Today I'll give you a little travel report about my visit at this year's book fair in Frankfurt.
Everyone loves to get up very early, so do I and swung my ass out of the bed at 4 am. Shower, coffee, car, looking for a free parking lot, I was hitting Wuppertal central station at 5.45 am and waited for the ICE. Good luck, the train drivers didn't strike that day, after they caused a massive chaos some days before. I entered the train punctual and had a very nice journey via Cologne along the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, crossing Loreley until I arrived only with a delay of 10 minutes at Frankfurt central station.
After a short drive with the city train I entered the book fair. I had a fix date with one publisher in the morning and some loose dates where I could show my portfolio at noon and in the afternoon. The first date was like a real first date. Slightly nervous I had a short talk with a reader from a Berlin based publisher. She liked my stuff, gave some positive feedback and wanted to see the finished product including the text. I felt a little eased after that good start of that day.
After that date I had to check out some publishers who couldn't tell me in advance if and when they did a consultation for illustrators. I got the dates and even skipped one great publisher because they were unfriendly on the phone and didn't answer me.
Last year I've been in Frankfurt on a public day. That was kinda uncool in two ways. First, there weren't any contact persons on the publisher's booths anymore and second, the halls were overrun by thousands of peoples so that I felt I had to wade through marmalade. This year everything was cool, the booths were crowded with competent persons and there was a pleasant mass of peoples. And of course, this year I had to show something.
And so I spent most of the day standing in line with other illustrators (and some writers) and waited for showing my portfolio. I often received positive feedback, some critique and two publishers told me that my book wouldn't fit in their portfolio. At the end of the day I had a hand full of potential publishers that liked to see the finished product to forge an opinion. In between I checked out some publishers that weren't on my radar because they're too small or off-topic, visited the digital innovation area as well as the guest visitor's hall which was occupied by Finland this year.
At 6 pm I had closing time and hit a bistro near the central station to satisfy my hunger. At 8 pm I entered my train back home. At 10.30 pm I was back. Totally dished but happy. The next days, I'll have to finish the children's book, that means color the remaining pages, lay out the text, create a cover and so on. And then see what's happening next.
Cheers, Robert
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