French publishers fail to tap international market

Not many of us know that there are six thousand languages spoken across the world. But only few languages have a potential market for books. French is one of the largest spoken languages after Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi. There exist a great potential in international book market owing to the large language pool.

The market for English language books is one of the largest. This huge market is driven by dynamic marketing by the publishers.Spanish market is driven by the rise in the living standards of the Latin American population and the government initiatives to promote literature and reading. Both of these book markets are huge and comprise of big and small companies.These are driven by the eager of the middle class to read books and appreciate literature.In addition to this these markets have expert professionals, subsidiaries and the permit to operate freely with their own policies.

The French language book market on the other hand seems to be largely concentrating in Paris. Forecasts say that French language pool is going to rise further due to its 700 million native French speakers. However, it appears that the supply side of French book market is not able to catch up with the rising numbers.

It seems that publishers in this market have assumed that French speaking population is only limited and is never going to rise and therefore they have not explored the opportunities in international market.They are still sticking to the old practices of marketing unlike other book markets. This picture seems to be worse for writers. A writer whose book is published by a company in Paris cannot publish for anyone else. They face challenges to sell the rights of book published in French language inside French speaking countries.

In nutshell, the market for books in French has huge potential but they need to throw away their old-fashioned attitudes.