Literary Agent Platform - Capacity Building

Project description

This project is the continuation of two projects that successfully applied to the Creative Europe program: Reading Balkans: Borders vs. Frontiers and South and East reaches West - digital platform for promotion of writers in post-conflict societies. We want to use the achieved and the knowledge gained through it to build a new project, with a new focus, corresponding to the needs and unused potential of the European literary markets. In all these years that we are working in publishing and EACEA projects we realised that the biggest problem in circulation between European languages is cooperation between small languages. Nowadays almost all translations happen from English to small European languages. Cooperation between small European languages is rare or non-existent. We found out that there are multiple reasons for this situation: - Lack of knowledge & skills on selling rights Small languages have smaller audiences, and the revenues are considerably smaller. That is why publishers are smaller with less employees and with lesser capacity in selling rights. Selling rights is particularly difficult because it demands constant presence in international environment and smaller publishers do not have capacity nor finances to do that successfully. - Lack of translators Usually, smaller languages have problem even with finding good translators for bigger languages, so translators to smaller languages are even harder to find. Usually, they need translations to bigger languages first so they can at least translate works through bridge language. - Lack of promotion Especially English authors are much more present in various media and content, so they are much more compelling for publishers to translate. Big publishers have also much more funds for promotion and for development of all kinds of tools for pushing rights sales (to film sector, theatre, gaming, merchandise, other languages, etc).

Objective

- Transnational creation and circulation

Priorities

- Sustainability

- Digital access

- International dimension