Adam Howard, Publicity and Marketing Director at Scribe Publications talks about the challenges and opportunities of promoting literature in translation and reflects on how Scribe champions international voices.
You’re the publicity and marketing director at Scribe Publications. Could you tell us about what your job entails, and a little bit about Scribe and how you came to work with them?
As the Publicity and Marketing Director, I work on around 2 or 3 books a month – Scribe publishes a wide range of titles, including topical nonfiction, literary fiction, fiction in translation, health, popular science, history, and more, so every month is a little bit different. When it comes to publicity, it’s largely about finding the right audiences for the right books – placing reviews in traditional print media like newspapers and magazines, arranging events in bookshops and at festivals, and reaching out to influencers and booksellers.
Booksellers in particular I think are absolutely invaluable: a vast network of enthusiastic readers who care deeply about the books they sell — they’re the flesh and blood influencers.
Adam Howard
More and more, as review space in print media dwindles, we rely on our networks of bookstagrammers, BookTokkers, and booksellers to get out books into the hands of readers. Booksellers in particular I think are absolutely invaluable: a vast network of enthusiastic readers who care deeply about the books they sell — they’re the flesh and blood influencers.
Along with that, I support the Publicity and Marketing Manager, who has their own titles to work on, advise on new potential acquisitions, strategise about future seasons, and make sure that we’re looking at the big picture in terms of which titles we’re focusing on, what’s going on with the publicity landscape here in the UK, and what people are talking about and reading across the whole publishing world.
I joined Scribe in 2016, after working at Foyles for around ten years, first on the shop floor and eventually in events — it was a natural transition to working in publishing, and I’ve always found that people who come to publishing from bookselling have valuable knowledge about how to get books into the hands of readers via booksellers. I was attracted to Scribe because they published such a wide range of different titles for such a small publisher, which appeals to my own magpie-like tastes — but also because it was such a collaborative, supportive workplace.
Translated titles account for a notoriously small percentage of the English-language market, but initiatives like #namethetranslator and WIT Month – both of which Scribe supports – have worked to centre literature in translation. Are you thinking about (raising) the profile of translators and translation when you’re marketing translated titles? And more generally, to what extent does the fact that a title is translated play a role in how that title is marketed?
I think there’s a growing community of readers in the UK who are drawn to translated literature, largely because it offers them new perspectives, but also because literature from other countries offers readers new formal explorations that we don’t really see in English writing. As such, we try to celebrate and champion the fact that the world is translated and make it a feature of the publicity and marketing campaign.
Adam Howard
I think there’s a growing community of readers in the UK who are drawn to translated literature, largely because it offers them new perspectives, but also because literature from other countries offers readers new formal explorations that we don’t really see in English writing. As such, we try to celebrate and champion the fact that the world is translated and make it a feature of the publicity and marketing campaign. Often, when a translator is based in the UK, they’ll have networks that we can call upon to support the publication, and a few translators have become established names in their own right — all of this helps create a story for the book and catch people’s eye.
That being said, there are still swathes of people who are put off by translated literature, and we’d love to turn more people on translated titles where possible. It’s not about downplaying the translated-ness of the titles, though, but rather highlighting the universality of the stories being told — Brothers and Ghosts, for example, is about a German woman with Vietnamese heritage, but could easily map onto similar stories of British second-generation immigrants.
Brothers and Ghosts, for example, is about a German woman with Vietnamese heritage, but could easily map onto similar stories of British second-generation immigrants.
Adam Howard
Some translation theory discusses an idea of secondariness, or the idea that a translation comes after the source-language text. I’m wondering whether there’s any kind of parallel to be drawn with the publicity for translations – do you ever look into how a title has been marketed by the original publisher? How closely (if at all) do you work with the marketing directors of these publishing houses?
It always helps when a book has won awards or garnered glowing praise in its native country, and we’ll always including this when pitching to UK media — it helps press upon literary editors that the book comes with prestige. However, I think each individual country’s media landscape operates with its own set of rules when it comes to publicity, as well as differing cultural tastes. Plus, the UK media has a particular resistance to translated writers, so it requires unique tools in order for a translated title to break through.
In your experience, are there any particular opportunities or challenges that come with marketing translated titles? I’m thinking about the potential for international collaboration and translation-specific prizes, but also the logistics of organizing launch events when people are in different countries and might speak different languages.
