Six months ago, the London Book Fair brought American literary agents eagerly across the pond for a brief respite from an increasingly fraught U.S. political landscape. And those shopping books before or at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair are seeing continued strength in the same categories that dominated dealmaking in London.

In tumultuous times, people tend to look to books for either answers or escape, and today’s world finds them leaning fairly decidedly in the latter direction. Agents say escapist and feel-good fiction remain of interest to their international colleagues—though demand for horror and horror-adjacent titles has grown since March, as something of a complement to rose-tinted romantasy. And in the nonfiction market, self-help and health and wellness titles continue to command most of the attention.

“I don’t see much of a difference between London and Frankfurt,” says Jill Grinberg, proprietor of Jill Grinberg Literary Management. “We’re seeing a lot of interest in smart, high-concept novels like Jaclyn Moriarty’s Time Travel for Beginners that sit in the sweet spot between commercial and literary. And fantasy, especially crossover romantic fantasy, remains extremely popular. But there’s also interest in classic-feeling speculative, like Garth Nix’s Massif.”

Allison Malecha, director of foreign rights at Trellis Literary Management, agrees. “Everybody is looking for something with a really easy, clean hook, and something that feels somehow both familiar and fresh,” she says. “We’re also getting a lot of questions about romantasy, with our fantastic colleague Alyssa Morris leading the charge.”

Morris, whose Substack Romancing the Phone is seen by many in the industry as perhaps the definitive chronicle of BookTok trends, joined Trellis earlier this year, where she is building a list focused on romance, romantasy, and self-published authors. Romantasy began its dizzying rise to bestseller list domination as early as Frankfurt’s 2022 edition, and while some have questioned just how long it will remain popular, Malecha says, “We are still seeing an appetite for romantasy and dark academia and other fan fiction spilling over into the self-published space.”

Grinberg notes that interest in horror is “maybe opening up the way it always does with trends that start here—where the foreign publishers, over time, see that the audience is hungry for it.” She adds, “We’re pitching a lot of horror. On the one hand, people are hungry for feel-good, funny, escapist fiction. But on the flip side, they’re also very open to much darker fare. We either want to escape or we need to dwell in the extreme version of it, to help us deal with the day-to-day.”

Regal Hoffmann & Associates partner Markus Hoffman adds that “the demand for genre-inflected, upmarket literary fiction really does seem to be growing internationally, and within those categories I think especially in horror.” Paul Lucas, formerly of Janklow & Nesbit, joined the agency in July, and Hoffman says he brought “a really fantastic sci-fi, fantasy, and genre list.” Hoffman points to new series from cozy fantasy novelist Delemhach and epic fantasy author James Islington, both represented by Lucas, as getting lots of prefair attention.

“Literary fiction is continuing to blur,” Hoffman says, “and what a few years ago would have landed on the genre lists both here and internationally is also being picked up on so-called mainstream lists. In fantastical literature, you can deal with the issues that plague us at remove, which makes them a little easier, maybe, to deal with.”

Another continuing trend is the proliferation of sales in the months ahead of the fair, which began during the pandemic—to the point where some smaller American agencies have opted out of attending the fair in person altogether.

“We made that judgment call at the end of last year, feeling unsure about how this year would go and what it would look like, both for travel reasons and for market reasons,” Trellis’s Malecha says. “And we ended up having the biggest summer we’ve had as an agency, with foreign rights deals across a few different titles, including for a really amazing upmarket-to-literary book about an unconventional love triangle, Maria, Maria by Jennifer Galvão.” (Maria, Maria was a PW Deal of the Week in August.)

“It’s always a long way to go for American agencies, and there are a lot of foreign publishers visiting New York this September,” Malecha adds. “But if I was making the decision to go to Frankfurt now, I probably would have. There is still, to me, a feeling of good energy—even if, yes, politically, we all have a lot to be concerned about.”

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