London Book Fair 2012 | Part Three

The un-dead stay cool, as Spain takes the tiger by the tail

Many of the exciting sales this year were in the foreign and translation markets.

Here's a taster:

• In an unprecedented move the Barcelona literary agency who represent Gabriel Garcia Marquez auctioned a two-year license to publish A Hundred Years of Solitude in China.
• The title has previously been widely pirated in the country. The agent Carmen Balcells, widely thought to be the most powerful figure in Spanish publishing, opened the auction at $1,000,000, within hours of the fair opening on Monday bidding had already passed the $1.5million mark...
• Faber pre-empted World English Language rights in Stallo, a Swedish tale of the supernatural featuring trolls. The acquiring editor has compared it to Let The Right One In and Stephen King's Salem's Lot - apparently it's "very creepy".
• Keeping with the undead-types, Constable & Robinson imprint Corsair bought UK and Commonwealth rights in the first two books in the Deadlands  series by Lily Herne (the series is published in South Africa by Penguin).
• Swedish super-agency Salomonsson, who represent internationally-known Scandinavian writers such as Jo Nesbo, had a big trilogy by Anders de la Motte at the fair.  Ten foreign deals were closed in the lead up to the fair, and the agency conducted a heated auction between UK publishers for the work in the UK
• US agency Foundry did a bit of creative deal making...they received a submission with a split narrative - an adult and teenage voice. Realising the potential, they asked the writer to split the book in two and develop both voices further...and at the fair they sold two books out of the original manuscript:  Cain's Blood.  One Young Adult title to Simon & Schuster and the adult title to Touchstone. *Ker-ching*!