The Frankfurt Book Fair is held every October in a convention center the size of a small city. You enter through hall after hall of publishers from 80-something countries, navigating crowds that peak at over 300,000 visitors across five days, and somewhere around hour three of your first day, you realize something: the international book trade is alive, enormous, and conducted largely through handshake agreements made over terrible coffee in glass-walled meeting rooms. If you want to understand how the publishing industry actually works, not how it’s depicted in New York media profiles of literary agents, but how the global machinery of rights, distribution, and production actually functions, you need to spend time at a book fair.

I’ve attended Frankfurt three times and the London Book Fair twice. I’ve also been to BookExpo America (before it folded), the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, and several smaller regional fairs. Each has its own character, but they all serve the same basic function: they’re marketplaces where the business of publishing happens in person, face to face, at a speed and efficiency that email and Zoom calls simply cannot match.

Most readers have no idea that book fairs exist, or if they do, they assume they’re basically oversized versions of the literary festivals I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog. They’re not. Literary festivals are for readers. Book fairs are for the industry. The distinction matters. At a festival, you browse tables and attend panels. At a book fair, you sit in pre-scheduled thirty-minute meetings with rights managers, foreign publishers, literary agents, and distributors, and you negotiate the deals that determine which books get published where, in what languages, and at what prices.

Let me explain how this works in practice, because the mechanics are fascinating and almost entirely opaque to anyone outside the industry.

Say we publish a novel at ScrollWorks that does well in the U.S. market. A publisher in Germany might be interested in acquiring the German-language rights to publish a translated edition. Historically, and still predominantly, this deal gets done at a book fair. Our rights person (at our scale, that’s me wearing a different hat) meets with the German publisher’s acquisitions editor in a meeting room at Frankfurt. I bring a one-page sell sheet with the book’s description, sales figures, review quotes, and a sample chapter. They’ve usually already read the manuscript or a partial, because I sent it ahead of the fair. We discuss terms: advance, royalty rates, territory, publication timeline. If there’s interest from multiple foreign publishers, there might be a mini-auction, conducted over the course of the fair, with offers going back and forth between meetings.

The whole thing sounds archaic in an era of instant digital communication. Why fly to Germany to sit in a meeting room when you could have the same conversation over email? This is the question that tech-minded people always ask, and it reveals a misunderstanding of how negotiation works in publishing.

Publishing deals, especially international ones, are built on relationships. A German publisher deciding whether to take a chance on a small American press’s debut novel is making a bet that involves significant money, time, and reputation. They’re not just buying a manuscript. They’re entering a partnership with a publisher they need to trust. Trust, in my experience, is built in person far more efficiently than over email. At a book fair, you can read the other person’s enthusiasm (or lack thereof), you can have the sidebar conversations that email doesn’t allow for, and you can build the personal rapport that makes future deals easier. The handshake at the end of a meeting isn’t ceremonial. It represents a level of mutual commitment that a signed email doesn’t quite capture.

The London Book Fair, held every April at Olympia London, has a different character than Frankfurt. It’s smaller, more focused on the English-language market, and somewhat less intimidating for newcomers. I attended my first London fair in 2019, and I remember being struck by how much less formal it felt than Frankfurt. Frankfurt has the weight of history and scale. London has the energy of a working trade show where people are there to get things done without the ceremonial aspects.

What I appreciate about London specifically is the seminars and programming aimed at smaller publishers. Frankfurt can feel overwhelming for an independent press. The major publishers have massive stands, sometimes two stories tall, with meeting rooms, bars, and dedicated staff. A small publisher might have a shared table in one of the collective exhibits, with a banner and a stack of catalogs. The disparity can be demoralizing if you let it get to you. London does a better job of creating programming and networking opportunities scaled to independent publishers, and the International Rights Centre at London is specifically designed to facilitate the kind of meetings that smaller presses need.

The Bologna Children’s Book Fair is the most visually striking fair I’ve attended. Held in Bologna, Italy, every spring, it’s dedicated to children’s and young adult publishing, and the exhibits are full of color, illustration, and a kind of creative exuberance that you don’t see at Frankfurt or London. We don’t publish children’s books at ScrollWorks, so Bologna isn’t directly relevant to our business, but I attended once as an observer and found it enormously educational. The global market for children’s books is structured differently than the adult market, with illustration playing a more central role in rights negotiations and with certain markets (Japan, Korea, Scandinavia) having outsized influence. I came away with a better understanding of the publishing industry as a whole, even though the specific segment wasn’t our lane.

Now, I should address the elephant in the room: do book fairs still matter in the age of digital communication? This question has been asked with increasing urgency since the pandemic, which forced Frankfurt and London to go virtual in 2020 and 2021. The virtual editions were, by most accounts, adequate but uninspiring. You could schedule video meetings and browse digital catalogs, but the accidental encounters, the energy of the physical fair, and the deal-making momentum that comes from being in the same room with hundreds of potential partners were absent.

