Fiction stirs worldwide interest, as publishers convene for the 38th annual children's book fair

With 1,449 publishers exhibiting from a total of 75 countries, this year's Bologna Book Fair got off to a strong start, with the spring skies (mostly) cooperating, and with publishers pleased to be greeting old friends and making new ones, against the backdrop of this beloved medieval city.

The biggest star of the fair wasn't one book, as is sometimes the case, but instead a genre: fiction. Everyone was either asking for it or selling it, thanks in no small measure to the international success of a certain British boy wizard. As Eileen Pagan, subsidiary rights director at Walker and Co., observed, "Most people are not looking for picture books; they have their own well-known illustrators. And art sensibilities are very different in other countries. We're doing far better with our fiction."

Translation, though, is still an issue--more fiction continues to flow from the U.S. than flows into it, since publishers in other countries are more willing to translate fiction and readers abroad can be more receptive to foreign fiction than American readers. This did mean, however, that U.S. rights directors found themselves swamped with fiction requests. "Kids are reading books again," exulted John Lyons, managing director, international, at Little, Brown. LB's big book was a first novel, What Every Girl (Except Me) Knows by Nora Raleigh Baskin, which garnered interest from the U.K. and all over Europe, from Australia, and even from countries like Singapore, Malaysia and Croatia.

Random House's Pam White also felt that "fiction was the thing everyone wanted from us." Among the books she was selling briskly were Lord of the Nutcracker Men by lain Lawrence ("We've had interest everywhere, and it's sold in at least eight countries"); Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares, a fall 2001 novel that was generating both international and domestic buzz; and A Mother's Gift by Britney and Lynne Spears, just out in the States and sold into the U.K. (Boxtree won it at auction), Australia, Germany, Sweden and Brazil, among other countries.

Rei Uemura, editor of children's books at Tokuma Shoten in Tokyo, whose list is 20% Japanese, 80% foreign authors, and who publishes a wide selection of top British and American writers, said that in recent years, "American fiction has been pushing too hard toward problems, and the books seem to be written to describe the problems, not the characters." FSG rights director Maria Kjoller noticed the same trend, quoting a German publisher who told her, "I've seen so many depressing books--we want happy stories now."

Kjoller's standout title was a David Klass spring novel, You Don't Know Me; it sold at auction to Penguin in the U.K. for a "significant five-figure advance, by far the highest advance we've ever received in the U.K." Other auction winners for the book included Seuil in France, De Fontein in Holland and Arena Verlag in Germany; Kjoller also sold it to Otava in Finland, saying that...