The following report was a project for the course Italian Art and Culture for USAC Viterbo's Spring 2022 session.
Books and literature have historically had extraordinary impacts on human culture and life. When looking at authors like William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri, one can really start to understand the influences storytelling can have on language and ways of life. Shakespeare alone gave English countless new metaphors, concepts, and phrase, and Dante is unignorable in Italy, still thriving and alive even in the smallest of towns. But their influence did not happen out of nowhere. These men did not write their works, their poems and essays, without having a way to show them to the public, without having a way to sell them.
Even before the advent of the printing press, books had an industry, a market, with writers, poets, calligraphers, artists, paper craftsmen, and patrons making up a majority of those involved in the process. In modern times, this has developed into a complex network of authors, agents, editors, publishers, designers, printers, distributors, booksellers, librarians, and more. Across the globe, this familiar practice of getting a book “on the shelf,” so to speak, has become globalized, but that does not mean there aren’t small differences in the markets across various cultures.
Publishing has three markets in the United States: trade, independent (not owned by major trade companies), and academic. Its major trade publishers are Penguin Random House (PRH), Macmillan Publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, and Simon & Schuster, with the latter being sold by its parent company to PRH, a controversial decision in the American market. These five companies make up a majority of all publishers in the U.S., each owning more than twenty imprints. PRH is the biggest, having been created by a historic 2013 merger of Penguin Group and Random House.
The Italian market, according to the Associazione Italiana Editoria (AIE), has four groups: trade, small publishers (equivalent to independent), educational, and academic and professional. Its major companies are Mondadori, De Agostini Editori, CEMS, Feltrinelli, and Giunti. Feltrinelli owns the largest bookshop chain in Italy, known as La Feltrinelli. Their frequency is comparable to, if not exceeding, that of Barnes and Noble. Mondadori, one of the oldest Italian publishers, similarly has their own chain of bookstores, though not nearly as widespread as La Feltrinelli.
In U.S. trade publishing—meaning books that the general public purchases—everything begins when an author pitches their work to an agent, who then networks with editors and provides them with manuscripts they may be interested in. Usually there are acquisitions editors or assistant editors who read through these manuscripts for an editor, providing them with a report of the pros and cons of a book and its market potential. An editor then chooses to sign on a book, pitching it to their higher ups. Contract negotiation is then made, involving the author, editor, and agent. TV, film, and various other adaption agreements may also be made at this stage.
Following this are various editing stages: content editing and copy-editing being some of the most important. Once a manuscript is perfected as best it can be, it’s sent to a book designer, who can be either in-house or outsourced. The designer is also in charge of researching artists and outsourcing the illustrations or images used on book covers, which they also most often design. The editor and a production team proof the book, with the production team overseeing printing decisions, everything from cost to shipping to paper sourcing—nearly always foreign in the U.S., which is currently creating major production setbacks and release date changes due to shortages.
Advanced Reading Copies (ARCs), which can also be digital (eARC), are printed and sent to various reviews, which is how blurbs are chosen to display on covers and other promotional materials. Reviews give both the company and booksellers the chance to see how well the book is being received, allowing them to adjust order sizes accordingly. A marketing team goes on to promote the book, publicists organize and manage events to do the same, and a sales team works with various booksellers to ensure copies will be available in stores, libraries, and schools.
From here begins the difference between the book markets of the United States and Italy, which, according to data from the AIE (published in the 2022 report “Adlus Focus on … the Italian Book Market” for the 2022 Bologna Children’s Book Fair, are respectively the first and sixth highest grossing book markets in the world, as of 2021. Their main distinction lies in their import and export sales, both of which work simultaneously yet also independent of the domestically originated publishing process.
Following the initial domestic sales stage, or even prior to it, deals for the foreign sales and/or translation rights—known as an export for the seller, and an import for the buyer—may be made. The United States is known for having an astronomical number of exports but a notoriously small number of imported translations, with less than 5% of books sold in the United States being translations. The U.S. has major imports—the works of British author C.S. Lewis are one such example—but these tend to only be books first written in English. The only exception to this seems to be Japanese manga, which dominate graphic novel imports and translations all around the world. The overall reasoning for American adversity to translation is complicated and not easily pinned down, but generally translations are assumed by publishers to not thrive well in the American market, and so imported translations, and translations in general, are rarely published.
The Italian trade market is different in that it thrives off foreign books and translations. Walking into a major bookstore in Italy—La Feltrinelli or Mondadori, for example—you’ll immediately find internationally popular bestsellers, nearly all U.S. based, and all translated into Italian. American authors such as Madeline Miller, Adam Silvera, Leigh Bardugo, Rick Riordan, Sarah. J. Maas, Jennifer L. Armentrout, Colleen Hoover, Holly Black, and V.E. Schwab are near stables in bookstores in 2022.
Outside of these physical sales, the Italian book market has historically had more imports than exports. According to data from the AIE, 2015 saw an unprecedented spike in the acquisition of rights of foreign authors, with 10,685 contracts being signed that year. Since then, it’s evened out to an average 9,000 contracts per year, with 2020 seeing 9,127 books sold. 2019 to 2020 did see a decline in import contract sales, though the likely impact of the COVID-19 pandemic can’t be ignored when looking at this data.
This sheer number of imports doesn’t mean that the Italian book export market is non-existent. Publishers have worked hard to even out the difference. In 2001, 1,800 contracts regarding the rights to Italian authors’ works were sold. In 2020, that number became 8,569, having grown slowly but steadily over the years. Internationally acclaimed Italian authors—such as Paolo Giordano, Niccolò Ammaniti, and Elena Ferrante, whose fame is nicknamed “Ferrante Fever”—, feed into the growth of Italy’s book exports. In comparison to the U.S. market, which influences the international book market more than allows itself to be influenced, the Italian market allows itself to have a bit of both.
One thing these markets have in common is that they’ve both seen unprecedented rises in book sales and social media influence following 2020 and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Book enthusiasts on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram can make or break new releases and have contributed to the sharp rise in sales of children’s books, including Middle Grade and Young Adult. AIE data reports that the children’s market (which it categorizes as up to the age of fourteen) counts for 18% (286.6 million euros) of Italy’s overall 2021 book market. That’s up 19% (forty-six million euros) from 2020 alone.
The U.S. market has seen a boom in its YA sales and exports, with a majority of international TikTok book sensations being U.S. published, but the Italian market has also found that its children’s books are leading their export sales forward. According to the AIE, 32.8% of its translation rights sold in 2020 involve children’s books. In comparison, children’s books only made up 10.5% of overall Italian book production in 2020. What the influence of these platforms, and the rising recognition of the younger market, will do to the industry is yet to be fully understood, but it seems that for both the U.S. and Italy, their future is in children’s exports.
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