Imagine trying to sell someone a Ferrari in a showroom where parts of the ceiling have just fallen in and there’s banging and drilling going on behind the white sheeting that’s hung up beside you. You have a world-class product on offer but your potential customer might have already tripped over the carpet, been shouted at by staff as part of the entry system, and can’t find anywhere to sit down that’s not the floor.

“Is there not a VIP lounge or anything like that? I’ll pay whatever they want, I just want a coffee and to charge my phone,” an American film exec asked me in 2022. I recalled the convenient plug sockets and perches of Earl’s Court and wondered how we had regressed so much in a decade. It’s not a metaphor, its simply embarrassing. And yes, he’s never come back to London Book Fair (LBF).

As a UK business, the state of your national book fair reflects on you, so we are all invested – and last year’s Olympia shambles took the biscuit. When it is just pigeons flying around the International Rights Centre (IRC), it’s amusing, but when parts of the ceiling come down metres from you, not so much. This is why we, as a UK literary agency selling rights internationally, took the decision this year to do the fair differently: not by buying hard hats but by putting our budget towards an off-site venue to host our international customers.

The announcement that LBF will move from Olympia to Excel London in 2027 has naturally stirred both excitement and anxiety. At the most basic of levels, our national book fair needs more room, which Olympia cannot provide – that extra space we remember from old and imagine might reappear once the works are done has gone for other use development. On a strategic level, London’s crown as a top-tier book fair has been slipping. Is this a problem? Depends how important you think it is that we have a national book fair that’s properly international I guess, but what is clear is that other book fairs, such as Sharjah and Gothenburg, are expanding their rights and B2B offer. The market is there if London wants more of it.

Trade-fair halls are blank canvasses and LBF at Excel can be more ambitious, more world-class and what we want it to be, truly showcasing our industry.

Trade-fair halls are blank canvasses and LBF at Excel can be more ambitious, more world-class and what we want it to be, truly showcasing our industry. The pandemic reminded us that face-to-face events are crucial for building trust and can produce high-value, memorable experiences that are difficult to replicate digitally.

Back when I was a young person, I worked on stands at large and exciting consumer-facing shows the British Motor Show and the BBC Good Food Show. I would love for the UK to have a book fair that’s also B2C, as they seem to manage this everywhere else in the world. I was thrilled when I visited Riyadh International Book Fair last year to see long queues of excited young women waiting to get their books signed by the author, just like in Frankfurt. In the National Year of Reading, should we debate as an industry why we don’t have a consumer book fair?

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