booklab

The yearly top revenue based ranking of Chinese writers by Danwei provides, just as in previous editions, some highly interesting (and entertaining) insights in how the Chinese fans and readers are ticking. Don’t only go for the top few names, but read the by-lines, and occasionally check back grounds for the names listed - and you will discover some absolutely valuable and relevant results. The ranking is to be found here.

Tracking significant milestones of how Chinese literature and publishing interacts with the West, we can refer to reports in the Hollywood reporter and The Bookseller that Jiang Rong’s novel “Wolf Totem” is going to be turned into a major movie by French director Jean Jacques Annaud.

As The Bookseller reports,

The film will be made in China, with backing from the Beijing Forbidden City Movie Co, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Annaud plans to plans to breed wolves and train them from birth to take part in the story of a Chinese student who goes to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s and captures a wolf cub to raise.

The book which had been high up in China’s bestseller charts for years, was the first major acquisition of Penguin’s newly established Beijing bureau chief Jo Lusby ca. 3 years ago, and was then successfully presented in translations across Europe and the USA.

Together with Miha Kovac of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, we did a survey on book bestseller lists in seven major European markets over the past 12 months The top 40 writers divide into 13 writing in English, and 27 writing in other – European – languages, with Swedish (8), French (5) as the strongest, beating Dutch and German (each 4), Italian (3), Spanish (2), and Brazilian Portuguese (1). Not a single writer to be translated from a non-European language could make it into the top 40 author’s charts (in previous years, however, the Japanese Haruki Murakami, or Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk may have spoiled this exclusively Euro-centric pattern, yet only slightly). Not even a Central European or a Russian author is among the top listed. However within the English realm, 2 authors with clearly non-Western bearings and agendas are among those who met with the largest reading audiences across the continent, Afghanistan born Khaled Hosseini and India born Man Booker Prize Winner of 2008, Aravind Adiga.

More to this here.

A separate, yet related piece by us has been published by the Frankfurt Book Fair here.

Is China ready for the next move in allowing publishers to just mind about their own business? It seems so.

The official China news agency Xinhua reports refering to China Daily: “About six or seven press and publishing giants with annual revenues of more than 10 billion yuan (1.46 billion U.S. dollars) will be set up to compete globally in three to five years,” said Fan Weiping, director of the publishing industry development department affiliated to the GAPP.”

The China General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) which is both running the publishing industry and censorship, released guidelines earlier this week saying that “market-oriented news organizations and publishers have been given a deadline of one to two years to make the transition to full-fledged commercial players”, according to Xinhua.

These developments perfectly fit into a long term strategy of bringing China’s publishing industry in line with its global peers, as we reported here earlier.

The largest group, “Higher Education Press” already has a solid place in our ranking of the world’s top publishing conglomerates, and HEP has great ambitions to evelop into a global player, on par with the major players of the West.

Only last year, Liaoning Press was the first publishing company allowed to go public on the Shanghai stock exhange.

Other publishing ventures started to open offices abroad, like China Youth International Press did in London in 2008.

And Chinese online gaming companies like Shanda – listed at the Nasdaq – expanded into publishing by setting up its own “literature” division specializing in the booming online publishing business for young adult readers. (We will present Shanda’s vision in a panel at BookExpo America in just a month in New York.)

Background

Reuters quotes the recent GAPP documents as saying that the

“policy “opinion” from the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) stresses that China’s Communist Party censors will continue controlling what appears in books and other publications.

But the document issued in the People’s Daily signals the government wants publishers — until now run more like the bureaucracies to which most are attached — to become more commercial through share offers, mergers, takeovers and controlled private investment.

“Encourage and support capital from society, especially from major state-owned businesses, to take part in the share-system restructuring of publishing and media businesses,” the GAPP announcement states.

“Encourage and support non-state-owned capital in various formed entering permitted (publishing) areas,” it adds.

Further Reuters reporting goes:

“The regulations signal private investment is going to play a bigger role,” said Zhang Shouli, who runs a Beijing-based distribution company for children’s books. He and other private operators have been lobbying for a firmer role.

“But these rules are still vague, so we’ll have to wait and see what the specific regulations allow.”

This week’s NYTimes Sunday Book Review focuses on new books from Chinese authors, including:
‘The Vagrants‘, by YIYUN LI
Reviewed by PICO IYER
‘China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation’
By XINRAN
Reviewed by JOSHUA HAMMER
‘Brothers‘
By YU HUA
Reviewed by JESS ROW (with a portrait of the writer in the Sunday Magazine.

