Fantasy Publishing House

Seeking solace, I have been daydreaming about my ideal job. So here it is: I'd like to be the person who commissions translations in a fantasy publishing house where money is no object. Obviously I'd only do that half the time; the rest of my time would still be spent translating fabulous books from German. And travelling around in my chauffeur-driven Sunbeam Alpine (see above). Well-paid staff would do the other, more gruelling parts of the publishing work: accounting, editing, production, publicity, distribution...

My translator friends would come to me with impeccable recommendations for books to publish, and I would say yes, of course, if you love the book then it must be wonderful. Let's do it. And critics will snatch them out of our hands and fight over who gets to review them. But there'd be no need to argue because it's fine to have several reviews of any particular book, even in one publication, each pointing out in a supportive manner what delightful aspects the previous reviewer couldn't find room to mention. Although probably column inches wouldn't be an issue in the first place.

My first list, on the German side of things, would consist of the following titles:

Non-fiction
Heike Geißler: Saisonarbeit/Season's Greetings from Fulfillment
Carolin Emcke: Gegen den Hass/Against Hate

Fiction
Julya Rabinowich: Krötenliebe/Toads and Tempest
Antje Rávic Strubel: In den Wäldern des menschlichen Herzens/Into the Woods of the Human Heart
Senthuran Varatharajah: Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen/Before the Signs Mount Up
Rasha Khayat: Weil wir längst woanders sind/Because We're Elsewhere Now

Children/YA
Finn-Ole Heinrich: Die erstaunlichen Abenteuer der Maulina Schmitt/The Amazing and Astonishing Adventures of Maulina Schmitt
Kirsten Fuchs: Mädchenmeute/Girl Gang

I might be too busy being driven onto beaches to do all the translations myself. If you have unlimited funds and would like to give me a part-time job doing exactly this, feel free to contact me. I understand if you'd rather invest your unlimited funds in getting rid of reactionary world leaders, though, so if I don't hear from you I'll know that's where your priorities lie. That's fine.

Updated Stats on Women Published in German

Hello there. I've combed through the autumn catalogues to add to my ongoing stats on original German fiction by gender. Here's the table. I counted first-time hardcover publications written in German, classified by the publishers as "Belletristik", so broadly fiction, essays, poetry. There are 33 publishing houses in the count.

Some publishers are doing really well, publishing equal numbers of make and female (identifying) writers – dtv, DuMont, KiWi, Klett Cotta/Tropen. And some are even bringing out more books by women than by men this autumn: Aufbau, btb, CH Beck, List, Ullstein, Rütten & Loening and notably Matthes & Seitz, with three ladies in their German fiction/Naturkunden catalogue and only one dude.

Everyone else – not so much. There are twenty publishers publishing more men than women and eight houses not bringing us a single female German fiction writer this coming season. All in all, only 37% of original German fiction covered by my count was written by women.

Happy New Stats

Happy 2016! I was in a less-than-creative mood anyway so I did some counting. I'm working on an article on gender imbalance in translated fiction for New Books in German. And I'd found it impossible to find any statistics on books published in German in the first place. So I combed a selection of publishers' catalogues from Spring 2016 and Fall 2015. For the purpose of comparison with other stats, I've included only fiction (novels, novellas, short story collections but no poetry, drama, essays or children's books) written in German and published for the first time. The publishers are thirty literary, genre, indie, major group-linked, small, large, medium houses – but of course this is by no means a comprehensive list. Anyway, here it is.

You'll notice the numbers are surprisingly low. Only 128 original German-language titles published in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in Spring 16, 144 in Fall 2015. Obviously that's because I haven't made any attempt to cover all publishers. But it's also because a lot of translations come out, especially fiction. In Germany in 2013, 11,894 published first editions fell under "German literature" and 6,164 literary translations were published, according to Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen 2014.

Adding the two seasons together, books authored by women made up 43% of original fiction in my selection.

Going by a previous count of mine, about 30% of fiction translated from German to English was written by women. So something does seem to be getting lost along the way.

Cornelia Funke Founds Breathing Books

This is not new news, I'm afraid – I'm working too hard at the moment to keep up – but I do find it interesting.

German writer and illustrator Cornelia Funke, asked to make significant changes to the the structure of the third Reckless book, The Golden Garn, by her US/UK publishers, said no. Her books are edited in the German original, she told the press (two different but similar interview pieces were published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Publishers Weekly has the full scoop in English).