The answer, based on what I’ve seen since the fairs returned to in-person format, is yes. They still matter. Attendance at Frankfurt in 2022 bounced back to near pre-pandemic levels, and the deal volume was reportedly higher than expected. Publishers who had spent two years doing everything remotely came back to Frankfurt with a backlog of negotiations and a renewed appreciation for in-person deal-making. The fair’s role as a gathering point, a fixed moment in the calendar when the entire industry converges, turns out to be more resilient than the pandemic skeptics predicted.

That said, the pandemic did accelerate some changes that were already underway. More preliminary work is now done before the fair, with manuscripts exchanged and initial interest confirmed via email, so that the fair meetings themselves are more focused and efficient. Video calls have become a standard supplement to fair meetings, used for follow-up negotiations and for connecting with publishers who didn’t attend in person. The fair hasn’t been replaced by digital tools, but it has been augmented by them, and the result is a more efficient system overall.

For small publishers like us, book fairs present a particular cost-benefit challenge. Attending Frankfurt means flights, hotels, registration fees, and at least three days away from the office during one of the busiest periods of the fall season. The total cost for a two-person trip is easily $5,000 to $8,000. For that investment to make sense, we need to come home with enough promising leads and potential deals to justify the expense. Some years, we do. Some years, the leads are thinner, and I spend the flight home wondering if the money would have been better spent on marketing.

What tips the balance, in my calculation, is the cumulative effect. Any single fair might or might not produce immediate results. But attending consistently, year after year, builds a network of international contacts that compounds over time. The German publisher I met at Frankfurt in 2019 didn’t buy anything from us that year. But we stayed in touch, and in 2022, they acquired translation rights to one of our titles. That deal might never have happened without the initial face-to-face meeting. The fair planted a seed that took three years to grow.

I want to talk about a specific aspect of book fairs that I think is underappreciated: the role they play in surfacing international literature. The flow of translated literature into the English-language market has always been famously lopsided. According to various estimates, only about 3 to 5 percent of books published in English are translations, compared to 20 to 40 percent in many European markets. Book fairs are one of the primary mechanisms by which non-English-language books get noticed by English-language publishers. Scouts, who are specialized agents that attend fairs on behalf of publishers to identify promising foreign titles, play a significant role in this process. Without the concentration of international publishers that book fairs provide, the translation pipeline would be even thinner than it already is.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve occasionally acquired English-language rights to translated works, and in both cases, the initial contact happened at a book fair. The process of acquiring a translation is complex, involving not just the original publisher and the translator but also considerations of cultural context, market fit, and the significant additional cost of translation itself (a good literary translator working on a 300-page novel might charge $10,000 to $15,000). But the results, when it works, are among the most rewarding things we do. Bringing a book that was written in another language into English, making it available to readers who would otherwise never encounter it, feels like participating in a genuinely global literary conversation.

The other thing fairs do, which is harder to quantify but very real, is provide a sense of perspective. When you spend your days focused on the American book market, it’s easy to develop a tunnel vision about what publishing looks like. Attending an international fair reminds you that the American market, large as it is, represents only a fraction of global publishing activity. You meet publishers from countries whose literary traditions you know nothing about. You discover that a novel that sold modestly in the U.S. was a massive bestseller in France, or that a debut author you passed on has won a major prize in South Korea. This global perspective is humbling, and it makes you a better publisher.

For anyone considering attending a book fair for the first time, whether as a publisher, an agent, an author, or simply a curious observer, my advice is this: prepare intensively, schedule your meetings in advance, bring more business cards than you think you’ll need, wear comfortable shoes, and stay near the convention center so you don’t lose precious time commuting. Also, if you’re going to Frankfurt, learn to say “hello” and “thank you” in at least five languages. It won’t help your negotiations, but it will make people smile, and in an industry built on personal relationships, that counts for more than you’d think.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is how book fairs function as an early warning system for industry trends. The panels, keynotes, and hallway conversations at Frankfurt and London are where you first hear about shifts in reading habits, new technologies, emerging markets, and changing business models. It was at Frankfurt in 2018 that I first heard serious discussion about the audiobook boom that would reshape the industry over the following years. It was at London in 2019 that I first encountered publishers experimenting with subscription models. You can read about these trends in trade publications weeks or months later, but being at the fair lets you hear the conversations in real time, ask questions, and gauge how seriously the industry’s decision-makers are taking them.

The book fair is, in the end, an act of faith. It’s a gathering of people who believe that books are worth making, selling, translating, and carrying across borders. In a media environment that increasingly treats text as content and content as a commodity, that faith feels countercultural. I find it reassuring to stand in a room with 300,000 other people who share it.