17 Aug 2 Seas Agency’s 2013 Fall Trip

Our fall 2013 international book fair trip will take us to Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.

By Marleen Seegers – first posted in August 2013.

September is approaching—that means it’s that time of the year again, when the exciting frenzy of the Frankfurt Book Fair starts welling up!

As usual, we started preparing the year’s most important event in international publishing as early as June. Thanks to our wonderful intern Tori Porter, Marleen’s schedule is fully booked by now—apart from one or two slots on the Saturday late afternoon, when the Agents’ Center resembles much of a ghost town anyway (contact us if you want to come keep us company!).

Our Frankfurt Book Fair Hot List will be ready very soon… but we have some other business to tend to first: from August 29-31, we’re excited to be attending the Bienal do Livro, Brazil’s national book fair held in Rio de Janeiro this year. Preview or download our Bienal do Livro 2013 catalog!

Before the start of the fair, we’ll be meeting with Rio-based publishers such as Rocco, Record, Zahar and Alfaguara/Objetiva. During the Bienal, we look forward to discussing our catalog with among others Autentica, Novo Conceito, Pensamento, Globo, Intrinseca, Gente and Sextante. Our São Paulo-based intern Marcela Vieira, who has done a great job preparing our Rio stay, will be joining us!

We’ll then take a short “vacation” after the fair—it is impossible to take a total break from publishing in September, but it will be our first tentative time off since Christmas last year!

We’re heading for Paris on September 10, where Marleen will have meetings with various publishing professionals—prospective publishers as well as clients—from September 16-23. Hopefully the weather will be better than last time we were there! We’ve arranged a bike this time, to cruise from meeting to meeting…

Amsterdam and Utrecht are up next: Marleen will be visiting her compatriots from September 25-October 2nd. Like France, Holland is one of our specialty markets, which means we sell directly to Dutch publishers without passing through a sub-agent. In fact, we’re the sub-agent for quite a few of our clients there. Looking at this past year’s deals, we observe that Dutch rights sales have a prominent place among them, in spite of the difficulties the Dutch publishing market is facing at the moment.

We look forward to seeing you in Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Amsterdam, Utrecht and/or Frankfurt this fall!

PS: During our travels we’ll have irregular access to our emails. We’ll do our best to follow up on your messages promptly, but thank you for your understanding and patience as it might take us a little longer than usual!

Please contact us before sending us any letters and/or packages by post between August 15 and October 10.