So they gave her the rights back and she didn't even have to pay for the finished translation, and she has set up her own publishing house, Breathing Books, to bring out the book on her own terms. No one's really saying why the Americans and British wanted the changes, although Funke suspects they wanted to market the novel at younger readers – they didn't want it to open with a birth scene or close with an open ending. I'm impressed with Cornelia Funke. The internet would say Cornelia Funke gives zero fucks.

The plan now is to bring out the novel with a title closer to the German original than the planned "Heartless", as an e-book and a limited print edition to begin with in November, and see how things go. The new company will also do book-related apps and new editions of Funke's books with her own illustrations, plus re-releases of out-of-print titles like the fabulous Pirate Girl (tr. Chantal Wright) – which coined the phrase "you piratical nincompoop", much beloved in my household. The website looks exciting but doesn't credit Funke's usual translator Oliver Latsch, who is also her agent. And her cousin, I believe. So maybe he's OK with that.

I like the idea of a writer gaining greater command over her work in translation. I have to say I was surprised an editor would suggest structural changes to a translated and thus already edited book, but perhaps it really is the done thing in children's and young adult publishing, which seems to be rather concerned about putting readers off. And what makes me particularly happy about the whole story is the tiny spark of hope that Breathing Books might one day publish writers other than Cornelia Funke. Maybe they could offer a gateway to young Anglophone readers' hearts and devices for translated fiction. If they're reckless enough, maybe.

GBO Editors' Trip

Every year, the German Book Office in New York invites a different group of North American editors on a jaunt around Germany. This year they've brought over people from independent publishing houses and  given them a packed schedule of visiting German publishers in Berlin and Frankfurt, looking at books and schmoozing with Germans. Yesterday, I was invited to their "all-day conference on the topics of new German literature and digital publishing". Actually I was invited to the first two-hour session, which was about translation, but I stayed all day.

It was exhausting. We all sat around a very large table and talked about translation from our various perspectives, which are a little different. So I learned that some German publishers are bringing out fewer translations now that they have to pay translators higher royalties and grant them higher shares of subsidiary rights, but others are just biting the bullet. The editor I was sitting next to was quite unhappy about it, but then I'm unhappy about the fact that German translators are still poorly paid, so we agreed to differ. One American editor said she couldn't possibly buy a book before reading it all the way through, which means sample translations are of limited use to her, but I think everyone got the message that it's not commercially viable for a German publisher to pay for a full translation into English on the chance that someone might buy it. Others are happy to work with readers, whom they have to trust, however. A reader has to have their own taste and also has to understand the publisher's taste and interests, and has to sum up the plot in case there are holes in it. So it's hard to find people to do that, especially as it's probably the worst-paid job ever. I quite enjoy writing reader's reports but I have to admit it's always tempting to big up a book in the hope of getting a translation commission out of it. I don't do that though. No, really.

One editor had just signed a Berlin-based writer whose forthcoming book I'm also in love with, and dashed out over lunch to meet him. Apparently he's very tall with amazing eyes and can fill a room with his presence. I envied her quite a lot. Another reads German himself and got as excited as I am about a classic novel that's been re-issued in its uncensored form. Or at least I hope so.

I talked about why the editing process is different for translations into English, because my editors rarely understand the original. We all agreed that those meddling writers shouldn't usually be involved in the translation process – it just upsets them too much. And I learned that editing and translating debut novels are similarly fraught. I suppose that should have been obvious in the first place. Fraught was the word of the session, in fact; many of the editors around the table seemed to feel slightly uncomfortable about translation, with the exception of those who publish nothing but translations. I think that's probably because they have to let go of the reins and trust the translator, who then goes away for months before they know what exactly they're getting. Yes, it would be scary. 

Later on we talked about trends in German publishing: what on earth counts as non-fiction, why there are so many incredibly long novels, what about philosophers and is their work more than self-help, have creative writing schools got out of hand, are the Germans fascinated by death and bowels, and why do they feel the need to invent fake foreigners? Talking about trends is always tricky, but what I liked about this session was that it (and the others) was moderated by Ed Nawotka from Publishing Perspectives, who didn't come to the table with his mind made up. At previous events on similar subjects, I've often faced German experts who have everything neatly packaged beforehand and don't leave much room for discussion. And then we talked about digital publishing, by which point I was rather tired. But that was OK because we were in a room full of professionals, who were quite open about their likes and dislikes and how much money they're making out of what.

