The Year of the Rabbit started in Taiwan just as the first annual Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE99) kicked off. The record attendance at the exhibition was a good omen.
The book fair, which this year became an annual event, confirmed that Taiwan's publishing industry is in good health, and stands as an exemplar of the vast potential of the Chinese-language book market, both in terms of rights and in book sales. TIBE2000 will take place in February.
Taiwan was a US$1 billion book market in 1998, with 27,286 new titles. While some publishers complain that this is too many for such a small market, Taiwan readers spend around US$120 per capita per year on books. Ten percent of the titles, or nearly 3,000, were translated from US and British publishers, and these took more than their share on the Taiwan bestseller lists.
PHOTO: GEORGE TSONG, TAIPEI TIMES
It is not uncommon to sell 10,000 copies of a strong translated title now, up from 3,000 just a few years ago, according to those who know, like Lily Chen, president of Big Apple Tuttle-Mori, one of the two major agencies in Taiwan. As a result, such sales are credited with pushing up advances.
"We paid the highest advance in our history for The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families last year," says Charles H.C. Kao, founder of Commonwealth Publishing Co. A major publisher strong in midlist titles on business and politics, with two influential monthly news magazines, Commonwealth's boss is also an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin. "Book publishing is more open and competitive in Taiwan now than anywhere else in Asia," Kao said. "That is why the publishers are flourishing. Books are inexpensive here and well-produced, too."
I can attest to that. The print production has never been better and prices at the Taipei book fair, where discounting was the norm, were often under US$5 a book.
"The Chinese approach to books and to analysis allows us to introduce progressive ideas from the West," Kao explains. His list is heavily in translation, with authors such as Peter Singer, Michael E. Porter, Peter Drucker and George Soros, Charles Handy, John Nesbitt and Steven Covey.
While Kao tries to buy the whole opus of a foreign author whenever he can, that is becoming more difficult.
Publishers in Taiwan are getting increasingly competitive and sophisticated about the books they buy from abroad. Linden Lin, editorial director of Linking Publishing, bought the new Soros book, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, at Frankfurt last fall and had sold 42,000 copies of his translation by last month.
While Taiwan publishers try to avoid bidding wars, the stakes are going up as they expand their markets. Using the traditional characters of the language, Taiwan editions sell well in Hong Kong, even though the Chinese spoken dialect there is different, and different from those in the Chinese communities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver and New York. World Book Company in San Francisco is the major distributor of these Taiwan editions.
Trade houses like Commonwealth and Linking depend mostly on bookstore sales and mail order, so the retail success of the Taipei book fair last February was particularly welcome, though In says it was of little help to him for buying rights from abroad. For that, he must go to Frankfurt, New York and the annual BookExpo America to win out against the competition. And like many publishers in Taiwan, the China market is much on his mind.
"We are buying business books of every kind," says Lin. "We are also working more closely with Beijing and Shanghai publishers." They have also had success with art titles. An ambitious new project is 3,000 Years of Chinese Painting, co-published with China's Foreign Languages Press (with a US$11 million grant from Yale University Press in 1997, it is the first of 75 volumes planned). Lin printed what looks like an optimistic 5,000 copies -- but another art title, The Story of Art, which he bought from Phaidon in 1997, sold 10,000 copies in six months, and in March they printed 15,000 more.
Some seemingly "American" products do remarkably well in Taiwan. Richard Huang, CEO of Classic Communications, has sold 350,000 copies of his Scott Adams titles so far, leading with The Dilbert Principle at 150,000. Like most of the major players, he has both the Taiwan and Hong Kong markets. With just six million people, Hong Kong generally buys one book for every five bought in Taiwan.
Another US product that should have done well is IDG's Dummies series, but the first translation bombed. Now one of the country's most notable young publishers, Rex How, is relaunching it.
President of Taiwan's prestigious Commercial Press, founded a century ago in Shanghai, How also has his own affiliated imprint, Locus. His team there has made a totally new design: a book size especially suitable for the Taiwan market, a different logo, and a new Chinese translation of the word "dummies," which is sometimes a problem for the series abroad. "We call it the Genius Class series," says How. "There are two meanings of `genius' in Chinese, one is literally a genius and the other is very much a `dummy.'"
How's Locus list, just two years old, has broken publishing records already. With just 70 titles total, it won nine places on Eslite Bookstore's top 100 sellers in 1998. Two translations from Commercial Press made the list as well: Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh and Geography of Time by Robert Levine.
Another major rights buyer in Taiwan is the petite dynamo Joyce Yen at China Times. She is likely to become an even bigger player when China Times becomes the first Taiwan publisher to become a public company, next January. This means something quite different in Taiwan than in the US, where selling stock can just be a means of pulling in money when you don't otherwise have it.
The Taiwan securities market is under a much tighter rein, according to Yen.
"We would not have been able to do this if we had not been making record-breaking profits for the past three years," Yen says. "We had to be the most assets-rich house in the country."
Now, China Times will have a sizable amount of outside capital and a superior position for rapid expansion beyond its core business of consumer publishing for Taiwan.
Along with this, however, China Times will become the only "transparent" publisher in a country in which most houses are still very secretive about their annual sales volumes.
Yen is usually right on top of things. China Times made Don't Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson a bestseller in Taiwan before any other foreign market. It hit the charts in November 1997 and is still there. Even Yen is sometimes surprised by her successes.
"What was unexpected this year is the stellar performances of a string of up-market, high-brow titles, such as The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Harvard's David Landes and Guns, Germs and Steel by UCLA molecular biologist Jared Diamond," says Yen.
While harboring some reservations about the Mainland market, because of the piracy problems that persist, Joyce Yen works with various partners there for many of her translations, but she is most proud of what she can do for a book in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
"Hong Kong is a core market of ours," she says. China Times is doing biographies of major political figures in the People's Republic, which couldn't sell in China, and it had great success, of course, with East and West by the last British governor Chris Patten.
Among the fastest-growing young publishing houses is the Citi group, just two years old. Managing director S.P. Su now handles seven imprints and two overseas sales operations, in Malaysia (something rare among Taiwan publishers) and Hong Kong. Overseas sales accounted for 10 percent of the total last year for the group, which has had 50 percent growth over the last two years.
Owl, the reference book division, includes titles from DK, Cambridge and Larousse. With 95 percent of the list translations, for all ages, it is expanding out into literature, art and academic titles. Marco Polo Press, the imprint for travel books, is 100 percent translations. Like the rest of the Taiwan players, Su is now optimistic and looks to the US for most of his translations.
However, some big international titles from the US fail in Taiwan, most notably romances and murder mysteries.
The blame goes to Taiwan's own romance writer Chiung Yao, who is known throughout the Chinese-speaking world for her prolific list of books, all with TV and film spinoffs. Now in her 60s, Yao is still prolific, and Crown Culture Corp is her sole publisher and media producer.
In translations, Crown chooses Milan Kundera (including his latest, Identity), Umberto Eco, Peter Mayle and Laura Esquivel. They have introduced Patrick Suskind and all of the works of Bill Bryson this year, according to rights director Emily Chuang.
Sally Taylor is a roving correspondent for Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine in New York. Taylor's article was reprinted by special arrangement
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