forward to this meeting as a chance to bring even more voices into the discussion and to really begin the process of adoption of a Royalty Statement Standard.”
There’s no charge to attend the session, of course, but in case space becomes tight, it’s a good idea to RSVP to Riky Stock to let the group know you’re coming: r.stock@buchmesse.de
A Six-Figure Pre-empt From Grayhawk Agency
We start our Rights Roundup today as we frequently do near Frankfurt time, with a new offering from Taipei’s Grawhawk Agency, where Gray Tan tells us that Jeong Ji-A’s My Father’s Liberation has been sold by the agency’s Jade Fu to HarperVia in New York in a six-figure pre-empt.
Gray Tan
Tan says, “We knew this is a special one when three of our team (including me) read this over the weekend and all cried.”
And for those looking to get one more book of note’s sales news to us before the trade show, our next Rights Roundup is set for October 4, but remember that you can drop us deal news at our rights deal submission form at any time without waiting for our reminder.
As in each roundup, we use some of the sales copy supplied to us by agents and rights directors, editing that copy to give you an idea about a book’s nature and tone, but limiting the promotional elements. If you’d like to submit a deal to Publishing Perspectives, see the instructions at the end of this article.
My Father’s Liberation
By Jeong Ji-A
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – World English: HarperVia (United States)
- Taiwan, Complex Chinese: Solo
- China, Simplified Chinese: Thinkingdom
- Japanese: Kawade Shobo Shinsha
- Vietnamese: AZ
- French: Zulma
- Russian: Eksmo
“Following her father’s sudden death, Ari Ko returns to her hometown for the funeral. Although she was once close to him, their bond had long since frayed. Her father, a former communist partisan, lived by the principle ‘serve the people’—a belief Ari struggles to relate to.
Jeong Ji-A
“As friends and comrades recount her father’s life during the funeral—his fake treachery to protect others, his years confined in the mountains—Ari realizes that there’s a lot about her father she doesn’t know.”
This book was preceded by another novel from Jeong, The Partisan’s Daughter. She holds a PhD in creative writing from Chung-Ang University and has won awards including the Lee Hyo-seok and Kim Yu-jeong literary awards.
The translator and author Anton Hur, well known to many Publishing Perspectives readers, writes about My Father’s Liberation as “the story of a failed revolutionary” adding that at the same time it’s “a very funny and poignant tale of a man who lived as best he could by his principles to the end of his life.
“Overflowing tragedy spills over into comedy as Korea’s ongoing national division between North and South is both mourned and sent up in this hilarious and intimate portrait of a recently dead father, showing us that the monsters of the Red Scare of yesteryear were never more than our neighbors, our friends, and our highly flawed parents. Jeong’s keen ear for dialect and dialogue encapsulates in this thin volume the whole of the life of a passionate man and the impact of his decisions on his country, his family, and history itself.”
Silent Evidence
By Clea Koff
- Publisher: HarperCollins UK / Avon, London
- Rights contact: Anna Soler-Pont, Pontas Literary & Film Agency, Barcelona
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Audiovisual rights optioned by an American producer (to be identified)
- French: Éditions Héloïse d’Ormesson
- Russian: Eksmo
- Audiobook rights in Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese: Audible.
“Jayne and Steelie founded Agency 32/1 with one purpose in mind: using their specialist forensic skills to help police solve crimes.
Clea Koff
“When a bundle of frozen body parts falls out of a van on a Los Angeles freeway, FBI agent Scott Houston knows just where to go for an off-the-record post-mortem.
“But to everyone’s horror, Jayne and Steelie quickly determine the parts aren’t from one body. The body parts are from multiple bodies.
“A serial killer is on the loose. Worse, Scott Houston’s call has put Jayne and Steelie’s lives in jeopardy, as their unique skills can uncover evidence to unmask the killer. Can they find the killer, before the killer finds them?”
Neuromania: Fact and Fiction About Your Brain
By Albert Moukheiber
- Publisher: Allary Editions, Paris
- Rights contact: Marleen Seegers, 2 Seas Agency
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
“This book distinguishes fact from fiction in the epidemic of chatter about the brain and provides an up-to-date overview of where the science actually stands.