There was some extra schmoozing tacked on the end with all sorts of other Berlin publishing people and then the group was whisked off to dinner. Here they all are in flattering light, getting upset about Hachette's acquisition of Perseus.

I enjoyed myself. I've met groups of editors from an international programme before and that's always been slightly intimidating, especially because they often seem more intent on getting to know each other than on getting to know the German publishing world, if you see what I mean. This group was more focused and friendlier and more willing to share. I hope they get a lot out of their trip, and obviously the German Book Office and I hope they'll snap up German titles and sell their own titles back. Many thanks to the tireless and ever-stylish Riky Stock for the invitation!

On Fans and (German) Fiction

My daughter is into fan fiction. I'm a bit hazy on the details, but she tells me there are all these kids out there who get really upset when their (book) series come to an end, so they write their own continuations and put them online. Which is fine by me. She tells me the girls call themselves fangirls, and she loved the novel of the same name by Rainbow Rowell. It's all a bit meta, huh?

Anyway, according to the Guardian, Simon & Schuster have bought rights to a fan fiction series about the boy band One Direction. My daughter pours scorn on anyone who likes One Direction, so I assume she hasn't read any of the 293 chapters of After. The publishers will be changing the names of the boy band members to avoid being sued. Because of course celebrities maybe don't like unofficial merchandising items that merely cash in on their fame but don't wash any extra pennies into their own pockets.

As we know from the case of the French novel in which a character looks like Scarlett Johansson but isn't her. Ms Johansson, the Guardian told us a few weeks ago, is suing. The writer Grégoire Delacourt apparently saw it as more of an homage and is very upset. It's all a little unsettling for German fiction writers, who have so far got away with this kind of behaviour. Simon Urban's Plan D works with all manner of real people as characters but was gone over with a fine-tooth comb by the Random House legal department before the English translation came out. And Tilman Rammstedt employs an imaginary Bruce Willis to save the day in his most recent novel, Die Abenteuer meines ehemaligen Bankberaters.

I'm not sure where the line can be drawn between fan fiction and fiction by fans – presumably being put on sale for money makes published books a different matter to online fan epics. But I do like the idea of interacting with characters both real and fictional by writing them into your own stories, not unlike those new James Bond books or the reworked Jane Austen novels by current writers. And changing the names of Bruce Willis or Scarlett Johannson would stop those two stories from working, because the point is that they stand for a particular quality – brute force and beauty – just as whatever the boys in One Direction are called stand for clean-cut pop stardom. Or like JMR Lenz stood, for Georg Bücher, for the tortured writer. I probably don't need to spell it out, right? It's fiction – get over it.

On a related note, the exciting Prosanova festival I didn't attend in Hildesheim last weekend put three German writers on stage together after asking them to comment on each others' texts. They called it #brandtlendlereich and it was supposed to add sound, scent and sight to the social reading process. Apparently, it worked. But I suspect that fan fiction (a very social form of reading and writing) already has enough readers without having to tap in to the young German literary scene.

Book Translation Life Cycle

People sometimes ask me how a book ends up in translation, and it's sometimes hard to explain. So I was pleased to see Publishing Trendsetter's infographic on the lifecycle of a book in translation. It's focused more on books moving from the US to other languages, but it applies to some extent to books going from other languages into English. Plus they have a few interesting little videos with players in that cycle, including with German-English translator Marshall Yarbrough.

I'd say in the other direction, for example German to English, you can strike literary scouts out of the equation and put translators in their place, because part of our role is pointing editors to German books. Also, there's a big overlap between translators and the readers who write reports for editors.

Interestingly, the American writer Kristin Harmel talks about trying make sure her books have universal appeal - Tim Parks will be pleased - but also says the money she makes out of foreign rights sales varies widely and isn't all that big a factor for her.

Daniel José Older on Diversity in Publishing

The American writer Daniel José Older has a depressing and inspiring piece at Buzzfeed about race, power and publishing in the U.S. Read it. He writes about the hurdles authors of colour have to jump to get published in America's white, middle-class dominated industry, about agents and editors who "can't relate" to characters who look different to them, about how an amorphous entity called The Market is blamed for the homogeneity of what gets into print. There are a lot of paragraphs that got my blood pumping (as did Older's great stories about working as a paramedic), but this is the one that made me think the most about the situation here in Germany:

We’re right to push for diversity, we have to, but it is only step one of a long journey. Lack of racial diversity is a symptom. The underlying illness is institutional racism. It walks hand in hand with sexism, cissexism, homophobia, and classism. To go beyond this same conversation we keep having, again and again, beyond tokens and quick fixes, requires us to look the illness in the face and destroy it. This is work for white people and people of color to do, sometimes together, sometimes apart. It’s work for writers, agents, editors, artists, fans, executives, interns, directors, and publicists. It’s work for reviewers, educators, administrators. It means taking courageous, real-world steps, not just changing mission statements or submissions guidelines.

