For the first time, Scribe has sent a three-person team to the Frankfurt Book Fair: at the recently concluded 2008 fair, our fiction acquisitions editor, Aviva Tuffield, and our translations editor, Margot Rosenbloom, accompanied me on the most stimulating and gruelling trip in world publishing.

The three of us took part in over 100 meetings with agents and publishers during the week of the fair, pitching our own wares and looking at those of others. We’ve already bought several terrific titles that we were shown, and offered for others, and there’s been serious interest expressed in a number of our books. At this early stage, it feels like our best Frankfurt yet.

We came across the usual bullying rights-buying behaviour by large UK houses, who keep insisting on acquiring Australian rights within the rubric of ‘UK and Commonwealth’ rights (as they’re so quaintly named) when they’re shown new titles. This is blackmail, pure and simple, as I’ve said before. By threatening to withdraw their offers, or not offer at all, unless these rights are made available to them, they gazump or freeze-out Australian publishers, sweep up Australian rights for next to nothing, pay low ‘export’ royalties, and thereby prop up their bottom lines effortlessly. Perhaps these rights should be renamed ‘UK and British Empire’ rights, because that’s their true neo-colonial basis.

Luckily, US publishers and agents are waking up to this rort, and are more prepared than ever to ‘split rights’, as it’s called, with Australian publishers. Even they face some difficulty, though, with their own UK sub-agents — who, in some cases, are extremely reluctant to have their work lives complicated by having to consider Australian offers and thereby antagonising the large UK publishers they depend on for a living.

When I said something to this effect last week to The Age’s book review editor, Jason Steger, and he incorporated my typically diplomatic comments in a piece he wrote for his column, I was astonished to see my words ricochet around the world. A recently launched UK industry email-newsletter, BookBrunch, promptly headlined a report of Steger’s column with the words ‘Rights holders — bastards and cowards’. Now I know what to do to get attention: talk like an Aussie.

Frankfurt was conducted against a backdrop of deepening anxiety about the world financial crisis, of course, but there were no obvious signs that this affected the number of participants or their buying-and-selling animal spirits. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that trade publishers, by their nature, tend to be optimistic and forward-looking. I was asked about this on Ramona Koval’s ‘Book Show’ on ABC radio national on 24 October, and found myself saying that, ‘You can’t just retreat … and hide and cower until it’s all over. You still have to assume there’s a market for good books.’

As it turned out, our October ‘sales’ were very strong — above budget, and above the same month last year. I put the word ‘sales’ within quotation marks because, as readers of this blog will know, invoiced sales are not necessarily the same as bookshop sales. We were helped greatly by having a bestseller on our list — The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge — which has now been reprinted four times, with over 20,000 copies in print.

In the meantime, visits to our website keep growing, to a level that would have astonished me a year ago. I think this has got a lot to do with the widespread publicity that our new books keep generating, the breadth and depth of the list, and the richness of the site.

So, as financial Armageddon approaches, we gird our loins, and keep fighting the good fight.