Book fairs. Literally, the great meeting places
This is the statement that Mauro Mazza, Extraordinary Commissioner for Italy’s participation as Guest of Honour at the 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair, shared from the stage of the Più libri più liberi (also known as Rome Book Fair), the National Fair for Small and Medium Publishing, during the event held in Rome this past 6 December. This was from a discussion between different members of the publishing world, moderated by journalist Loretta Cavaricci from RaiNews24, in anticipation of what will also be a meeting in October of two countries, Italy and Germany, naturally united by a century-old cultural tradition.
“The origins of the Frankfurt Fair date back to 1436”, recalls President Juergen Boos. So, the motto “Roots in the Future” equally applies to the history of the Book Fair: a precious heritage inherited over time and a look to tomorrow in the name of a culture that knows how to be “choral, diverse and plural", as Commissioner Mazza hopes, and that knows how to meet the challenges that new media and new readers are urgently posing.
Newspapers, TV, web, trade fairs – what really matters?
The question is pressing upon all actors in the supply chain and concerns the strategies needed to engage an ever-increasing number of readers in a profoundly changed media landscape. Namely, one wonders, in particular, what can the role of trade fairs be in book promotion today.
"I strongly believe in the experiential value of trade fairs. The fairs serve to create and strengthen the book community and build a loyal relationship to reading", says Annamaria Malato, President of Più libri più liberi.
“Frankfurt is not a place where you sell products, but where you make stories visible, and that means showing the people behind the stories: the writers, the translators and anyone who contributes to the process behind the scenes. It also means bringing readers into contact with the authors”, says President Juergen Boos.
A conception of the fair as a meeting place, first and foremost, that puts all the participants in the Roman debate in agreement, not only because literary festivals traditionally offer a conspicuous number of events aimed at shortening the distance between insiders and the public, but also because the promotional methods have changed significantly, and it is the public itself that loudly asks (almost demands) the writer to be there and to reveal themselves. Readers want to get to know the author not only through the pages of their books, but they want to look them in the eye. They want interviews, they want a contact that social media has made incredibly possible, not to say indispensable. A good thing? A bad thing?
Seven seconds or seven chapters?
It is a phenomenon that started with generalist television, as Commissioner Mazza notes: "The first seven chapters no longer matter, but the first seven seconds”.
A phenomenon that transforms language by imprinting it with increasing “emotionality” and which implies the need, equally incumbent upon authors, to put 'their body and face' into it, claims Roberta Scorranese, journalist for the Corriere della Sera. It is a constant demand for constant presence that doesn't always have a positive impact – the writer’s personality risks overshadowing the quality of their work – but which is a crucial issue that needs to be confronted.
"Luckily there are fairs, where there are books and we can see them and browse through them and then, we can also meet the writers," Scorranese reiterates.
The gift of ubiquity
If the traditional mechanisms for promoting a book have changed radically in the last twenty years, as RAI journalist Giorgio Zanchini well illustrates, if once all it took was a couple of authoritative press reviews, a few radio and television interviews, and the author could say they had completed their task, "today everyone has to preside over all channels, physical and digital, and be present to the point of ubiquity, but..." Zanchini goes on to stress, "promotion and sales are not the same thing. "Promoting books also means spreading ideas, and that’s what trade fairs do."
The narrative forests of Frankfurt
Frankfurt will then be like this: a whirlwind of ideas to make the pages fly, many handshakes to forge symbolic - even before economic - links with the book object, a great desire for Italy, an invitation to go for a stroll, to echo Umberto Eco (the author who was a main character in Frankfurt in 1988, the last time Italy was Guest of Honour), in our narrative forests, to then stop for dialogue in the square imagined by architect Stefano Boeri, the place where tradition and innovation will meet and where, in Commissioner Mazza’s words, it will still be possible to "think big" literally, and not just virtually.