So I'm thinking about diversity in German publishing, and remembering an article I wrote a few years ago about how the portrayal of "ethnic" characters in German literature is left up to writers with first-hand experience and whether that matters or not (I'm still not sure but I'd write that article differently now), and remembering a panel discussion on "the problem with homosexuality" and a recent publishing party, at which a couple of friends and I tried and failed to come up with a list of successful gay writers in German (it was towards the end of the evening – and define "successful" – but still). And of course I'm remembering the recent debate about the class backgrounds of Germany's creative writing students, which I felt hugely missed the point, possibly because Germans are not as willing to utter the word "class" as the British, for example.

I know too little about America but here's the thing about Germany: it is a country with extremely poor social mobility. The education system and the way the working world is structured mean that if you're born disadvantaged in some way, you're likely to stay that way. That's why it was a no-brainer for me that the kids who study creative writing at university level are from wealthier backgrounds. But here's the thing about publishing: you don't need a qualification to write a good book. Now I'm aware that publishing as an industry is more interested in making a profit than in making the world a better place. And individual publishing gatekeepers probably do unconsciously follow that behavioural pattern, at least some of the time, that keeps women out of positions of power: this person is like me, so I will support them; this person is not like me, so I will not actively support them. Call it human nature, call it the old boys' network, call it discrimination. However you refer to it, it makes the books that end up on shelves less diverse and, yes, to me, more boring – how many books in one season can be about aging white men lusting after younger women? A lot.

I was pleased when Hanser's new head Jo Lendle said he wants to publish more women, and I hope he and other gatekeepers, and you and I, can try harder to make publishing not only fairer but also more interesting. There is room for improvement.
  

Two Uncles or Not Two Uncles

Last night I attended a very open and friendly panel discussion kindly organized by Transfiction, which was about money in the era of digital publishing. The speakers – (digital) publishing people – talked a little about Amazon and their frustration at being unable to work around it. I won’t go into great detail about that except to say that I’m trying harder not to buy books from Amazon now.

What I found most interesting was a discussion about payment models. I asked why e-publishers are using different payment models to print publishers for exactly the same services, i.e. translation and editing. The answer, essentially, was that they don’t have enough money to pay advances.

Volker Oppmann was one of the panelists, and told an interesting story. He set up the publishing house Onkel& Onkel in 2007 with a loan from his two uncles; hence the name. Apparently he paid it back recently after selling his other business, Textunes, to Thalia. My friend Nikola Richter (Mikrotext) said that new publishers don’t have the backlist income that established (print) publishers have, but that small publishers of all kinds pay smaller or no advances. I would argue that this is not necessarily the case in the UK, but we weren’t talking specifically about the UK. And Zoe Beck of Culturbooks said that what e-book publishers are investing is their time, which amounts to money. They’re experimenting to find ways to pay translators (I assume editing is done for free by members of the team) such as 100% royalties up to a certain cut-off point. They’re also, as far as I understand, only commissioning translators for short books.

The situation is difficult for me to deal with, as a professional translator. On the one hand, I’m excited by all these experiments and the idealism with which they’re being undertaken. Nikola pointed out that e-publishers are bringing out books of unusual lengths and with unusual content that otherwise wouldn’t be published at all – although Zoe (an author and translator as well as a new publisher) didn’t reflect on e-publishers’ role in her own point that writers are earning less through royalties now that publishers are bringing out more books. Although I see it as a good thing, more choice, including digital reading matter, means smaller shares of the pie.

On the other hand – and what comes next is not going to make me many friends, I suspect – I see translators as less attached to the literature we produce than the writers themselves are. My work contributes to the quality of the product but it’s not the only factor; the writer thinks up the plot and the characters, for instance. So while it may be acceptable to an author that she will be paid after the fact and depending on how well her book sells, I personally am not willing to take that risk. While my task is a creative one, I am usually commissioned by publishers to translate books they have selected. According to my logic, they should then assume the financial risk for that decision. I personally am not in a position to work without being paid a fixed sum to compensate for my time.

