On episode 12 of the Make Books Travel podcast I’m talking to Antoine Tanguay, who founded the Quebec publishing house Editions Alto in 2005.

When I asked Antoine if there were any specific topics he wanted to discuss on the podcast, he mentioned that for the past few years he’d been focusing quite a bit on publishing innovations, on new ways to spread writing and people's stories.

During the interview it turned out that he is indeed full of ideas to try out different ways of telling stories, and isn’t afraid of unusual, out-of-the-box ideas. To put it in his own words, he “thinks outside the book”! It was fascinating to hear about some of his ideas on this podcast episode. 

I truly enjoyed our chat and I hope you do, too!

Welcome to episode 11 of the Make Books Travel podcast. Today’s guest is Chiara Scaglioni, editor of international fiction at Mondadori in Italy.

Chiara and I met a couple of times at various book fairs last few years, and had in fact scheduled to meet at the Mondadori offices in Milan early April this year. That obviously did not happen...

Italy was the first Western country to be hit by the Covid-19 virus, late February, and for a while it was the global epicenter of the pandemic. So of course the coronavirus is an important topic of our conversation. I was especially interested in getting a sense of the current situation in Italy now that the restrictions have for a large part been lifted, bookstores have reopened, and books are being published again.

On today's show I am talking to Stephanie Barrouillet, founder of SB Rights Agency in Tel Aviv that represents foreign rights in children's books around the world.

The 10-hour time difference between California and Israel didn’t stop us from having a great conversation about the global children’s book market.

As we were talking, I realized Stephanie and I have a lot in common: we both live in a country we weren’t born in -Stephanie was born in France and I’m originally from the Netherlands-, we started our publishing career in yet another country -Stephanie in the UK and I started out in France-, we both founded our own agencies within a few years' interval, and, probably because of these international journeys, our agencies don’t focus on the representation of books from one specific language or country but rather, we represent authors and books written in many different languages.

Today I am talking to Florent Massot, who founded the independent French publishing house Massot Editions in 2017. This isn’t Florent’s first publishing venture however, as he has been publishing books for over 35 years.

I wanted to sit down with him and discuss amongst others the impact of the strict lockdown measures the French government imposed in March. 

For about 2 months, it was virtually impossible to buy a book anywhere in France, either in physical or online bookstores. The French Publishers’ Union recently published a survey that showed a pretty gloomy picture of the state of the industry. 

But the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t the first crisis Florent has seen in his career, and I very much look forward to hearing his thoughts.

After having interviewed publishing professionals from Mexico, Spain and Germany and heard about their experiences connected to the Covid-19  pandemic, I now wanted to focus on a country in Asia. I’m truly delighted to be joined today by Gloria Masdeu, who works for the Rights Department of the Thinkingdom Media Group in China.

Among many things, Gloria talks about how she ended up moving from Barcelona to Beijing, what the 3-month lockdown was like for her, and how the Chinese capital is slowly opening up again.