Founded in 1986, Bloomsbury Publishing is an independent publishing house dedicated to promoting quality literature. During the editor’s week of the Buenos Aires Book Fair I met with Bill Swainson, Senior Commissioning Editor of the Adult Editorial Division at Bloomsbury Publishing in London.
Frances Riddle: About how many translations does Bloomsbury publish annually?
Bill Swainson: We publish about 100 books a year of which about 40-45 are fiction titles. The rest are non-fiction. Of the fiction titles no more than four or five are works in translation. So that gives you around 10%. Of non-fiction I do a maximum of one or two books in translation per year. I’m not interested in percentages or quotas. My role is to find the best writing I can from foreign languages and find really good translators and then publish those authors just as we do all our other authors over several books and over several years. It’s a very long process to establish a writer’s reputation and then to develop and grow it. I don’t look for one-off books. I’m actually looking to work with writers.
FR: What first sparked your interest in world literature?
BS: When I was growing up I was lucky to go to France and I thought it was the most exciting place I’d ever been until I went later to Italy. My father had been a prisoner of war in a Japanese prison camp and his best friend by the end of the war was an Italian submarine commander. So we saw this Italian family regularly. But more important was in the 60s and early 70s the most exciting writing was international. We were discovering writers like Cortázar, Marguerite Duras, even at school. When I was at university I did English but I had friends who studied French, Italian, Russian, and I read what they were reading but in translation. So for me literature has always been world literature.
FR: How do you decide which works from other languages you might want to publish?
BS: I go and look for the writers. I use a network of friends, experts, publishers, and agents from all over the world. And this helps me select the writers I want to publish. They need to be writers that are serious about their careers, who are literary novelists, and I need to feel that I can work with them and they obviously need to feel they can work with me.
FR: How much of a role does the marketability of a foreign author play in your decision to publish a translation?
BS: The market doesn’t play a role at all. A writer could have a very big profile but their work might not be that interesting. The other way around it’s more difficult because a writer could be quite interesting but they might not be that interested in publicity. So the challenge is how to work best with the writer in question. A year and half ago I went on a publisher’s visit to Istanbul and we were introduced to writers, publishers, agents. We had a very full program and one name came up three times. It wasn’t a writer we met, it wasn’t someone whose publicity was happening at that time, it just sounded interesting. So I asked for the books and I got them read by two different people and all of a sudden Hasan Ali Toptaş seemed like the genuine article. In Germany he’d been described as the Turkish Kafka. That’s a nice line but actually to me he seemed to have something which a lot of the great modernist writing of the 20th century had which is a combination of the desire to experiment formally and a strong awareness of the tradition, particularly the literary tradition out of which story telling in that country comes. For me Hasan Ali Toptaş was attractive for those reasons. He has a sense in his writing, yes it’s a bit like Kafka, but it’s also a bit like Angela Carter who can take a fairy story and then turn it on its head and the fantasy becomes real in a way you’re not expecting. I’m choosing writers drawing on my reading of great literature and I hope I can go on doing it for some time. The market is really important but not when you’re choosing, at least not for me. You have to know how you’re going to present the writers you take on and that means knowing about how your own publishing company works with sales, marketing, publicity and rights. It means knowing about how the marketplace works, which has changed radically in Britain in the last three of four years.
FR: What changes have you seen in the British publishing industry?
BS: The market has changed hugely. In about 1983 the first Waterstones shops opened. This created a marketplace for international literature in English and in translation from other languages, which had not previously existed on that scale. It coincided with an economic boom. People had disposable income. Paperbacks didn’t change much in price over the years. The Berlin Wall came down, we all rediscovered Central Europe, and there were all kinds of stimulants for literature from different parts of the world. That went on for about 25 years. There was a whole generation of publishers whose experience was chain bookstores. You could go to them for publicity and marketing. They would support you in what you were doing, and the public could find the books in that marketplace all over the UK in the 250-300 Waterstones branches. It was a viable way of publishing. Today Waterstones is still a very important market but you have Amazon which probably takes half the literary market. You have the wholesalers who supply the small independents. You have W.H. Smith who doesn’t tend to touch literature in translation unless it hits the bestseller lists like The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruíz Zafón or The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out a Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson. W.H. Smith is not really buying literary fiction. So you have a much reduced market and therefore publicity is ever more important. If you don’t get publicity nobody hears about the books. They don’t sell on Amazon. If you don’t get publicity Waterstones’ customers don’t go into the bookshops and order the copies. And then of course the other market which wasn’t there before is digital publishing. So for fiction the Kindle can account for 40-50% of sales for a book. Usually that applies to the big bestsellers rather than literary fiction but it can still be a significant 10-20%. So our market is changing and the publisher’s job is to keep abreast of those changes and find the best ways to work with the market to get the book in whatever form, print or digital, to the readers.
FR: What are the biggest challenges to publishing translations in the UK?
BS: Publishing any book from any language, including English, is really hard. Most books are not successful. I don’t publish literature from other languages as a translation. I publish it as literature. The translation is the means to get it from one language to another. We could not work without our translators, not only for the work they do as a translator but also the advice and support they give in promoting an author and so on. But if we went to the marketplace and started trying to sell Vargas Llosa or Juan Gabriel Vásquez as translations, immediately people will turn away. And you’ve stopped talking about the literature. So the key to me is to find the best way to publish your book whether it was written in English or Sanskrit or Aztec or whatever language. You’re publishing a book and that has to come first.
FR: Have you seen anything this week at the Buenos Aires Book Fair that you would like to see translated to English?
BS: The British market is absolutely overwhelmed with works in English and often writers who are widely read in other European countries or in Latin America or in Japan or China are overlooked. There are many writers one would love to see published in English but of course if your job is an editor you’re fully occupied just trying to publish the writers you do take on, as successfully as you can. So you don’t often raise your head from your desk to look for everything that’s missing. It’s when you come to a book fair like this and you see that for example this year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar. I thought I had an idea of his back catalog but yesterday I saw two, two-volume books of Cortázar’s works that I had no idea existed. The sense that I get coming to a book fair like this is you actually see the collected works of writers in a way that you don’t see in English bookshops. You only have to look round the stands at this book fair or in Istanbul or in Paris and you see that there are hundreds of books that aren’t getting published. All you can do is publish the books you do find out about and choose to publish as best you can. I might pick four brilliant writers but that doesn’t mean there aren’t another 16 in the same country.
FR: Do you think that works in translation will one day have a better foothold in the British publishing industry?
BS: The issue of the 3% problem or 2% or whatever percent problem: percent of what, of all the books published, scientific books? Are we really making a useful comparison there? But I think that if all general publishers regularly published some books in translation, immediately, the situation would be better. You can’t make people do it but every time there is a success like Jonas Jonasson or Carlos Ruíz Zafón, whenever you just think of their work as literature it gives people more confidence and it makes them more willing to take risks. Looking ahead, yes, if we as citizens support our societies and insist that our governments look after education and culture then yes, we can be optimistic. But it’s not going to happen while we sit at home busily editing away. We have to be actively engaged.