E-only publishing in Germany is at a very early stage. The way I see it, at the moment people are starting their own e-publishing houses with a great deal of enthusiasm but very little capital. It now seems possible to publish without borrowing money beforehand, because the costs of printing, storage and physical distribution have fallen away. And so the other costs – writing, translation, editing, design, etc. – must be got around too, by means of “investing time”.

Again, I’m torn. I think it’s a good thing that people without two uncles willing to lend them money can publish books. But if in doing so, they require others to assume part of the publisher’s traditional risk, my worry is that only those with two uncles willing to subsidize their creative lifestyles will be able to participate further down the line. I say this as a person with three uncles, none of whom is in a position to lend anyone money. And I say it at a time when we’ve actually achieved a situation in which someone like me can make a living, more or less, out of literary translation.

My hope for the future is that e-publishers will end up making enough money to use the payment models employed by traditional publishers. My worst fear in this respect, however, is that traditional publishers will pick up on these new payment models and try to use them too. In my disaster scenario, that would mean that translators (and editors, writers, designers, etc.) without two uncles could only afford to work on books that promised high sales figures. And that would not be good for literature.

(New) German Publishers' Blogs

For quite some time, German publishers were thoroughly old-school. That meant they were not only very wary of electronic formats, but also quite shy of the internet and especially bloggers. That's been changing gradually, with the advent of reading platforms like lovelybooks.de and vorablesen.de – which I don't like personally but a lot of publishers seem to appreciate – with videos embedded via zehnseiten.de – which I do like but rarely watch – and recently with official guidelines for book bloggers interested in review copies. Suhrkamp, for example, has a special page of Information for Bloggers with a slightly patronising list of suggested titles.

So it seems like that sea change has come; it's now officially OK to request review copies if you're a book blogger. And since around the last book fair, a few major publishers have even launched their own blogs. Publishers' blogs are never going to be impartial, but it would be nice if they offered readers a little something extra that's not on the standard website. Do they? A road test.

Let's start with the much-feted Kiepenheuer & Witsch blog. So far it's mostly extracts from a translated book (Craig Brown's Hello Goodbye Hello), an interview with KiWi author Alina Bronsky by Isabel Bogdan, a couple of book-industry glosses and recycled speeches and two photos of pages from the publisher's notebook, annotated by the tech-savvier young'uns. There doesn't seem to be much character shining through as yet – Moby Lives it ain't.

Suhrkamp brings us the slightly more excitingly named Logbuch - deutschsprachige Literatur heute. I think they can just about get away with the title because they do actually feature a couple of writers (three out of fourteen) not published by Suhrkamp. It's more interesting than the KiWi blog because the writers are writing themselves, book industry stuff and diaries and other short pieces. I enjoyed Marion Poschmann on beauty, even though it could have been longer. They've also re-used a couple of making-of videos about Clemens J. Setz's last novel that were previously on a different Suhrkamp site, and an editor has an unfortunately-named column with the word daily in the title, last published on the 11th of November. Plus large numbers of apparently random photos. This one is certainly using all kinds of formats and has a fair amount of material to offer already, but I feel a bit cheated by the whole "German-language literature today" thing.

Thirdly there's hundertvierzehn, which promises a peek behind the doors of S. Fischer Verlag (114 is their house number). Endearingly, the head honcho has written a welcome letter. This one has a lot of background material on Fischer books and authors, including video interviews with Ai Weiwei, Clemens Meyer and Felicitas Hoppe (the last two in the manner of Hubert Fichte!), an audio interview with Anne Frank's German translator and writer Miriam Pressler, darling postcards from writers to their editors, a short essay by Uda Strätling on re-translating Brave New World, links to songs Thomas von Steinaecker listens to, and a tiny amount of recycled stuff (from the house literary magazine Neue Rundschau - but at least they tell us that). I like this one best because it's both quirky and intelligent – except there's no comment function.

There are others, even some that have been going for several years, and no doubt a few I'm not aware of. What I'd like, ideally, is a publishing-house blog written with wit and covering all sorts of bases. We all know the purpose is to drum up interest in their products and make us think they care about us, the readers. So it's fine for publishers to focus on their own authors as long as they're open about it, but I'd like to hear from others like editors, trainees, translators, illustrators, and so on. Which is why I'm a fan of the mairisch Verlagsblog with it's terrifyingly honest series about what a publishing house actually does. My friends at mairisch have the advantage that they're a small house with a small catalogue, and the disadvantage that they all have day jobs. What they've managed to do is make a blog with a big personality that is always fun to read, albeit with less frequent entries.