The Chinese internet platform Danwei reports, quoting an article in China Youth Daily, that the Chinese government is set to abandon direct control over most publishing companies by the end of 2010.

The goal is to allow “for profit” media companies to get rid of direct state control, to end state restrictions on the allocation of ISBN, and to encourage the forming of “six or seven internationally-recognized press and media companies that are domestic leaders with assets and sales each over 10 billion yuan.” (Original quote in Chinese)

After experimenting already with IPOs of state controled publishing groups since 2008, and with more or less independent “creative agencies” acting as defacto publishing companies, or at least, as - partly very successful - imprints, this next move could be decisive in pushing China’s publishing industry internationally from being only a big buyer of copyrights into a real player in the global cultural industries.

See also our privious posts here and here and here

While it is frightening to see in this very moment how the new Mandarin hotel next to Rem Kohlhas’ CCTV tower is burning, I was checking all kinds of sources on news with regard to China’s publishing landscape.

Friends told me that the crisis so far did not have any knock out impact on the industry, but at the same time, I hear a lot of lines about “restructuring” - or reconsidering all to bold and expansive strategies in publishing companies.

We learn for instance that Liaoning Press which was the first publishing company allowed to go public at the Shanghai Stock exchange in 2008 has been re-branded as North United Publishing and Media (Group) Co., Ltd. More significantly, most of the major Shanghai based publishing groups have been encouraged to become more of  ‘companies’ instead of state run cultural agents, and yet another publisher - Reader Publishing Group in Gansu Province -  is also preparing to go public.

The annual Beijing domestic book fair held in January says in releases that business concluded with 2.5 bn RMB worth of deals (ca. 200 m up as compared to 2008).

Also, translations which had shown tremendous growth to an estimated 10,000 titles sold into China for translation per year, seem to remain solid. In a workshop sponsored by the British Council, it was announced that China will be the guest of honor at the London Book fair in 2012 (after being in that role in Frankfurt later this year).

Forcasts e.g. in China Daily have it that books about macro economics as well as the now exactly 30 years of China’s opening may be among the top issues in the year’s new releases.

In fact in  the top bestseller segment, the controversial “Currency Wars” (货币战争) by Song Hongbing  is back as #1 in non fiction. And 30 years of the special economic zone in Shenzhen have been turned into a novel called “Destiny” (命运 ) by Lu Tianming.

Much more interestingly in terms of international reach is the clear trend that more and more regularly, books from Chinese authors are given prominent recognition abroad. In a piece in the New Yorker, the broadening reciprocal exchange of books and ideas via translations in both direction has been recently discussed - and compared to the lack of such an exchange with the Arab world.

Pankaj Mishra reviewed the English translation of the in its Chinese edition hugely successful novel “Brothers” by Yu Hua  in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. But also the very dark The Vagrants: A Novel, a captivating new book on the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, by short story writer Li Liyun, got instantly attention and appraisal in the Times as the English translation was released by Random House.

In the most recent Chinese bestseller lists provided by China Publishing Today, a new novel, long listed at last year’s Man AsiaLiterary Award, Murong Xuecun, hit the charts, “Dance the Red Dust” (原谅我红尘颠倒), while his earlier book “Leave Me Alone, Chengdu” was given a German translation at Zweitausendeins.

So one can be cautiously optimistic that the flow of books and ideas between China and us starts to broaden from the odd trickle that it once was into a quite robust - and exciting - stream.

The next step ahead however would need to involve more sophisticated and also two sided working relationships between publishers and editors from the West with their counterparts in Chinese publishing houses - which used to be for so long just this: state controlled government agencies.

With all the ambition and enthusiasm and curiosity I met among Chinese publishers, the answer to this question may remain ambivalent – yet it also requires more in depth research.

When I discussed the list of publishers who prepare to go public with Hong OuYang, the energetic and very well informed editor-in-chief of China Publishing Today, probably the most relevant independent source of insight into the industry right now, she insisted that one must be cautious. A great deal of the energy at this point goes to the domestic market. For many decision makers in the industry just as well as in the government, it seems safer and more reasonable to look at developments in the home market first – while overseas is considered more risky and more difficult (as you need to travel, to speak or at least understand foreign languages and cultures, and hardly can predict success with both the professional and the consumer audiences abroad).

