UC Press Blog

1949, publishing professionals from around the world have gathered for the annual Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany. While London, Guadalajara, and Beijing host similar gatherings, the Frankfurt Book Fair remains the largest, with over 230,000 attendees in 2024. It is also one of the oldest book fairs, tracing its roots back to the 15th century when book publishers and printers would meet in a city just miles away from where the Gutenberg press was created. 

The Frankfurt Book Fair is one of the key ways UC Press attracts interest in potential translations and audiobook licenses for our books. To give you a behind-the-scenes tour into what actually happens at the fair, we spoke with Neal Swain, our Senior Manager of Subsidiary Rights & Licensing, in the lead-up to this year’s event on October 15-19.

What is the order of operations at the Frankfurt Book Fair? What do you do when you're there?

I should start by describing how the fair is set up. It’s hosted in the major conference center in the middle of Frankfurt and fills about 6 buildings. There are different levels devoted to different geographical regions and types of publishing. So, there's a North American floor, there's a German hall, and other regional floors, mostly occupied by trade publishers. There are also various event spaces and an agent center. Technical publishers have their own section, and so do educational publishers and stationery (as in blank notebooks and cards). And tech solutions have part of a floor as well. I’m sure I’ve left out many other specialties, but it should be clear that it's a large, spread-out fair, covering many aspects of a broad industry.

How you experience the fair depends on why you’re there. If you are attending as an author, you will probably be participating in a reading or panel, often on the weekend when the fair is open to the public.

But if you are a rights professional like I am, you are going to spend the entire day sitting in a chair, talking to people in back-to-back, half-hour meetings. This year, I'm attending for 3 days and have 17 meetings a day.

What are subsidiary rights (often referred to as “sub rights”) and what do these rights mean for university presses? Where do they fit into an author’s contract?

The rights to books come in two formats. There are the principal rights, which refers to the book in its first published form: i.e. print editions in their original language. These days that often includes e-books, too.

Then subsidiary rights are all of the other rights related to your book. They'll include everything from licensing permission to reprinting a chapter in a course pack or an anthology to rights for book-length adaptations like translations, audiobook, film, and TV. Depending on your contract, these rights might be outlined in more or less detail. 

Sub rights sales often go both ways. University of California Press sells certain rights to publishers who specialize in languages, territories, and formats where we don’t have a presence. In return, publishers who don’t have a presence in the U.S. market often pitch us their titles.  Who are you meeting with and why?

Primarily, I attend the fair to sell the rights of our books, and I mostly talk to audio and translation publishers interested in acquiring our books. Our deputy director, Kim Robinson, or our director, Erich van Rijn, will often attend for the purpose of acquiring co-publications and titles in translation, among other reasons. I also end up taking meetings to hear about potentially interesting titles and pass them along to editors at the press. 

Though translations operate in the marketplace and are sold based on a publisher’s demand, if an author is especially interested in having their book translated into a particular language, do you have any advice or suggestions for them? 

The first thing I would say is to think about if your book has subject matter or another quality that will appeal to the market you want to reach. It's really wonderful to see your book show up in different languages, but one thing that sometimes gets overlooked is that the book needs to appeal to those audiences in order for a publisher to undertake the expense of a translation. Whether that means that the subject of your book transcends geography or touches on wide cultural or contemporary issues, the book has to be relevant to the new audience in some way. Even being about an event or situation common in that country may not be enough if it is something that has already been addressed by authors or scholars there.

But the other thing to think about is your broader connections in the field: Do you know translators or international academics who are interested in work like yours? Do you know publishers in another country who publish books like yours? Have you published in that language in the past, and do you have that publisher’s contact information? Getting that information to your current publisher can be very helpful.

If the translation rights are ultimately sold, who usually covers the translation costs?

The foreign publisher that licenses a book pays for the translation, sometimes with the help of grants or other funding. They will pay a fee or advance to the licensing publisher, who will be the signing party on the contract, and then that publisher (in this case, us) will split the money with the author per the terms of the publisher’s contract with the author.

Do authors ever get involved in the translation process?

It varies on a case-by-case basis, really. For the most part, the publisher that licenses rights will handle all aspects of the translation. But many of our authors are fairly fluent in the language related to their subject of study, and want to review the translation themselves. Or, they have colleagues willing to review it. Or they may work with the translator in other ways, like making sure that certain terminology specific to their field is translated as accurately as possible. 

What trends have you noticed in the publishing industry for sub rights? 

For one thing, China has a very strong market for academic nonfiction. It's very popular there. 

For another, as English fluency has risen around the world as a second language, you'll find that there are some markets where it's harder to place translation rights now. Basically, people will start reading the English book first if it isn’t released simultaneously in their language. 

That has been true for a while now. 

Also, audiobooks are becoming more popular as a global format. You're seeing them in more languages and different territories than you used to. 

Any predictions on where the field of sub rights is headed?

It will be interesting to see how the audiobook market stabilizes as a percentage of a book’s sales, like the way e-books have in recent years. Of course, that’s going to be genre-dependent as well. There are some genres where sales are almost wholly audiobooks or e-book. But for academic books, my guess is that print will remain popular.