The Nobel Prize can be a distraction, but it’s very helpful

Jo Lusby, managing director with Penguin Books China

Excerpts

On Nobel Prize of Literature: “I think the Nobel Prize can be a distraction, but I think it’s very helpful. I said it’s a distraction because it’s a prize which is very difficult to predict, you cannot chase after it. Every year, one author is given a prize. That is not the only good author in the world at that time. It happens to be the author who wins the Nobel Prize. I certainly caution against on the overemphasis on the Nobel Prize. But as I said I do believe Mo Yan winning the Nobel Prize was a great moment of Chinese literature. There was a great sense of pride in China of acceptance of somebody who was big literary figure in China winning such an important international prize. And for that reason I understand the enthusiasm and I think it’s very important. For literary writers, advertising doesn’t really help. If you put a big billboard advertisement beside the street, people don’t really believe it’s a great book. They think it’s a commercial book. To have a prize committee, and such a well respected prize committee to say we think this author is fantastic. It’s an independent group to say read this person and this has huge value to us as publishers. That’s why we’re looking forward to publishing Frog, because it’s his first new novel since he won the Nobel Prize being published in English, so hopefully we have really quite high hopes in terms of doing something quite exciting.”

Classics have to be relevant: “I don’t really agree that young Chinese are not reading. People are well educated. I think what happened though is that classics in China has not been marketed very well in recent years. We know we have to sell the classics to people. It’s not enough to say Pride and Prejudice, very famous; of course you have to read it. You have to give people a reason, so we do a lot of marketing events. We do a lot of different jackets. We do a lot of promotional activities. We do a lot of face to face activities where people can go to reading and go to events, where you make the classics relevant to their life. And we find readers in China respond very very well to that. People want to be cultured. They want to be well-rounded. They also want to know what people in other countries are reading, so they want to feel as though they’re equal in terms of their cultural knowledge to somebody at the same age in the US or in the UK. So there is a real interest. We recently had a big success at Shanghai Book Fair where we sold Penguin suitcases filled with 20 hardback Penguin classics. It was a big crazy sell. Yeah, I think a lot of people wanted suitcases, but you know people wanted the books. People would by boxes of hard books. So you know, you give people a reason to buy it now, read it, feel as though you’re part of something fashionable and relevant. Classics have to be relevant. If they’re just old things and not relevant, why should you read them? I think publishers have responsibilities. It’s not necessarily readers. If readers are not talking about classics as much because publishers didn’t give them a reason to be excited, so that’s why we spend a lot of time. ”

People are very hungry for information in China: “The opportunities in China are that people are very hungry for information. From a publishing standpoint, people are not used to, when I talk about marketing the classics and packaging the classics, giving people a reason to read the classics. Classics are not new in China, but approaching classics in this way in China is quite new. So that’s where the opportunity we can use, the brand building experience. For us the opportunity is the Children. We’re a very strong children’s publisher. And there is a lot of opportunity here. We publish books that children want to read, not books that children should be told to read. And parents worry about their children. They want children to choose to read. They want children to develop maybe more empathy. They want them to develop more creativity. So through this kind of storytelling and reading with children, it’s a very good time for us to introduce what we do, both in English and Chinese to Chinese families, so the children’s area is very important to us. It’s a definite area of opportunity. And then as I say on the adult side, it’s really just about finding stories that Chinese people are very interested to read and it is growing. I think people talk about young people not reading as much as they used to in China. I’m not worried about the market shrinking here. In the past, books in some way sold themselves, now you have to really sell the book to people and give people a reason to read it, so that’s why I’m pretty optimistic.”