The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business

Explore the production of bestsellers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, through an investigation involving three consecutive years of fieldwork.

Beth Driscoll (Author), Claire Squires (Author)

9781108928106, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 October 2020

75 pages
18 x 12.5 x 0.5 cm, 0.1 kg

'The Frankfurt Book Fair is surely the most inventive of such postcritical inquiries into the making of culture, a book-about-books that should generate rich insights …' Toby Bennett, Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the leading global industry venue for rights sales, facilitating business-to-buzzness deals and international networks. In this Element, we pursue an Ullapoolist approach to excavate beneath the production of bestsellers at the Fair. Our investigation involved three consecutive years of fieldwork (2017–2019) including interviews and autoethnographic, arts-informed interventions. The Element argues that buzz at the Fair exists in two states: as market-ready media reports and partial, lived experiences linked to mood. The physical structures and absences of the Fair enact its power relations and direct the flow of books and buzz. Further, the Fair is not only a site for commercial exchange but a carnival of sorts, marked by disruptive historical events and problematic socio-political dynamics. Key themes emerging from the Element are the presence of excess, the pseudo(neo)liberal self-satisfaction of book culture, and the interplay of optimism and pessimism in contemporary publishing.

Introduction – Flight Paths
1. Book Buzz
2. Big, Small, Nowhere at All
3. Carnivalesque
Conclusion – The Broom of History.

Subject Areas: Publishing industry & book trade [KNTP], Press & journalism [KNTJ], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary theory [DSA], Literature & literary studies [D]