Deal prices surge at Shanghai International Children's Book Fair

UK publishers attending the fourth Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair (known as CCBF) reported a frenzy of intense interest from Chinese publishers keen to buy translation rights, with deal prices rising as auctions took place to acquire coveted titles.

Maxine Tokelove, general manager of 18-month-old publisher BookLife, said interest in its titles at the fair had been “phenomenal”. She added: “To date we’ve only been to Bologna and Frankfurt [book fairs], and now Shanghai—and this is on a different level. With our Infographics reference science series, 15 people wanted the rights. In the next nine months, we will produce another 30 titles just to meet that demand.”

Maverick m.d. Steve Bicknell, a first-timer at this year’s CCBF, called the fair “a real eye-opener”, adding: “The amount of enthusiasm I can only liken to when I was eight years old and my mother organised jumble sales and outside there were screaming women, jostling to get in.” Bicknell said he had shaken hands on two “important” deals, including one for his Ever So series of rhyming books. However, he said that the fact that almost all buyers at his stand were Chinese limited his options, commenting: “Once you’ve sold a book, you can’t sell it again.”

Pavilion owner and publisher Polly Powell said buyers’ choice of titles was unpredictable, but that Chinese publishers were growing in sophistication and were increasingly receptive to contemporary visual styles. “Deal sizes have increased, making Chinese business far more interesting. And with certain properties we’ve had auctions going,” she said.

Hachette Children’s Group (HCG) has attended the fair for each of its four years. Susannah Palfrey, head of rights, said that as well as the core market of picture books and popular science, fiction was opening up, with HCG selling standalone Middle Grade and sealing “a couple of YA deals”, with the latter genre “just starting to kick off” in the country.

Hachette was the only one of the major UK publishers to take a CCBF stand. Palfrey said: “Nothing beats face to face contact. We are keen to increase the travel we do, with a list of our size: there are lots of editors we need to see for the different elements of our publishing and one 20-minute meeting at Frankfurt doesn’t cover it.”

Michelle O’Doherty of Bath-based publisher North Parade said the fair was “bigger and busier” than when she first attended two years ago, and said it could become an annual fixture for the publisher.

CCBF occupied 30% more floor space year on year in 2016, with 350 exhibitors (up from 300 in 2015). New exhibitors from the UK included Green Android, Fourth Wall, I-Read and Sainted Media. Powell noted that CCBF was “more European in flavour than Beijing”, reflecting the more international nature of Shanghai’s workforce and outlook.

Several publishers also praised the organisation of CCBF, when compared to the larger Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF). However, as with BIBF one publisher noted that some books went missing in transit. BookLife reported that three titles in its Our Values series, developed for Key Stage 1 and 2 in the UK’s national curriculum— Government and Democracy, Identity and Gender, and Human Rights and Liberty—were not delivered to its stand, despite being included in its book shipment.

Book shipments were handled by state-owned organisation China Education Publishing Import & Export Corporation (CEPIEC). Its fellow organisation the China National Publications Import & Export Corporation (CNPIEC) blamed book confiscations at BIBF on a “misunderstanding” by the publishers concerned.

Xu Jiong, director general of the Shanghai Press & Publications Administration, which backs CCBF, told The Bookseller: “We hope CCBF can have more exhibitors and publishers, especially from foreign countries, with an increase in number and variety. Now we have [exhibitors from the] UK, the US, France, Germany and Russia; we want more from other areas in Asia, Latin America and so on, so the books will be richer in variety and come from different cultural backgrounds.”

He added that once publishers saw the “huge China market” they would return.

Asked to comment on how the administration approached cultural differences between Europe and China, such as freedom of expression, at the fair, he said: “As a government organisation, it is only natural we need to take so-called ‘cultural safety’ into consideration, so we do screening on books so that [things are] easy for children to understand... In the copyright exchange [buying of foreign translation rights], those elements not suitable for children will be screened out.”