Frankfurt Book Fair 2020

A different Book Fair this year

This is the time of year when the Nature Picture Library team would normally be at the Frankfurt Book Fair, catching up with our friends and colleagues in the publishing industry, and meeting clients from all over the world. But this year is different. The book fair is in full flow, but in 2020, it is largely a digital event and our meetings will be virtual ones. We will miss the buzz of the Frankfurt Book Fair (along with our annual indulgence in German chocolates and hospitality). However, we decided it was best this year to stay safe here in Bristol and enjoy a virtual book fair instead.

DID YOU KNOW that we present book and calendar ideas?

We create the concept along with a great selection of our images, many of them exclusive to NPL, and we handle all the image research. In many cases, we are also able to provide the author – Michael Bright and Anna Levin have worked on our projects, and photographers Alex Mustard and Stefan Christmann are authors too. We show our concepts to publishing contacts, aiming to find a partner who will develop them through to publication.

This year is no different – the NPL team has been busy working on a range of new book and calendar ideas to present. So, thanks to Rachelle Morris and Laura Sutherland in our sales team, we’re sharing a few tasters of some of our new ideas:

NEW Book Ideas

NEW Calendar Ideas

Here are some samples of new calendar concepts we have developed for Autumn 2020, with a view to titles appearing in 2022. Often they involve the work of a single photographer, which gives a stylistic unity, but we also have some conceptual titles up our sleeve, using images by a range of different photographers. We always ensure that we have sufficient strong coverage on the theme to be able to fulfil the same title in subsequent years.

Previous book successes from Frankfurt Book Fair

Over the years, Naturepl has been successful in proposing book projects. Many of them have gone on to be successfully published by a variety of international publishers. You can see our original presentations on the left which would eventually be transformed, developed and published in to the books on the right:

We are delighted that our latest book fair success Penguin – a Story of Survival by Stefan Christmann – will be on show at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. This gorgeous book is hot off the press, only a year after we proposed the idea to the German publisher teNeues Media.

The Magic Moment was a simple but strong concept. It show how all the elements came together for the photographer to create a great nature image, with extended quotes from some of the world’s top wildlife photographers. This was published by White Star Editions in Italy. And it has also had success in French, English, German and Japanese editions.

This ambitious book idea about the world’s reservoirs of biodiversity was first pitched by us at Frankfurt Book Fair 2013. It really appealed to the German Publisher Mair Dumont, who published it as Die letzten Naturparadiese in 2015. We were delighted that this important subject was covered with such engaging text and thoughtful design.

Here are examples of children’s book concepts we presented at book fairs that went on to be published:

It has been a pleasure to work with many leading publishing companies, including Hachette Children’s, Bloomsbury, World Book, White Star, Firefly, teNeues Media and Maverick Publishing.

And previous calendar successes

We also put together lots of calendar concepts to present to our calendar clients at Frankfurt Book Fair. Colours of Nature and Natural Zen have been successful titles for the Weingarten imprint of Athesia. And we have worked closely with other leading calendar companies, such as Ackermann, Delius Klasing, Dumont, Harenberg and Palazzi.