Albert Moukheiber
“That allows us to cast a critical gaze on those pretty MRI images and the spectacular claims about our neuronal interactions that are often seeking to manipulate rather than teach us anything useful.
“From behind a scrim of a few actual neuroscientific facts, they’re selling us everything from personal-development methods and pills that claim to fix our brains’ chemical imbalances to management techniques and plenty of other clichés…
‘By sharing real knowledge about the brain, Albert Moukheiber gives science its due and frees us from false beliefs. He invites us to learn so that we won’t get burned.”
Domani, domani
(Tomorrow, Tomorrow)
By Francesca Giannone
- Publisher: Mauri Spagnol Publishing Group (GeMS) / Casa Editrice Nord
- Rights contact: Viviana Vuscovich, Mauri Spagnol Publishing Group (GeMS)
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – French: Albin Michel
- Polish: Znak
- Portuguese: Presença
- Russian: Alpina Publishers
“Following the huge success of her La portalettere—the bestselling novel of 2023 in Italy with over 400,000 copies sold—Francesca Giannone returns to Salento with a sensitive, eventful novel about family bonds and conflict.
Francesca Giannone
“Lorenzo and Agnese, a brother and sister, are united by their love for the family soap factory, divided by destiny and by a decision that ends up separating them and marking their tomorrows and the rest of their lives.
“In the Salento of the late 1950s, Lorenzo and Agnese have lost everything. Their father has sold the family’s soap factory, a legacy he experienced as a millstone, but which, for the siblings, represented a reason for living. Now, to remain there as ordinary workers for a new, arrogant owner is a dreadful perspective.
“On an impulse, Lorenzo decides to leave, intending to find the money to take back what belongs to him. Agnese, on the other hand, decides to stay, unwilling to abandon her home of talc and soap. This leads to a serious and apparently fatal division between the siblings.”
The Great Gopnik
(Der grosse Gopnik)
By Viktor Jerofejew
- Publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin
- Rights contact: Maren Mentzel, Matthes & Seitz Berlin
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Czech: Academia
- Bulgarian: Janet 45
- Finnish: Siltala
- Hungarian: Atlantic
- Russian: ISIA Media
“The Great Gopnik is a rogue’s play full of humor and sharpness about the rise of Putin. who, as the Great Gopnik, embodies what should not be possible: a yob, a rowdy, a chav who not only makes it to the highest center of power, but keeps himself there.
Viktor Jerofejew
“It is both a literary explanation of the state of a country and an ironic, cynical reckoning with a megalomaniac.
“From exile in Germany, Victor Jerofejew—who was kicked out of the Russian writers’ association several times—uses literature to tell his version of lies and truth. Stalin, Putin, and the writer’s friends and family discuss the burning question: how could it have come to this?
“Jerofejew tells the story of today’s Russia from the perspective of the writer who is free to move through time and space, to have characters appear and disappear, to invent things and to expose what he has experienced, heard and seen as a hoax. Yerofeyev ventures nothing less than a literary explanation for what is happening today.”
Beasts
By Ingvild Bjerkeland
- Publisher: Cappelen Damm, Oslo
- Rights contact: Ingvild Haugland Blatt, Cappelen Damm Agency
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – World English and Spanish: Levine Querido
- Germany: Julius Beltz
- Sweden: Lilla Piratförlaget
- Denmark: Gyldendal
“What happens when society suddenly breaks down, when strange and scary creatures roam the countryside, and no human can be trusted?
Ingvild Bjerkeland
“Abdi (13) and Alva (5) are running through the forest, toward the sea and safety. Civilization has collapsed.
“Their mother and countless others have been murdered by terrifying beasts. No electricity or fuel is left. And the people who are still alive, are hiding—from the beasts and from each other.
“Beasts is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for children.”
Submitting Rights Deals to Publishing Perspectives
Do you have rights deals to report? Agents and publishing-house rights directors can use our rights deal submission form to send us the information we need. If you have questions, please send them to Porter@PublishingPerspectives.com
We look forward to hearing from you.
More of Publishing Perspectives‘ rights roundups are here, and more from us on international rights trading is here.
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