Profiles A whistle-stop tour of key Turkish literati


Felicity Wood gets an inside look at the issues facing the Turkish publishing industry from some of its major players


Turkey feast


will be when the real Amazon comes to Turkey. Publishers had the chance to work


with a local partner that had a totally different model and that chance has now been lost. If they had established a widespread model here they would have more power to compete with Amazon, the moment Amazon comes they won’t have any bargaining power.”


Mehmet Inhan, general manager of Idefix ,Turkey’s leading books e-tailer “We started at almost the same time as Amazon—but we started in Turkey and they started in the US so things have gone a little differently. Te e-book adventure in Turkey has been slow and sluggish—we have around 350 publishers which have joined in the e-book transformation, but that is out of around 1,700, so the proportion is still very low. Around 5,500 titles have been


converted into e-pub, but there are around 180,000 print titles in our catalogue. About 43,000 books are published each year, so our e-book range is still very low. As to why this is the case, it is a riddle I am trying to understand. We offer free e-pub conversion but publishers are still reluctant to deal with things like changing contracts and digital piracy. Te stance of the two publishing


associations on digital has not been that helpful really. At the start we went to them and asked them to help us with contracts for publishers, so that we all have a healthy start. Our current contracts have been drafted with them and we went down the agency model route, but as soon as we opened the e-book shop, they didn’t join us. So, the real problem


8 THE BOOKSELLER DAILY AT LBF | 17 APRIL 2013


Elif Bereketli, editor-in-chief of SabitFikir, Turkey’s newest literary magazine “In the UK and US there is a culture of lively, highly illustrated, young literary magazines but in Turkey that was not the case. So, we wanted to have fun with SabitFikir and we’re pleased to be a part of a new, vibrant, independent scene. We have organised literary events with the Museum of Modern Art, getting


authors to discuss certain issues each month—these types of events were really novel for Turkey—and they drew in crowds of 700 people at a time, which is huge for Turkey. In Turkey we have freedom of


speech issues all the time, so as a magazine we are really interested in that debate—we questioned the censorship commission, and it was the first time in Turkish history that they had given an interview, so that was huge for us.”


Amy Spangler, agent and co-founder of the AnatoliaLit Agency “Most authors in Turkey only have an agent for foreign rights but I see that situation changing soon. We have already begun signing authors for domestic rights as well. I find that authors and publishers are increasingly open to this, and I think eventually, in the not-so-distant future, we will find a greater demand for this, on both sides. It’s a very dynamic market here


right now. We see established publishers growing and new publishers blossoming all the time. Given the size of the population, average print-runs remain relatively low on the whole, though there has been growth in this respect in recent years and we have every reason to believe that print-runs will increase. Personally I’m excited about


Murat Belge, writer, columnist and literary critic “We have writers that deserve to be translated and it is beginning to happen. It is important that is does because our authors are writing about issues that need to be communicated. It sounds like I am complaining about the lack of interest from the world in Turkey, but more often I complain about the lack of interest in Turkey for the outside world; we have an ‘Iron Curtain’ mentality whereby the rest if the world is the enemy. We are a country with a lot of problems; enough to keep people going each day without growing more aware of the world and the process of modernisation has contributed to that.”


many of our literary fiction authors—Leylâ Erbil (pictured below) is a pioneering author whose latest title, A Strange Man, is being published this month, more than 50 years after the appearance of her first book. She remains incredibly daring and avant-garde, and has proven with A Strange Man that she has not lost any of her fire or any of her bite. Yavuz Ekinci’s latest novel, Te Lost Lands of Paradise, published late last year, is about a family in south-eastern Turkey and through a heart-wrenching tale paints a striking portrait of the region. It is the first of its kind in the way that it addresses the Kurdish issue and the Armenian genocide from a very genuine place, and I am hoping that it finds a readership abroad.”


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