It's early days yet for the major houses' ventures into book blogging. I hope they add more exciting posts and interesting ideas, and I hope they're not the kind of projects that require people who don't care about them to provide content, which can over ever end up lacklustre. Certainly, they all look very pretty.

Can I Quote You on That?

I am wary of summing up pending German court cases - one reason why I'm steering a wide berth around the whole Suhrkamp bankruptcy/ownership/management thing. But here's one I now think I understand.

The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is suing the online book retailer buch.de over their use of FAZ reviews on their website. The argument being - I believe - that this constitutes commercial use and they therefore ought to pay the newspaper. A number of critics found this rather disturbing, not least because they rarely see a penny from other commercial re-use of their work. Publishers, meanwhile, were up in arms.

What would this mean for book covers, if all of a sudden they weren't allowed to use quotes from newspaper reviews? Surely no paperback blurb is complete without several lines of critical praise? And what about publishers' websites? Would they have to delete those long lists of reviews attached to each of their books' pages? The German book trade association advised its members to take them down until the case comes to court.

Now the FAZ has clarified that it didn't mean publishers, silly, according to the trade mag Börsenblatt. Apparently it's fine for them to use quotes of up to 25 consecutive words without even asking first. Isn't that kind of them? So if you do it to sell books, it's OK, but if you do it to sell books, it's not OK.

What I find more disruptive for my own work, although I do understand why it's happening, is that German newspapers are increasingly putting their reviews behind paywalls. I do a job for the German literary translators' association that consists of tracking down online reviews of translations, feature articles about translators and our work, press and radio reports on literary translation, etc. and compiling a list of links once a month. And whereas all the major papers still put news online for free, the accessible reviews are becoming few and far between. So while I do use short quotes from press reviews, they're rarely from the FAZ anyway because they and the Süddeutsche Zeitung are the worst of the paywallers. It seems that news and click-bait comes for free but arts coverage is something we have to pay for directly. Ah well. I only hope the critics are making a living out of it.

That Very Exciting Thing: Readux!

The big day has come: the yummy new Readux website is live! Feast your eyes on the first four teeny books to go on sale in October. There's an original essay by Gideon Lewis-Krauss, whom I once accidentally called a nerd to his face. There's Swedish fiction from Malte Persson (trans. Saskia Vogel). And there are two classic 1929 pieces on Berlin by Franz Hessel (trans. Amanda DeMarco). Yes, he was indeed Stéphane's father but he was also a fabulous writer and flaneur.

Most exciting for me, as you might imagine, is my translation of Francis Nenik's The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping. It has been so very hard not to splurge this all over the internet, but now I can. Hooray! I absolutely adore this little book and I hope you will too. It's an award-winning piece of writing that will melt the hearts of all those who care about poets and also confuse you, I very much hope. I went out drinking with Francis Nenik in March, by the way.

Please join me in being very excited about this new venture to publish great writing in small packages, focusing on translation. 

(Full disclosure: Amanda DeMarco of Readux Books is sitting opposite me right now. But you should still go to the website and you should still buy all four books in October and also all the later books she publishes. I am biased but I do have good taste.)

Michael Krüger Complains (Part XIV)

Ah, Michael Krüger. Such a grumpy old curmudgeon - you've gotta love him. My friend Amanda DeMarco interviewed him for Publishing Perspectives, where he exudes pessimism on all sorts of subjects: who should have won a Nobel prize, bad books, American publishing, and this little gem on his successor as head of the Hanser publishing house:

Jo Lendle was chosen by the board of Carl Hanser Verlag. He is a young, good-looking, educated and friendly person, so I hope that Hanser made the right choice.

Introducing Readux Books

My lovely friend Amanda DeMarco is an awe-inspiring person. Not only has she very recently introduced me to bourbon, she's also just announced she's launching a publishing house, Readux Books. Come October you'll be able to read the first four teeny books (small format, 32–64 pp.) either in beautiful print editions or electronically. And most of them will be translations! Including from German!

I'm very excited indeed about this. I actually know what most of the books will be but I don't think I'm supposed to tell you. What I'm sure I am allowed to say is that they're going to be fantastic and you'll be licking your literary lips at the very thought of them. I know I am.

