Toby Mundy is the managing director and publisher of Atlantic Books. This week he is blogging for First Drafts from the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest book trade event.
Overslept this morning and missed my first meeting, after sitting up until the very small hours drinking beer. Not a good start. Spent much of the day feeling decidedly the worse for wear and didn't fancy solid food until 4pm.
The fair doesn't officially start until Wednesday, so today was spent meeting publishers in the lobbies of two rather grand hotels. Carol Janeway, the formidable rights director of the greatest of all the US imprints, Alfred Knopf, showed me a rather brilliant children's book by American string theorist Brian Greene that uses the Icarus myth to explain black holes. Greene is published by Penguin in the UK, but if they demur we may well make an offer for the UK publishing rights. I also heard about an interesting-sounding Dutch crime writer and a promising-sounding German business book writer.
Everyone here seems to have a "God" book lined up, in the wake of Dawkins and Hitchens (we published the latter, which did well). Most of them seem to be defences of the almighty. I'm sceptical they'll work. It's much easier to write against something than in favour of it. Meanwhile, there's also an endless supply of books about Bush, Iraq, Islam and the war on terror, but I'm not sure there's much of a market for them in the UK.
Overslept this morning and missed my first meeting, after sitting up until the very small hours drinking beer. Not a good start. Spent much of the day feeling decidedly the worse for wear and didn't fancy solid food until 4pm.
The fair doesn't officially start until Wednesday, so today was spent meeting publishers in the lobbies of two rather grand hotels. Carol Janeway, the formidable rights director of the greatest of all the US imprints, Alfred Knopf, showed me a rather brilliant children's book by American string theorist Brian Greene that uses the Icarus myth to explain black holes. Greene is published by Penguin in the UK, but if they demur we may well make an offer for the UK publishing rights. I also heard about an interesting-sounding Dutch crime writer and a promising-sounding German business book writer.
Everyone here seems to have a "God" book lined up, in the wake of Dawkins and Hitchens (we published the latter, which did well). Most of them seem to be defences of the almighty. I'm sceptical they'll work. It's much easier to write against something than in favour of it. Meanwhile, there's also an endless supply of books about Bush, Iraq, Islam and the war on terror, but I'm not sure there's much of a market for them in the UK.