I must say, as a European, this reminds me pretty much of the US approach in many respects.

The money raised at the stock exchange, Mrs. Ou insisted, will be spent primarily to get things going within China. That recalled manifold details that I had come across over the past week or so in China publishing – as well a story in the New Yorker from the end of July about young Chinese often hesitant against too much impact from things and ideas coming from the “West”.

Chinese are very keen to ‘localise’ – or culturally adapt – the content they buy, to the point of sending Mickey Mouse, with permission from Disney, to a journey across China, thereby adapting they cultural focus on “education” and values against a Western crave for pure entertainment. So why go for the trouble of a more complex ‘dialogue’ with the other?

A second thing is the many things to be done domestically. Mrs. Liu Yuan of the large “Higher Education Press” gave a few impressions of her company’s vast projects in merging and customizing and making interactive all the educational material between print and online, including large scale experiments with flexible business models where a lot is free, but more in depth interaction is charged for. Here, capital raised at the stock exchange can be used for very appropriately for quite some time.

A third field of expansion within is distribution. I have mentioned that the distribution division of the state held Xinhua agency is considering going public. With the consistently growing presence of English books available to Chinese readers – and many major US and UK groups – like Pearson - starting to produce low priced local English editions for Chinese readers, and distribution within China controlled by very few key companies, like Xinhua, the domestic online retailer Dong Dong and the Chinese branch of Amazon.com, Joyo, there is only limited need for broad and, to use the dirty word again, ‘complex’ interaction on many various levels.

A last issue is, as I have been told in more private conversations, that many of the ‘Presidents’ – or CEOs – of the major Chinese publishers who, I must remind us, are all owned by the government, are very much more focused on their home turf than the international. But again, this is exactly where perhaps change and opening up sets in.

“Going out” has been declared the official slogan not only, but also for publishing. And with the recently encouraged ambition to not only buy foreign rights, but quite a few success stories of Chinese books making it abroad. This is of course, once again, “Wolf Totem”, but also the highly popular kids’ series “Naughty Boy” by Yang Hongyin, launched by Harper Collins as “Mo’s Mischief” in the UK and US, and by Les Editions Piquier as “Les Affreux Jojos” in France. (By the way, allow me to add a funny footnote on those translations: The graphics that come with the texts have been taken as they were for the English translation, even more so as the kids are portrayed very much in an American style, with baseball caps and all, while for the French edition, new illustrations have been made, giving the kids a somewhat Asian allure!)

In Chinese fiction for kids, Yang Hongyin has only one rival, and that is the Austrian Thomas Brezina who with his “Knickerbocker Gangs” sold almost as many million books as she did. Next month, a panel is prepared at the Frankfurt Book Fair with both Yang and Brezina who together allegedly sold some 25 million books in China alone.

Before heading back to Europe, I had been given the wonderful opportunity to talk to young editors of China Youth International Press, or CYPI. They had chosen an even more direct approach to “go out” by opening an office in London a year ago to find a market for their top quality illustrated books.

With less than one day between the invitation and the time for delivery, I had prepared a really improvised presentation, thinking of a conversation of perhaps 60 minutes. On arrival, I was shown the international division’s classy new offices, with a conference room as you would expect to find it rather in a PR agency in Hamburg, Germany, than at a Chinese publishing company. Then I was introduced to some 40 hungry minds, all young editors, most in their late twenties who instantly produced an atmosphere of highest attention and curiosity.

So we started, with some overview on international trends that I tried to explore at the beginning, and then I was shown a long list of ongoing book projects. I was amazed by the wide range of topics, by the quality of the work, and by the unpretentious way of how those projects were discussed.

At one point, I looked out of the windows noticing with surprise that it was getting dark. Nevertheless the Q&A went on for another 15 minutes, and in the end, we had a really highly compact workshop that lasted for three full hours, without even a break.

While saying good bye, a little bit exhausted, I must confess, I realized with what ease these young professionals had for all this time moved back and forth between their visibly tightly woven group patterns, and the individualistic curiosity of similar folks in any creative company anywhere in the world.

Here are some more Chinese publishing groups who prepare to go public and, as mentioned already, take note how many of them are procincial groups:

Schanghai Century Publishing Group

Jiangsu Publishing Group

Anhui Publishing Group

Hunan Publishing Group

and the distribution division of the central state run media group Xinhua.

This will trigger an interesting race for sure.