London Book Fair

retreats.

We're going to take a whole zone at London Book Fair.

We're going to do this and that.

And we're just literally like, okay, let's just finish the first season.

And I remember reading it in one day and I realized immediately that I had something very, very special on my hands.

When the novel was first touted at the 2019 London Book Fair, it led to a bidding war and a seven-figure publishing deal.

It was a real whirlwind journey.

We had, I think, 10 bidders in the UK bid for the rights and I think we did the first deal within maybe 24 hours, 48 hours of submission.

When a book is sold to a US publisher, the author's literary agent typically retains the foreign translation rights or they partner with a dedicated foreign rights agent.

These agents then take the book to major international markets, primarily at massive industry events like the Frankfurt Book Fair or the London Book Fair.

I've heard of Frankfurt, yeah.

Yeah.

This book traces his journey towards understanding the truth about h- his father, a man whose life intersected with the mob, the casino world in the formative years of a now global industry, while offering an intimate look at the world that few outsiders, his world, few outsiders ever witnessed.

The memoir was recently featured at the London Book Fair.

Wow.

Good for you.

You know, like, it becomes a, you know, eventually we're going to get to a point, and especially something with, like, the Dramini fan fictions where it's still taking place in a magical world in which, like, you know what I mean? It's not an AU in which you are, like, still using it in the world.

And, like, that book, the fucking All the Young Dudes, the, like, remiss and serious, like, mega popular fan fiction sold for seven figures at London Book Fair.

And it's going to end, like, I don't know how that's going to get... you know what i mean like it's just like the more this comes out sometime it's gonna have to break right because authors like as much as like authors can like love fic and like be like yeah i love when people like play in my world like whatever like they are still copyright holders and like at some point the copyright the threat to the copyright becomes real because if you don't enforce it in certain situations, then like, you know, a big company who like is really egregiously, you know, violating your copyright is going to be like, well, look, they didn't like care about that.

You know, like, so the open use of IP and copyrighted material hurts everybody.

Potentially, this was the first year of the mentorship scheme.

And correct me if I'm wrong on this, but it's certainly the first year when I was involved, when there was this sort of supported plan to go to London Book Fair regularly.

together.

So the mentorship runs for six months from September.

So, and London Book Fair tends to be in March.

So it, you know, it represents the kind of the end of the programme.

And there was this idea from coming from the people running the programme that the mentor and the If possible, the mentee would kind of sit in on some of the meetings that the mentor was having.

And so I think we kind of, when we got the contract, we just sort of went away and did our own thing.