desayunoencama | Packing and panicking

I'm actually not very panicked about my trip tomorrow to Frankfurt, even though I'm leaving in the morning and still have so much I need to get done. This is my 15th Book Fair, I think, so I pretty much have things under control or down to a routine.

And this year I seem to have very few meetings, and also very few new projects on offer: that is, what projects I have are mostly already under contract and I don't really have much on hand in terms of complete projects to offer, or even proposals really.

At this point, I'm no longer representing foreign rights for various independent publishers, as I did my first few years, so I'm mostly just concerned with my own backlist and frontlist (which is around 90 books).

It helps my equilibrium, I guess, that yesterday I had an interesting telephone conversation with an editor who's interested in working with me (in a pretty open-ended way), so right away I'm feeling positive about new projects on the horizon, which is a good thing, it cuts the URGENCY to make a deal right away during the fair, not that I would object to doing so... :-)

I think it's going to be a conservative fair, given the current economic crisis (for instance, two of my meetings this year are with Icelandic publishers, and since their entire country has basically just declared bankruptcy this week, if they are in fact at the fair I'm sure it will become a purely social meeting until everything settles down for them...) but one of the nice things of having fewer meetings this year is that I'll have a chance to wander the halls and see what various publishers in different countries are doing (if they did show up at the fair), collect catalogs of publishers I may want to work with some time down the line, etc.

While the big news stories from the Fair are always the big deals, the fair is not always only about selling rights, and certainly not only in the mad bidding frenzies that get hyped in the press.

A lot of it is about networking, and often it's meeting people who you don't work with directly but who put you in touch with people who you do wind up working with.

So I find it an invaluable experience, even if I come away without a single new project sold, nor any licenses on existing projects.

(And I've often built up working relationships that after a few years HAVE resulted in projects being sold, when the time and/or the project was right.)

I did not produce a new catalog this year; next year I'll do one, maybe earlier in the year, in time for BEA or something.

I have habitually brought too many copies of my books with me each year, which I then had to lug home, so this year I'm going fairly zen; if anyone wants something, I'll mail it to them after the Fair. Given the weather forecast (not to mention past experience at the Fair) the most important things for me to pack are: an umbrella, a raincoat, and some warm sweaters. :-)