Cape Town Book Fair

Notice from the CTBF:

At the Cape Town Book Fair, we want to provide exhibitors with tools to make better business connections – and make libraries and institutional buyers even more aware of the titles on offer.

In order to achieve this we have created a new tool: The Book Titles list. Once you register with us as an exhibitor you can register your titles in the list on our website – with author, synopsis and many more information fields for fleshing your titles out. All titles published in 2008 or later, and that will be on exhibition at your stand, can be registered – and we will actively promote the list to all libraries as well as other institutions in South Africa and beyond.

• Click here to register – deadline is 28 Feb!

Press release from the CTBF:

The Cape Town Book Fair wants to fill a gap and provide foreign as well as South African CTBF participants with the option to work with the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. For many years the Harare Book Fair had provided this opportunity, but after its disappearance no other fair has been able to deliver such a platform and atmosphere.

We are aware that it is difficult for publishers from other African countries to participate in the Fair, especially as an exhibitor.

Therefore we are very proud to have found a wonderful partner in the Goethe-Institut in South Africa, which will be inviting approximately 15 publishing houses from sub-Saharan African countries to participate in the 2010 CTBF. Publishers have to apply for this grant, and the terms and conditions for this programme can be found here:

• Publishers Invitation Programme

Publishers participating in this scheme will enjoy a one-day workshop on Thursday, 29 July 2010, as well as different matchmaking meetings, etc., during the fair. The Cape Town Book Fair is reaching out to all of Africa, and these are the first steps. Come and join – there is so much more to do on the African continent!

Note: Interested publishers complying with the requirements may apply until 19 April 2010. Applications received after the stipulated date will not be considered.

A friendly hello from the Cape Town Book Fair blog to remind publishers that there are only five business days left to take advantage of the CTBF’s “early bird” booking discount of 2.5% on all stands. The deadline is 31 Jan – and the last working day before then is next Friday, 29 Jan. Hurry to get your registration and booking in!

• Click here to register as an exhibitor
• Contact Sadika Ahmed for further information
• Click here for further CTBF contact information

In other CTBF news, the Fair has announced that Friday, 30 July 2010, its first day, will be a dedicated trade day, exclusively reserved for publishers and trade visitors as well as institutional buyers. It will further arrange “matchmakings” to introduce interested parties to each other and stage seminars addressing hot topics of the trade.

As another “First Time”, all exhibitors can now register their exhibited titles from 2008 onwards on our website, so as to promote them to potential buyers at an early stage.

Finally, together with the Goethe-Institute and other partners, the CTBF has committed to renewed efforts to ensure that more publishers from other African countries will exhibit in 2010. The popular public programme will remain in place, and, last but not but least, a much-improved shelving system for exhibitors is in the works.

More updates soon!

• Click here to register as an exhibitor
• Contact Sadika Ahmed for further information
• Click here for further CTBF contact information

Maureen Isaacson of the Sunday Independent reports that the 2010 Cape Town Book Fair has been moved from June to July/August, in consideration of the FIFA World Cup, and that all CTBF staff are being retrenched bar one:

June 2010 will bring beery football fans and assorted pleasure-seekers to our shores, but no blue stockings, as the date of the annual Cape Town Book Fair has been changed from mid-June to run from July 30 to August 2.

This is all we know following the resignation of Vanessa Badroedien, the book fair director since its inception four years ago. Her contract ends next month. She will be missed. Retrenchment notices have been given to the book fair staff, with the exception of a sales administrator.

(more…)

Press release from the Publishers’ Association of South Africa

With her current contract with the Cape Town Book Fair (CTBF) drawing to an end in September 2009, CTBF Managing Director, Vanessa Badroodien, this week gave the book fair board of directors notice of her intention to resign in order to pursue new career opportunities.

During Badroodien’s tenure as Cape Town Book Fair Director, the fair drew the most ever visitors to any exhibition at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.

Claudia Kaiser, the Vice President of business development of the Frankfurt Book Fair, is in Cape Town to work closely with Badroodien and thus ensure a seamless transition in preparation for 2010. The preliminary dates set for next year’s CTBF are 30th July to 2nd August 2010. Mid-June, when previous book fairs were staged, will not be possible in 2010 due to FIFA world cup activity.

Badroodien said: “I am proud to have been involved, as director, in developing, launching and staging for the past four years, the most successful book fair ever held in Southern Africa. The time has now come for me to step aside and let someone else build on the successes achieved by the book fair.”

Dudley Schroeder, Chairman of the Board of the CTBF said: “Vanessa’s staging of the inaugural Cape Town Book Fair in 2006 and the manner in which she steered this strategically crucial event through four highly successful years has left the book industry in South Africa with a great legacy and a fine foundation that we plan to build on for many years to come.”

Juergen Boos, President of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s holding company, said: “Vanessa pioneered and created something truly special for Cape Town and South Africa as a whole. The CTBF, under her leadership, achieved pioneering successes that are, in many respects, lauded internationally.”

Ends

• Visit PASA home
• See also: Vanessa Badroodien Resigns from the Cape Town Book Fair

In the last in our series of photo essays on the 2009 Cape Town Book Fair we highlight some of the interesting discussions that took place during various panel sessions with authors and academics. Visitors to the fair can attend almost all the panel discussions for free, which makes them a popular feature of the fair every year. As a special bonus for this essay we have included video clips from two of the most popular sessions.