Michael Krüger on Translations in the USA

Michael Krüger is the publisher at Hanser Verlag, probably one of Germany's most serious publishing houses. He's about to retire (at 70) and he's one of those people men I see as representing a bygone age in the book world. That has its pros and cons, I'll admit. I get a sense that he and his generation took literature very seriously indeed and were loathe to publish anything they might have considered trashy. Profit was not the only thing they had in mind. At the same time, publishing was more of a closed shop and not terribly open to women. I remember Krüger's protests that Elisabeth Ruge couldn't possibly take over from him - because she has children.

Krüger occasionally sits down at his desk and talks to a camera. The resulting video is available on Hanser's new-fangled youtube channel. I rarely watch these talking-head videos of his because I feel uncomfortable about the apparently authoritative nature of his pronouncements. It's like this, he tells us, and I'm the man who's telling you it. Again, I think this is a common phenomenon among men of his generation, let's say. But anyway, this time he talks about the woeful lack of translations in the USA and how all German writers want to get their books translated into English but nobody wants to publish them. In case you like that kind of thing. It's interesting as an insight into how a German publisher sees the American publishing world, although you might not feel terribly cheerful after watching it.

What (German)(Indie) Publishers Do (and German Wine)

The lovely people at Mairisch Verlag have a blog, which is in German. And they've now started a regular feature about what publishers do. The first episode is about manuscripts and editing - why they don't take unsolicited manuscripts any more, what writers can do instead, and what their work as editors entails. Fun.

Also, if you have £80 to spare and live in London - and let's face it, you can probably only afford to live in London if you're the kind of person with £80 to spare - and you like wine, why not sign up for a course on German wines at the Goethe Institut? Apparently you get to take the glasses home with you - but the wine itself you have to transport inside your stomach, I suspect.

How to Learn to Write?

There is a great deal of scepticism in Germany about creative writing schools and courses. Two universities offer highly respected degree courses, but older writers and critics are often very rude about their graduates. I suspect they're envious. There are of course plenty of the "release your inner novel"-type correspondence courses that advertise on the back pages of magazines, although I know nothing about them whatsoever.

But what I'm noticing now is a number of shorter courses taught by bigger-name writers and professionals. There's the Schreibschule am Meer where a friend of mine teaches crime writing. They also offer a week combining sailing and writing, not something I'd want to do at the same time. Oddly they don't offer translation courses even though Paulina Schulz, who runs the school, is an experienced translator. Perhaps fewer people are interested in joining the glamorous world of translation.

And now publishers are setting up their own courses. I think it probably started with Ullstein Open House, a one-day extravaganza of their top-selling writers talking about/teaching about their work for a smallish fee. Now there's the Bastei-Lübbe Academy, complete with the tagline "This is where your story starts..." They seem to be offering courses lasting several days on all sorts of subjects, taught by writers and editors of historical fiction, paranormal love stories, thrillers, fantasy, TV scripts, and all manner of other genre stuff. Deutschlandradio has an interview with one of the authors involved, Mario Giordano, asking that rather tired question of whether writing can be taught but also some other more interesting things.

Would you like my two cents? I think one of the reasons why creative writing courses aren't as widespread in Germany as in the English-speaking world is that authors here have other ways of making a living than teaching. To wit: public funding via grants, and high reading fees. Having begun to lead translation workshops myself, I know that this kind of teaching is hard work. I get a huge amount out of it for my own work and I enjoy it a great deal but it's tiring. It requires preparation and your full attention for several days at a time. Whereas reading aloud from the same book - very possibly the same passage - and then answering possibly vacuous questions a number of times over in different places is arguably less strenuous. Having said that, I suspect there's some demand for these types of courses. Whether they're any good I can't possibly judge - but it makes sense to me to take a course with someone who's published several erotic novels, for instance, if you want to go in that direction yourself. And yes, of course you can teach creative writing. But it's probably just like teaching mathematics - there are some students (and some teachers) who are going to end up doing better than others.

All this is kind of building up to me telling you about a course in London, Peirene Press's Masterclass on the art of the novella. Meike Ziervogel's rapidly expanding European novella empire is now branching out into teaching creative writing. You have to read three of their excellent novellas, including FC Delius's outstanding Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, and then spend the weekend doing the workshop with tutor Shelley Weiner. I love the way there's no apologising for the fact that these books are translated - they're positive examples of good writing, full stop. Now I wonder whether one of the translators might be involved in future masterclasses...

