Frankfurt frenzy was led by PFD and RCW

Peters Fraser + Dunlop (PFD) and Curtis Brown both sewed up 17 deals apiece in the latest edition of The Bookseller’s Rights Report, which covers the heavy trading months of August, September and October. United Agents polled in third, two deals ahead of Rogers, Coleridge & White (RCW).

As we have emphasised since we began compiling Rights Report league tables, the data is based on the deals reported online at TheBookseller.com, which for the time period covered by this chart numbered 340. While this may not be comprehensive, it does give an indication of the market.

Patrick Walsh, whose new PEW Literary venture celebrated its one-year anniversary during the time period, leads the individual agents, on six deals. Nelle Andrew was the PFD star, orchestrating four deals, tying her in second place in our individual agent list, level with Jonny Geller (Curtis Brown), Judith Murray (Greene & Heaton) and Juliet Mushens (Caskie Mushens).

Hachette continues to dominate from the publisher perspective, accounting for a third of the deals The Bookseller reported over the period, with Penguin Random House (12% share) and HarperCollins (9%) in second and third place respectively. Independent publishers accounted for a 22% share overall, with Faber leading the indie pack (11 deals).

For editors, Bluebird’s Carole Tonkinson notched up six deals, level with Sharmaine Lovegrove in her first few months leading her new Little, Brown imprint, Dialogue Books. Picador’s Francesca Main is in second place, after securing deals with four authors, meaning Tonkinson and Main accounted for 45% of Pan Macmillan’s 22 August-to-October acquisitions.

Being Frank
October was, unsurprisingly, the heavy rights-trading month, with The Bookseller reporting 151 deals during the month, 106 of which came during a two-week period around this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. If we consider only these deals, the agency leaderboard stays relatively consistent, with PFD, RCW and United Agents coming out on top, orchestrating six deals apiece. Walsh’s PEW Literary conducted five of its six deals during the period.

In terms of genre, the balance tips slightly in favour of fiction (60%), particularly manuscripts that can be classed broadly in the literary or reading-group area (35 deals), followed by crime (26) and Young Adult (19). The bulk of the 137 non-fiction acquisitions over the three-month period were memoirs, thanks to a string of celebrity autobiography announcements during FBF, including high-profile contracts for the likes of Louis Theroux, Lenny Henry and Cher.

The Rights Report has continued to keep an eye on diversity. In cases in which the ethnicity of the author can be determined—and ignoring titles that have multiple contributors or were written under a pseudonym—12.7% of deals were for titles by black, Asian or minority ethnic authors. At the half-year mark, that figure was 11.4%. In terms of gender, 58% of the deals reported pertained to books written by women.

*Kate Shaw, Kirsty McLachlan, Laetitia Rutherford, Laura Macdougall, Laura Williams, Natasha Fairweather and Veronique Baxter also secured 3 deals apiece.