Feature Market Focus Talking Turkey


Felicity Wood speaks to some of the key players in Turkish publishing to understand why UK publishers should pay more attention to this booming market


UNLIKE MANY OF its European counterparts, Turkey’s economy is booming—between 2002 and 2011 its GDP has grown by an average annual rate of 5.2%. Alongside this the literary landscape in Turkey is changing too—translations into and out of Turkey have increased, the number of titles published each year has increased, distribution networks have become more sophisticated, online retail has blossomed, and slowly but surely censorship issues are starting to improve. With Turkey this year’s Market


Focus country at the London Book Fair the two publishing associations in Turkey—the Turkish Publishers Association (TPA) and the Turkish Press and Publications Association (TPPA)—have one goal in mind: the increased translation of Turkish authors into English. Münir Üstün, president of the TPPA, says: “Te bottom line is we want Turkish books to be translated into English. We want them to reach the wider audience we think they deserve.” His counterpart at the TPA, Metin Celâl Zeynioğlu, agrees: “Te relationship


between Turkey and the UK is very one-sided—close to 35% of books in Turkey are books in translation, and of that 35%, 85% are from the UK and US. We are bringing 20 Turkish writers to LBF, and if we can turn around that one-sided track then it will have been a success. Since the TEDA programme (a translation fund for international publishers) was launched, the number of Turkish authors that have been translated into other languages has grown immensely. Around 1,000 books have been translated, but not enough have been translated into English—less than 15 grants have been awarded to UK publishers—and I hope we can overcome that problem.” So, why aren’t Turkish authors as


popular in the UK as they are in other European countries, such as France and Germany? For Müge Gürsoy Sökmen, the co-founder of Metis Publications—which publishes 40–50 titles a year by Turkish authors such as Murathan Mungan, Bilge Karasu and Fethiye Çetin, and authors in translation including Roberto Bolaño and J R R Tolkein—it is a running joke that both US and UK publishers only want “carpets and hashish”. She explains: “UK and US publishers are used to the world living in their language and within their idea of how the world is, so


figures” Can Öz, general manager, Can Publishing


16 THE BOOKSELLER DAILY AT LBF | 15 APRIL 2013


a problem of Turkish authors not being accepted as universal literary


Tere seems to be


publishers are used to the world living in


UK and US


their language” Müge Gürsoy Sökmen, co-founder, Metis Publications


often we offer a book to a publisher and we are told it is ‘not Turkish enough’.” It is something that fellow publisher Can Öz, the general manger of Can Publishing, agrees with: “Tere is a connectivity issue, it is quite tough because there seems to be a problem of Turkish authors not being accepted as universal literary figures. Many authors will complain about being expected to write something ‘oriental’ and not being able to just write literature like any other author from Europe.”


Knowledge is key In Turkey itself, the bestseller list closely resembles that of the UK and the US—although last year’s bestselling book was İsim Şehir Hayvan by Yılmaz Özdil, a columnist at the Hürriyet newspaper. Recently elected to the TPA, Öz explains that, censorship issues aside, it is as complicated a domestic market as it is an international one, with the lack of national market research impacting on publishers. “Te Turkish domestic market is similar to markets across Europe in that crime and thriller titles take around a fifth of frontlist sales, and there has been a rise in sales of the children’s genre and increased popularity in current


affairs titles—but frontlist sales are becoming less and less important. “At the end of 2001 Turkish


publishers across the board became a bit more professional, so there has been a huge traffic of imported books being published in the past 10 years, and these backlist titles are taking a bigger and bigger part of the market everyday compared to frontlist titles. Publishers are investing much more in publishing frontlist titles—the number of titles published last year was 41,000 (up from about 20,000 five years ago)—but it is increasing in a market that is actually getting smaller,” Öz says. “Te problem is that we don’t have


accurate market research. Lack of market knowledge is a huge problem. We don’t know how individual segments are doing and 99% of publishers are not big enough to do their own, they’re shooting blind. Te TPA doesn’t, but I was elected in the last election and that’s my primary aim, to do something altogether and publish it. “Te information Nielsen gives us is


not as accurate as it could be, because retailers don’t necessarily feed in all the information and publishers tend not to be public companies, so they don’t give out all their data.”


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