The Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency had a packed but wonderful time at the Bologna and London Book Fairs this year selling rights to international publishers worldwide.
The Children’s Book Fair, held every year in Bologna, came first and we attended for a short but intense three days. Meetings mostly took place at the stands of all the different foreign publishing houses we were presenting to, giving us a fascinating snapshot of the types of books that were trending across the globe and how different publishing houses presented their publications. We obviously had the occasional mandatory ice-cream break to regain our strengths in between meetings, of course.
The London Book Fair took place the week after Bologna, so Madeleine, Thérèse and Cara all had three days packed full with meetings with international editors in the International Rights Centre. We had a great guide to present, with gorgeous new debut titles and a host of really exciting new books from our fantastic existing authors. It was the perfect occasion to find out about the foreign editors’ acquisition wishlist and to catch up on their exciting publication plans for some of our books which had been acquired around previous book fairs.
We were so proud to have two of our authors joining panels at the London Book Fair; Mel Sherratt talked on a panel about Independent Publishing with Amazon, such as Kindle Direct, while Kathryn Croft debated on a panel discussing whether Self-Publishing Houses were the next level in the evolution of Self-Publishing as a whole.
We had brought along a whole set of our beautiful book proofs and finished copies, and really enjoyed showing off our authors’ hard work!
