G-MAP attended the Frankfurt Book Fair from October 15 to 17, 2025. During the fair, we met with publishers and also visited some of the major bookstores in the city.
We originally expected most of our conversations to focus on manga education. In practice, however, many of them turned to production: what could we actually make together?
Publishers seemed more interested in concrete possibilities — such as working with Japanese artists to create new titles for their own readers — than in the broader idea of supporting Japanese students. The difference in response was noticeable once the conversation moved toward actual projects.
Of course, three days of meetings are not enough to draw conclusions about the European market as a whole. Still, hearing similar ideas from several publishers gave us some useful direction for what to explore next.
If the goal is to prepare students for professional work, expanding classroom instruction alone may not be enough. Students also need opportunities to create work for real projects, receive professional feedback, make revisions and take a project through to delivery.
We also heard a great deal about the practical side of international production: contracts and rights, payments and taxes, translation, review processes, scheduling, revision limits and delivery specifications. These are not easy matters for an individual artist or a school to handle on its own.
Several publishers also mentioned the value of having a single point of contact to coordinate the overall production process, particularly when trying to build a relationship beyond the first project. This is something we would like to test through actual collaborations.
