I’m not attending this week’s London Book Fair, for the first time in many years.
The very first book fair I ever went to was also at Olympia, in the early 1960s, and Sir Allen Lane introduced me to T S Eliot, whose pale hand I solemnly shook. He loomed over me and his glasses caught the light with a little flash that may have done duty for a smile. Touching a legend is like visiting a volcano after an eruption: the soles of your feet get hot and sticky but the rest is a disappointment. Book fairs are a bit like that too.
My wife went to the granddaddy of all book fairs, in Frankfurt, every year for nearly half a century. She always came home hoarse and exhausted, complaining about the pressure of half-hour meetings for eight hours on the trot, with no time to pee, let alone snatch more than a bite of an over-priced sandwich. I was not exactly sympathetic, since from what I’d heard all anyone did was get pissed at various lavish publishers’ parties and then collapse in a hotel lobby. Presumably because they’d been kicked out of a bedroom following a fling for which the fairs were legendary.
When I went to my first London Book Fair after having set up The Ampersand Agency in 2003, I realized what she meant about the pressure. Agents are given tables with four chairs and there’s so little space between you and the next table you can see their notes, hear their conversations, wonder where they got their sandwiches, and get bumped as their guests push their chairs back to rush to their next meeting.
If you don’t fill all four chairs for a meeting, your neighbours will ask to borrow one, while trying not to look smug that they’re so much more in demand than you are. People can be late because their earlier meeting overran or, far more likely, they couldn’t find you in the agents’ warren, or they were stuck in the wrong hall and the signage was useless. But sitting alone at your table makes you look like a total loser: when those around you fill up, you make a pathetic attempt to appear frantically busy by pretending to write up your notes, or have an intense conversation with your voicemail.
Sometimes there’s a slot where you’ve got nothing scheduled, which in theory gives you time to go to the loo, have a snack, or mosey around greeting old friends and generally seeing what’s going on by listening to the buzz. But your mates are wrapped up in meetings, there are long queues at all the food and coffee outlets, and when you stop to greet somebody you think you know they will peer at your identity badge and pretend to be running late.
If you think about seeing what’s on the publishers’ stands, which are in a different part of the hall and cost the big names hundreds of thousands of pounds, you are frustrated when you aren’t allowed to talk to an editor you’ve been chasing for weeks because you haven’t made an appointment, disappointed that your authors aren’t featured more prominently while those of your rivals are, and also worried that you won’t make it back to your lonely table in time for your next scheduled meeting.
But do the meetings, the grit in the oyster, produce pearls? People start arranging their schedule weeks in advance and you have to keep track of the changes with a spreadsheet. Then you try and make a list of the topics you want to talk to each editor about. By the time you’ve repeated the same spiel a dozen times a day, it’s hard to keep up the necessary degree of enthusiasm. You know the editors you’re meeting are as dazed and jaded as you are: they are dutifully making notes of the books they’d like to see, you’re making notes of what to send them, and both of you suspect that the books will languish in their inboxes until they gather the digital equivalent of mould and are either rejected or left to rot.
Aren’t book fairs about the writers? I hear you ask. Lol! Writers who don’t have an appointment aren’t allowed near the agents, so I would advise anyone considering splashing out on a day ticket to think again. The odds on you bumping into an agent or publisher who will understand what you’re trying to do are roughly the same as bringing about peace in the Middle East. Miracles are required.
So why does everyone in publishing get into such a tizz about book fairs? Why do they make appointments while grumbling about the time they could spend doing something more constructive, splash out on hospitality while complaining their authors don’t get paid enough, and spend loads of cash on having a table or a stand when they know the money will never be recouped by the business that results?
FOMO: if you don’t have a table or a stand when everyone else does, if you don’t attend the parties everyone else has been invited to, even if you don’t recognize a soul and can’t hear a word anyone’s saying because of the screech of all the other freeloaders, if you don’t do a deal that gets a mention in the daily summaries, you’re missing out.
Book fairs are fun, provided someone else is picking up the tab. But all those hours of relentless pitching, by agents to publishers, and by publishers to booksellers, distributors, and their foreign colleagues - all of that hot air results in a tiny number of deals, most of which had been manured for many weeks beforehand.
In theory, a fair gives the members of the international community of book workers a chance to meet and mingle with their colleagues and sprinkle a bit of glitz on a business that has a couple of days once a year to twirl in the limelight before their stands are demolished to make way for the next set of exhibitors, who may be makers of grommets or insulation or sex toys. It’s a jamboree that makes money only for the organizers.
I enjoyed it, I complained about it, but I won’t miss it. Or not very much.
My book, Still With It!, is available now
Good point!
"Book fairs are fun, provided someone else is picking up the tab." Amen. Book fairs around these parts are one more way to milk the poor writer. At least the regional ones, which are filled with the unpublished and self-publishing desperate for a break. The pay-to-attend seminars are hustles like a carnival, with the difference you might actually win a stuffed toy. You can't win anything at a book fair.