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A Chat with Stephen Tyers
Today is #EuropeanDayofLanguages. In the lead up to Frankfurt Book Fair, we chatted with our Rights Executive Stephen Tyres about his work handling rights with our partner publishers in other countries. SPCK has international partners in Turkey, Spain, France, Finland, Poland, Hungary, and Germany, among many others.
1. Describe your job in two sentences.
My role is to promote our SPCK and IVP titles to foreign language publishers and to negotiate a publishing agreement with them that will enable them to publish a translated edition of our book.
2. What’s the most challenging element of your role?
The negotiation, especially with new partners. People love the books and have a vision to see a particular book in their respective language. Then I have to tell them how much they will need to pay us; sometimes it can be a quite protracted process working out the financial side of the agreement.
3. Where in Europe would you like to travel to next?
In terms of my role, I’d say that we already cover the most important European book events by attending Frankfurt Book Fair, London Book Fair and the Children’s Book fair in Bologna (not that I attend that one personally but we do have a presence there). There’s no other book event in Europe that really grabs my attention. Aside from my role at SPCK, on a personal level I’d quite like to visit Croatia one day.
4. What do you look forward to every year at Frankfurt Book Fair?
I look forward to old friends from our regular partner publishers that I have gotten to know over the years. With the people that I know well, I feel that I can recommend specific books that may be of interest to them. That’s the fun part of the job.
