London Book Fair 2024
This March I attended my first London Book Fair and it was HUGE. I’d been to events at London Olympia before, but the scale of LBF was incredible by comparison.
As an introvert who works from home, I find myself making excuses not to get out to events in person. The result? I end up falling out of practice with talking to people in professional contexts and I need to give myself a lot of pep talks to get through them.
In some ways, the huge scale of LBF makes it easier to fade into the background. The background is my natural comfort zone, but comfort zones can be too… comfortable. A few of my lovely translator colleagues were there too and this meant I couldn’t just wander around anonymously. Which is A Good Thing.
Honestly, if you’ve never attended the LBF, I recommend going just to marvel at the beautifully colourful sight of London Olympia being given over entirely to the book industry. Wall to wall books in all their glory, and in a huge range of languages. Bliss for book lovers.
To get started, I attended the opening keynote by Jonathan Karp, President and CEO of Simon & Schuster to hear his perspective on publishing industry trends and developments. I heard that there is increasingly an international focus in book publishing – great news for anyone wanting to read books written in a language other than English.
Other key points I heard mentioned (these are very much my own quite subjective takeaways):
In a fast-changing industry, where publishers and authors have to embrace social media and new technologies, there is now often more reference to ‘decks’ than to manuscripts.
Authors are often doing their own marketing and achieving greater reach through social media (think BookTok).
AI was discussed, of course. You can’t go anywhere without it being mentioned these days. Karp said that at Simon & Schuster they were ‘daring to be cautious’ about the benefits of AI as a tool. One example is how it could be used for older books, and they are experimenting with AI narration for books that would not otherwise be published.
Particular highlights for me were hearing about Strasbourg as 2024 World Book Capital, and hearing distinguished literary translators talk about the translation of non-fiction works, something that can sometimes be overlooked as a genre of literary/narrative translation. I also went along to the CIEP’s stand to say hello and had a lovely chat with its new CEO, Christine Yeates.
I’d love to go to LBF again. Even though I only attended one out of the three days, I got a lot out of it.
Have you been to LBF? Share your tips in the comments!
If you’re planning to go, pop your questions in the comments below.