IN DEPTH


Deals of FBF past Der Mushensometer kommt zurück


Deals of FBF past


Due to overwhelming public demand, Tom Tivnan dusts off the Mushensometer as it returns to gauge the successes (and failures) of books that have been signed at the Messe during the course of Frankfurt Book Fairs in recent years


KEY THE JULIET MUSHENS-INSPIRED MUSHENSOMETER BOOK OF THE FAIR SIZZLIN’ SO HOT RIGHT NOW LUKEWARM MEH


FBF 2015 Young guns Andornino and Macdougall are Hogan’s heroes Three early career folk combined for one of the hits of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2015, as Laura Macdougall at Tibor Jones—in her first major deal after crossing the


aisle to agenting—sold début author Ruth Hogan’s The Keeper of Lost Things to Federico Andornino, it was his first buy at John Murray imprint Two Roads. The book club novel went in seven more territories during the course of the fair and has now been translated into more than 40 languages, while selling in excess of a million units globally. Macdougall later moved to United Agents and was Nibbie-shortlisted for the Literary Agent of the Year in 2022; in January Andornino was tabbed to lead Hodder’s Sceptre imprint.


MUSHENSOMETER


FBF 2018 Fort knocked? Hachette’s not quite alright on the ‘nite The most exciting deal for some at FBF 2018 (OK, me) was Hachette’s UK, US, French and Spanish branches combining to ink a multi-year agreement with Epic Gaming for tie-ins to


wildly popular shoot-em-up “Fortnite”. It seemed a good bet: “Fortnite” was (and remains) a phenomenon and hugely lucrative—an anti-trust suit Epic filed against Apple revealed it made $9bn from Fortnite in 2017 and ’18. And the tie-in template was obvi- ously Egmont’s previous success with “Minecraft”. But perhaps “Minecraft”’s contemplative play was better suited to books than “Fortnite”’s battles: the 18 Official Fortnite UK releases between 2019 and 2022 earned a respectable but not stratospheric £750,000 through Nielsen BookScan.


MUSHENSOMETER


FBF 2021 Rebecca rules a mostly empty Messe Remember Frankfurt 2021? You may not, as only a few hardy (foolhardy?) souls made the trek out in that pandemic-truncated year. But there was still rights trading to be had, with one Bookseller Daily deal concerning up-and-coming fantasy author Rebecca F Kuang’s transition to liter- ary fiction, Yellowface, being snapped up by HarperVoyager’s Natasha Bardon and The Borough Press’ Ann Bissell (as well as by May Chen at William Morrow in the US). The story mentioned Bardon had previously acquired Kuang’s Babel, which would precede Yellowface to publication. You know what happened next: Babel was a 2022 smash and part of the reason Bardon and HarperVoyager would win the 2023 Nibbie for Editor and Imprint of the Year; Yellowface, meanwhile, has become one of this year’s biggest global hits.


MUSHENSOMETER TheBookseller.com


FBF 2015 A Grecian earn: Varoufakis stars for Bodley Head An unexpected effect of the post- credit-crunch era of the late Noughties to mid-2010s were the occasional international smashes by heretofore obscure to the general reader econo- mists or policy wonks—for instance, Thomas Piketty with Capital. So, it was perhaps not entirely leftfield that a big hit at Frankfurt 2015 was the cascade of “significant deals” for the anti-austerity critique by the former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis, including being snapped up in the UK by The Bodley Head and the in US by Perseus. Varoufakis’ first English-language accessible trade title, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, was a hit which was then exceeded by the second book in the deal, Talking to my Daughter About the Economy. All told, Varoufakis has shifted £3.2m through BookScan UK.


MUSHENSOMETER


FBF 2016 Fiction readers don’t embrace Cable’s Open Arms With British fairgoers still reeling from the Brexit vote in 2016, one of the people who may have ironically brought it about—senior Liberal Democrat Vince Cable, whose Euro-leaning party ensured the Tories attained power in 2010, which eventually led to the referendum— featured on the front page of The Bookseller Daily. The former business secretary was turning his hand to novels, with Atlantic (which had published his successful non-fiction) acquiring world rights to Open Arms, a “fast-paced geopolitical” thriller promising to lean heavily on Cable’s insider knowledge of the corridors of power. Alas, just 1,800 copies have been sold through BookScan UK since, though that does not include the merch stalls at Liberal Democrat conferences, which might add a dozen or so units to the total.


MUSHENSOMETER


FBF 2010 Dunseath and Walker’s chicken shop date When writing this story at the time I remember feeling the press release was a hoax, but one Frankfurt 2010 deal was Weidenfeld’s Kirsty Dunseath plumping for a book from global superstar Alice Walker on… raising chickens. Yes, that would be The Color Purple Alice Walker, not an Alice Walker who might run a farm-to-table, Michelin-starred restaurant in the Cotswolds. But real it was, sold in the UK by David Higham’s Anthony Goff on behalf of Wendy Weil. To be fair, The Chicken Chronicles was probably ahead of its time as a memoir that also takes in themes of sustainability, environmentalism, race and class would be bang on-trend in an FBF 2023 submission. The book was favourably reviewed (Kirkus: “illuminating and wonderfully wacky”) but alas it only sold 1,800 copies in the UK after its 2011 release.


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Photography: Vince Cable © Shutterstock


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