Translated literature prizes are invaluable, not just for the individual books, but for our whole list of translated titles — every time we’re longlisted or shortlisted for a major prize, we notice an uptick in sales for all our translated titles because bookshops recognise us more and more as publishers of quality translated books. Institutions like New Books in German, the Goethe-Institut, New Dutch Writing, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Korean Cultural Institute, and many others set up to celebrate and promote books from their respective countries can always provide us opportunities to promote books over here as well.
Distance and an author who doesn’t speak English doesn’t tend to be too much of a problem when working on a book without the author in the country — translators are often, gratefully, very willing to help with communication, and when they’re not able to, we can muddle through. Scribe has a very international list, even with English-language titles, so we generally don’t have trouble finding an audience for a book without the author’s presence.
However, we’d love to bring our authors over to the UK to promote and celebrate their books in person, and that does pose challenges. Bookshops are less likely to program events with translated authors, and if the author doesn’t speak English, they rarely have the budget they’d need to include an interpreter. This is less true of festivals, but even then, budgets are tighter than ever, and as a small indie publisher, our resources our limited as to how much we can help. We try to get around this as best we can by applying for funding where possible.
Scribe has an incredible catalogue of translated fiction, including three recent NBG picks – Brothers and Ghosts by Khuê Phạm (tr. Daryl Lindsey and Charles Hawley), The Chinese Phantom by Christoph Giesen, Philipp Grüll, Frederik Obermaier, and Bastian Obermayer (tr. Simon Pare), and Darkenbloom by Eva Menasse (tr. Charlotte Collins). Could you say something about how you approached the marketing for each of these titles, and how the marketing strategies differed given the titles’ respective features?
Brothers and Ghosts tapped into a trend that I think we’re seeing in a lot of English-language books at the moment — that of the children of ESEA immigrants wrestling with their identity and heritage — so we pitched it as very much in line with authors like Ocean Vuong and Michelle Zauner. As I said before, whilst it’s a German story, it’s one that we’re seeing happening all over the western world, so we tried to reach out to ESEA readers over here who might relate to the experience. Although it was a debut, we felt that there was plenty that would resonate with readers.
With The Chinese Phantom, as with any topical nonfiction translated or otherwise, it was very much about the story. The authors were familiar to UK audiences and editors due to their uncovering the Panama Papers, which was a huge international story which originally broke in The Guardian, so they already had lots of UK contacts and connections which were really helpful when placing features over here.
There’s a big difference in how we might approach a debut like Brothers and Ghosts to a book that comes from an established author like Eva Menasse, even if her name isn’t known as well over here. Darkenbloom came to the UK with a lot of prestige and accolades from Germany and Austria, which literary editors took notice of. But whilst it’s a very Austrian story, it’s also essentially a story about the end of, and aftermath, of World War Two, something that UK media and audiences are fascinated by. So when we pitched it, we pitched it with a focus on its historical elements.
Darkenbloom came to the UK with a lot of prestige and accolades from Germany and Austria, which literary editors took notice of. But whilst it’s a very Austrian story, it’s also essentially a story about the end of, and aftermath, of World War Two, something that UK media and audiences are fascinated by. So when we pitched it, we pitched it with a focus on its historical elements.
Adam Howard
And finally, what are some translated titles that we can look forward to from Scribe this year?
We’ve recently published a brilliant debut from Sweden, Colony by Annika Norlin (tr. Alice E Olsson), about a group of people living in isolation, which we’re very proud of. This June, we also have The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje (tr. David McKay), a WWI epic about a shellshocked soldier that was a huge bestseller in the Netherlands. July, we have the debut novel by the International Booker-shortlisted Jente Posthuma, People With No Charisma (tr. Sarah Timmer Harvey), also from the Netherlands. From Germany, we’re delighted to be publishing the second novel by Shida Bazyar, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, translated by Ruth Martin in July too.
Adam Howard is Adam Howard is Publicity and Marketing Director at Scribe’s UK. He joined Scribe in 2016 after working at Foyles, where he managed events at the Charing Cross flagship store and handled bookselling for the Royal Festival Hall events programme.
Gemma Craig-Sharples is a translator from London and former NBG intern. She’s currently completing an MA in publishing and contemporary literature at the Freie Universität, Berlin.
