Continuing its bid to make sure that only its titles are distributed through mainland Europe – and not those pesky American editions – Hachette Livre UK hosted its first ever European Seminar this past week, paying for nearly 40 leading European booksellers and distributors to attend. Publishing News reports that guests stayed at the Savoy on Monday night – where the guest speaker was Ian Rankin – and were taken by boat to the Globe Theatre for the seminar on Tuesday, where divisional presentations were made by Hachette’s UK companies, and Little, Brown CEO Ursula Mackenzie outlined why making Europe exclusive would be to their mutual benefit.
In essence, PN says, Hachette maintains that European booksellers will sell more copies of a single edition of a name author, than the combined sales of a UK and US edition. To help achieve this, it is prepared to provide marketing spend for European campaigns, just as if it was the domestic market, and intends to tour more authors in Europe. Monica Richter of The Bookshop in Zurich welcomed the marketing spend and said that English editions “tend to be more popular, closer to European taste. However, having both editions does give the shop a more international atmosphere which our customers enjoy. And we have to stock both at present because we never know which edition will arrive first.”