You have to give them a reason to read

Jo Lusby, managing director with Penguin Books China

Excerpt

On the movie adapted from Wolf Totem: “The Oscar winning French director Jean Jacque Anaud has directed the movie. I’ve just seen a very small part from it but we’re very excited about it coming out and it gives us another opportunity to work on Jiang Rong again. People have very busy lives. You have to give them a reason to read a book. You have to give them a reason why they should spend their time and money to sit down now and read this book now. So with Wolf Totem, with something like a movie coming out, it gives us something as an opportunity to remind people about this book which we published in 2008. It gives us the opportunity to remind people to promote it to a new generation of readers or to an old generation of readers who knew about it but maybe didn’t go around to reading it. So it’s really a good opportunity for us to go out with something again, which we know was very successful. So we would do a movie tie and cover on the book. So we will celebrate the movie. Hopefully we can join together and have a great success. ”

Surprise readers rather than being too much led by them: “By social media, it means you can create relationship with very strong feedback without really imposing too much on your readers. You have to be very careful as a publisher not to follow too close in people’s reading habits because the biggest success in this world is books like Wolf Totem where nobody saw it coming. Everybody was taken by surprise. It was very unusual. You look at something like Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, the same-nobody could explain why but it became a sensation. EL James, Fifty Shades of Grey and so on, that these books suddenly came out and suddenly became a huge success and if you spent too much time talking to readers, actually the readers, they know what they want when you offer it to them. But until you offer to them, maybe they don’t know, so you can’t be too much led by readers. But you still have to closely follow their feedback. The key with a very successful book, by which I mean high sales figures book, if a book sells many many copies, it’s probably because somebody has read it, enjoyed it and recommended it to their friend. That is the best advertising and that’s the advertising that money cannot buy, and that’s also the best reader feedback. Now we do increasingly reliant on places in China like Douban, website where people go on and make reader recommendations. Overseas there’s a similar website called ‘good reads’, and we rely a lot on the feedback there and we see what people are saying because that’s honest readers who care a lot about what they are reading and they like to comment. You know, we certainly reach out to our readers. We tend to not do it too much.”

Challenges for Chinese books’ going global: “I think there’re two main challenges. One is around translation and the other is around marketing.”

Not easy to promote new Chinese authors: “Readers tend to not really trust advertisement for a new author, especially for a literary author. You can maybe use advertising for commercial author, but for literary author, it’s really about good criticism, it’s about positive reviews in big newspapers, but it’s also about an author speaking in a very honest and open and interesting way about that book. And if that’s happening through translation, it becomes so much difficult for people to create an emotional relationship. That’s not Chinese writers’ fault at all. English language speakers are famously reluctant to listen to people speaking foreign languages because we’re lazy, because we don’t have to, so people choose not to. But that’s definitely a big problem because it stops Chinese writers joining literary festivals for example, where they have a panel for writers who will be from four different countries. But their common language would be English, so to have one writer on the panel who needs an interpreter, it prevents free flow of conversation. I think it’s a genuine challenge and there is no good answer. I think that’s just a difference of generation. Young people in China speak better English, so in 20 years’ time, it probably won’t be a problem, but for now, it’s definitely a problem. ”

Would it be better for Chinese writers to speak English: “I don’t like to say that because that sounds like cultural imperialism. I think you can always get around these problems. You know Jiang Rong himself in China did not do any publicity events or any Chinese media interviews and the book became a good sensation. You have writers like Haruki Murakami in Japan who do not do many English language interviews or events and he is a major sensation around the world. You have a novelist like Stieg Larsson who wrote the novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who was not only a Swedish writer; he was dead when the book published. And the book became a major global sensation. So I would never want to dictate with Chinese writers that they have to learn English. I think for writers in particular, it’s a big challenge because writers, in English we talk about people weighing their words. They care about their words very very deeply. They will not just casually use a word and just throw it away, they will really care about their words and think about their words, so the level of fluency you need to be able to do a debate at literary festival is very very high. It’s not just like I can go on a subway, buy a ticket and order a meal. It’s not just the simple, regular English. It’s very emotional English you have to have. And I think for that level of English, you have to live overseas for several years, so I would not recommend Chinese writers to learn English. It’s just something that we have to understand. It’s an issue we have to work around somehow."