120004 AR Praxis-Workshop SS24 (2024S)

This workshop offers a first-hand practical experience of the world of publishing. It provides direct access to the workings of how to find authors and how to create, produce and sell books in the current marketplace.

Books can be so many things: good, bad, ground-breaking, controversial, canonical, of the moment, literary, commercial, inspiring, funny - but to be any of these things they first and foremost need to be - published. A book has a two-fold nature: it is both creative content and a product to be sold. Publishing provides the link between the artistic work of the author and the reading public. This workshop will explain and illustrate the real-life conditions and parameters of publishing, describing the productive arc of books and offering an insight into the creation, production and intended reception of fiction and non-fiction books. We will examine the key aspects of what publishing is about and what publishers do to transform an author's vision into a marketable product for readers to buy. The workshop will present an overview of the current situation in the German-language book market and the literary globalization that governs international bestsellers. We will concentrate on publishing in the German-language territory, i.e. Germany, Austria and Switzerland, comparing its original and translated titles with the international publishing situation, placing particular emphasis on the markets in the United Kingdom and the United States. The overall aim of the workshop is to provide authentic and direct insights into the work practices of the non-academic literary world and to enable students to do practical work on ongoing real-life publishing projects.
We will be looking at how we find new authors, at the acquisition process, at publishers' profiles and programmes, at marketing, publicity and distribution, at booksellers, internet platforms and customer reviews. The practical focus will be on what editors do in publishing, in particular their relationship with authors and their editorial involvement: evaluating exposés, textual and editorial work, finding a title, writing blurbs, slogans and sales pitches, presenting the author, interacting with readers, both directly or on Social Media.

The aim of the course is to give you authentic and direct insights into the work practices of publishing, particularly into editorial tasks and the pressures of economic viability. You will be reading and reporting on manuscripts that are currently being offered to publishers, thus gaining access to real work materials. You will learn how to develop pitches, write blurbs and formulate slogans, sales points and book titles using ongoing real-life publishing projects in English and German. You will gain a hands-on understanding of publishing processes and the current situation of the book business.

Dr. Cordelia Borchardt is Senior Acquisitions Editor Fiction at S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Having studied in Munich, London and Oxford, she is holding a PhD in English Literature and has taught at Frankfurt, Marburg and Heidelberg Universities as well as Stanford. Concentrating on upmarket commercial fiction, she has worked with a wide range of German and international authors like Graeme Simsion, Rohinton Mistry, Rachel Joyce, Jörg Maurer and Shelby van Pelt.