My final post on the 2009 Cape Town Book Fair is on some of the panel discussions that I attended. A few are a bit of a blur as I was rabidly posting highlights to my Twitter stream even though I said I wouldn’t but, at times, no one else was doing it besides the Book SA team so I felt compelled to impart.

Also, before we continue, a disclaimer: please disregard all the conspicuously placed bottles of a certain “vitamin water” that has been appearing at every large event I’ve been to in the last three months and which – to be honest – tastes like watered-down Mix-a-Drink (as a friend once dryly observed). I thought it might be a bit disruptive (and possibly inappropriate) to ask people trying to participate in Serious Panel Discussions(TM) to move them out of my photographic framings.

On to the panels:

(more…)

The opportunity to meet authors – both local and international – and hear them talk about their writing processes and experiences is one of the most exciting aspects of the Cape Town Book Fair. Here is a selection of some of the authors that were manning stands, launching books, and signing autographs for fans at the 2009 fair.

Half the fun of the annual Cape Town Book Fair is discovering new books and attending the formal author sessions and panel discussions. The other half of the fun is being able to spot authors unexpectedly in the exhibition area and interact with the friendlier writers at the stands, while getting a book autographed or just taking the opportunity to ask one-on-one questions and hear some advice or writing wisdom.

Snapped At The Stands

Authors could be found all over the fair working at the stands, either helping to promote books and publishing operations, or sitting patiently at a desk signing autographs and having their photos taken with eager fans who had been waiting in long queues.

• Read the complete article at Brainwavez.org

The Cape Town Book Fair is always an odd affair. It is both a trade event, in which publishers from all over the world exhibit to network and do business, and a public event that allows those with a love of reading to meet authors and attend sessions and workshops, as well as indulge in their love of books for four days with other equally minded individuals. This intermingling (and I do mean that literally, considering how the stands are always laid out) of two very distinct, and separate, goals has always left me a little dissatisfied because you want it to be either one or the other, not both, or, failing that, at least to be distinct, physically.

I was interested to see what would happen this year, the fair’s fourth year of operation, and how it would compare to previous years (I missed the first one but went to the second and third; the second was fantastic – it was an amazing experience for me – but I was largely disappointed by the third and was hoping that I was not witnessing the beginning of this exhibition’s slide into eventual oblivion).

Here, in the first (and most extensive) of a few photographic reports I have compiled are my impressions of the fair, both positive and negative. Keep an eye on the site for future posts, in which I will be showcasing some of the authors, activities, and panels that took place over the opening weekend.

This year the fair was noticeably smaller (I read somewhere that it was 400 m2 smaller) – you felt it the minute you walked into the exhibition space. A number of publishers that have featured prominently in previous years were also absent from the stands this year, and not just smaller publishers such as Two Dogs but also larger publishers such as Jacana and Struik (although both Two Dogs and Jacana did host author sessions and panel discussions).

(more…)

The Cape Town Book Fair probably had nothing to do with the London Book Fair’s decision to make South Africa the market focus of its 2010 event, but Vanessa Badroedien, Cape Town Book Fair’s director, says “it possibly did help to highlight it”.

She concedes that the decision is possibly strategic, because we are such a high import market – “it gives us an opportunity to make the traffic more two-way.”

This year’s book event brought variety, from Mahmoud Mamdani on Darfur, Moeletsi Mbeki on Africa, Jonathan Jansen on racism in the classroom and Denis Davis on the constitution, to Peter Rabbit.

The venues were packed with people eager to hear about the critical writings of Zakes Mda and access to information but why are we still deliberating on the merits of book prizes and the necessity of good book editing? Name one literary award winner, other than Jean-Paul Sartre, who declined the Nobel prize, who has given back their literary award. Show me the writer who longs for a bad editor to stuff up his book.

Hopefully, next year we can look forward to less of these obviously “safe” topics, to greater variety and to lower fares for stalls and venue hire. High cost is obviously the crucial issue and the reason for the absence of international writers, who we need to rock us out of our complaceny and our parochialism.

Jacana Media garnered many column centimetres for staging a smart geurilla advertising campaign via Facebook, cellphone and Twitter, which meant it did not hire a stall this year as it had done in the past. Nor did it pay for the space it occupied to stage some of its impromptu author appearances at the book fair.

(more…)

SOUTH AFRICA: “Sustainability of the Fair is a challenge, if you measure it against what it intends to be as a trade event, then we have significant challenges ahead of us,”  said Vanessa Badroodien, director of the Cape Town Book Fair, which has been running since June 13, and ends today. “It’s simply hard for publishers to justify a search and discover trip to South Africa. And if you’re talking about African publishers, when you look at coming to South Africa, for most it’s more expensive than traveling to Europe.”

The Fair was launched four years ago with an open ended partnership with the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Publishers Association of South Africa (PASA).  It was intended to serve as a replacement for the all but defunct Zimbabwe Book Fair, which had a long-standing reputation as the premier book trade event in sub-Saharan Africa but fell into disarray as Zimbabwe was subsumed by economic crisis. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the Cape Town Book Fair appears to have found little traction as a comparable trade event.

(more…)