German Publishing Excitement

Two publishing things, one of which I don't even remotely comprehend. And that is: Suhrkamp. As far as I understand it, the minority shareholder wants to get rid of the majority shareholder, who actually runs the place. And because she hired out her private home to the publishing house at a hefty fee, the courts have ordered her to pay €280,000 to the company in damages. And for another reason that I don't understand, the courts have removed her from the board, I think. Only she's appealing, so she's still there. Most people seem to be rather flummoxed by it all, but let's hope they sort it out and carry on making good books. Apparently the litigious minority dude is willing to negotiate. If you're a Bookseller subscriber, this piece may shed more light on the matter.

Update: wonderfully as ever, Amanda DaMarco sums up the situation at Publishing Perspectives.

The other thing is easy: Michael Krüger, head honcho at Germany's other super-highbrow publishing house Hanser, is retiring at the end of next year. You may remember his comments about the difficulties of finding a replacement last year, if only because they were incredibly sexist. Elisabeth Ruge, he said at the time, was unsuitable because she had two children. So now they've announced who'll be replacing him as managing director, and it's Jo Lendle. Yes, that Jo Lendle, the good-book-writing boss-man at DuMont Verlag. Jo Lendle, as far as I'm aware, has two children. Not that I don't think he deserves it, but still, I felt I ought to point it out.

Update: I just realised: it wasn't up to Krüger who got the job anyway. 

Lowest Common Denominator Marketing? That's What Friends Are For

You might be on Facebook, dear reader. You might "like" German publishers. You might be amazed at some of the things they get up to there.

It's not so much the persistent cat content-level crap - the photos of wacky bookshelves, the "Today is international chocolate day. Thumbs up who likes chocolate!!! ;-)"-type like-grabbing that makes publishers look interchangeable with any other commercial enterprise. Because let's face it, many publishers are interchangeable with any other commercial enterprise. I think what bothers me most is the apparent need to get in your face at least once a day, regardless of whether they have anything to report. You'll often get news-related posts, which aren't always well thought out. My favourites so far have been "International Writers in Prison Day - buy our calendar" and "Hurricane Sandy floods New York - buy our book about New York subway stations". I'm waiting for "Bubonic Plague hits Calcutta - buy our book on beautiful Indian textiles".

I'm noticing this extra specially much at the moment, because it's advent. The Germans make a big fucking deal out of advent. You're supposed to make decorations out of fir trees and candles and hang them on your front door. You're supposed to know how many Sundays there are until your annual church visit on Christmas Eve and count them down using more candles and fir trees, wishing people a "good second Sunday before Christmas" in a cheery way. And of course you're supposed to have an advent calendar, preferably one you made yourself when you were six out of raffia and cotton wool. Good parents will put little healthy treats in 24 cloth bags on a string for their healthy children. So of course good publishers want to give their Facebook fans saccharine crap once a day throughout December.

Now I'm not naming names here, but you'd be surprised at the levels to which publishers I'd previously considered highbrow will sink. They'd have you making up rhymes and guessing the number of chocolates left in the box and sending in photos of your cat in order to win a free book. Publishing people! Just because we're pathetically addicted to social networking, you don't have to treat us like idiots! Actually, there is an exception to prove the rule (now that was the turn of phrase I was looking for last time): Literaturverlag Droschl, which is giving us tiny soundbites from its books once a day. Like.

German Hits Fifty

As I learned at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Goethe Institut reserves 15% of its literary translation funding for supporting translations into English. The idea, I assume, is that when a book makes it into English it can serve as a bridge to other languages. Also for some reason, English is often considered a prestigious language so making it into English suggests a book is really good, at least to people who subscribe to the language hierarchy view. I'd guess it would also suggest to publishers that a book could be a commercial success, seeing as English-language publishing is a pretty cut-throat business. Whatever the case, 2011 was the first year in which they spent all that 15% budget. Hooray!

And you can see why at Three Percent: There are fifty first-time translations from German being published in the USA in 2012, up from 39 last year. Why? That's trickier. One reason is Seagull Books with their German and Swiss lists, but that only accounts for five extra books. AmazonCrossing has also done eleven titles from German rather than ten last year, mainly genre fiction I believe. There's also been a 4% increase in total translations published, suggesting to this eternal optimist right here that US publishers are becoming more daring. Possibly it's all down to the huge numbers of Americans in Berlin right now, only a fraction of whom actually speak German (anecdotal evidence only). Maybe everyone in US publishing has a friend in the city and their trips to the Panorama Bar make them more disposed to commission translations of German books.