On Selling Translation Rights: Frankfurt 2025
Our rights director Sam Edenborough gives his view on the translation markets for The Bookseller's Frankfurt 2025 daily edition
The state of the translation rights business has been on my mind, as it always is in the weeks before a book fair. In September I caught up with UK literary scouts and it was striking how many of them mentioned that their client-publishers were increasingly divergent in the things they were looking for. It is no longer the case that editors from many different countries are pursuing the same few books or trends each season. I suspect this adds even more pressure to the scouts’ already stressful work: they must dive deeper into each client’s list, culture and priorities while looking ever more closely and widely at what is on offer from UK agencies and rights teams.
This backs up our experience at Greyhound: we are as likely to get our first translation deal for a book from Russia or Brazil as we are from Germany or Italy, and the sequence of territories sold rarely show coherent patterns. The days when rights to multiple new English-language proposals or manuscripts would be acquired in 10 or 20 languages during the lead-up to a book fair are long gone.
Selling translation rights in 2025 is more challenging than it was in 2005, requiring deeper market knowledge and relationships built on trust
Nevertheless, there are still books from English that blaze into the international charts in multiple markets. Alchemised by SenLinYu is one of them, sitting squarely at the heart of the romance trend, with a ready-made fan-fiction readership abuzz and attracting curious new readers. It has gone straight to the bestseller lists in Germany, Italy and Poland on publication, as have Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets and Ken Follett’s latest, Circle of Days. Along with Freida McFadden and Laurie Gilmore, you’ll find a handful of books in the top 10 in many markets. But beyond this small group? Hardly any of the names in the Brazilian, French, German, Greek, Dutch, Italian, Korean, Polish or Spanish fiction bestseller lists are the same. Most are writing in the local language.
This is also true of non-fiction bestsellers around the world. Mel and Sawyer Robbins’ The Let Them Theory is a hit in many territories, but most lists are dominated by domestic authors writing about issues or trends that are unlikely to resonate outside their own cultures. That makes sense to me: it is in line with global current affairs, where parochialism, the rise of nativism, the primacy of local celebrity and a sense of political and cultural fracture are the new norm in most countries.
This despite the fact we are more connected than ever before to people abroad via social media and the web. Telling a German editor that a non-fiction author has half a million followers on Instagram (a decent number of which are likely to be in Germany) does not usually spark interest. Yet most non-fiction editors I meet want me to present them with authors who have some sort of relevant platform in their market to make the project worth considering. I miss the days when editors saw creating a platform as a natural part of publishing the book, rather than expecting the author to have done this themselves before writing a proposal. Economic pressures, including the cost of translation, have driven a focus on books that come with a ready-made marketing campaign and media attention, and the white heat around topics such as immigration, politics, lifestyle trends and technology tends to be most profitably exploited where an author is embedded in the culture, with skin in the game.
In my experience, selling translation rights in 2025 is a more challenging activity than it was in 2005, requiring deeper market knowledge and relying heavily on respectful relationships with editors built on trust.
However, those of us selling books written in English know that we still enjoy a disproportionate privilege and advantage. For the duration of my career, anglophone titles have been more commonly translated than those from other languages. This hegemony is gradually diminishing, however, as a glance at any of the recent acquisitions lists I’ve been given by editors at recent book fairs shows. Publishers and agencies operating in other languages have become more and more successful in placing their authors’ works on lists around the world, and the growing threat of exported English-language books in Germany, Holland and Scandinavia has only accelerated this trend.
In response to this, British agents have begun to sign up more clients writing in other languages, with Korean and Japanese authors being particularly favoured, following the healing fiction and practical non-fiction trends in those markets. As the lingua franca of international publishing, English remains a fantastic gateway via which any author can access rights sales in other languages. Most agencies and publishers in the non-anglophone world will now produce an English sample translation of their authors’ work before offering the translation rights.
There is no symmetry to be found looking at the British market. I spotted only two translated titles in today’s bestseller lists. British publishers, eager to acquire world rights in the books they publish so as to exploit translation sales, should ask themselves whether they’re doing enough to champion translated works at home. There is advantage in being able to boast to potential customers that they are buying as well as selling. I wonder whether the exploding popularity of speculative fiction, with its vivid rendering of other worlds and magical experiences, shows the way: it is clear that readers in the UK are not afraid to explore the foreign, the unfamiliar. NielsenIQ BookScan figures in 2023 showed a 12% rise in consumer spending on translated fiction in the UK, relative to 2022, so perhaps a positive shift is already underway.
While it is true that the majority of translation revenues are generated by a fraction of our list, and sweeping the board with 20 or 30 rights sales is harder than ever, I remain very optimistic about the future. Our authors are still being widely published in other languages, and international editors remain keen to acquire. Given the global trends driven by populism and culture wars, pushing us towards division and cultural inwardness, I believe more passionately than ever that books in translation have a critical role to play in bolstering and enriching our civil societies.
I’m gripped by those extraordinary book-fair moments of connection, when my pitch sparks authentic enthusiasm from an editor, when we both know that something truly exciting may be starting. It is addictive, inspiring and rewarding. With Greyhound’s current rights guide in hand, I know that Frankfurt 2025 will be no different.