From Prince Harry to Harry Potter in China — Q&A with publishing veteran Jo Lusby

I first met Jo Lusby in Beijing in the year 2000 when we were editors at rival entertainment magazines. She went on to run book publishing operations in North Asia for Penguin Random House.

Some of my daughter’s first books were Chinese versions of the British kids series Peppa Pig, which Jo published in Chinese and Korean. The Chinese version reportedly sold 60 million copies in its first three years.

In 2017, Jo co-founded Pixie B, a company that does cross-border business with publishers across different media types in China and the West.

We chatted a couple of weeks ago by video call about the pandemic’s effect on Chinese consumers and their media habits, Prince Harry and Harry Potter in China, and much more.

This is an abridged, edited transcript of our conversation.

—Jeremy Goldkorn

Jo, your company, Pixie B, produced an interesting report for your clients on the creative marketplace in China, of which the death may have been greatly exaggerated!

Can you tell me what exactly Pixie B does?

Pixie B is an IP agency and consultancy, working on commercial content strategies and doing deals between the West and Asia with a focus on China. We manage IP brands, including Harry Potter digital publisher Pottermore and U.S. IP franchise Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, help Chinese platforms buy content, and also do individual author representation work.

To get a concrete example, like Harry Potter, do you make the deals? Or what do you do exactly?

We are the agents for Pottermore, but in addition to finding and negotiating deals, we will advise on various areas of business strategy and oversee the project workflow to get the product out. This means that, for example, we mediated the negotiations and project management for [major Chinese audiobook streaming platform] Ximalaya, which bought the Chinese-language audiobook rights and created the actual audio work, and supported it as it went through the approvals process of the overall IP owners in London.

Are you managing Chinese intellectual property and sending it abroad?

To a lesser degree. In the main, I advise Chinese publishers and content platforms on acquisition strategies, especially when the books are hard to find, hard to buy, or difficult to get the parent company approvals on. I am working with some key content owners in China to take some genre works out of China into the West. The work we do sits somewhere between agenting, scouting, and IP and brand management. Publishers, audio platforms, and online content companies will approach us wanting certain rights, and I help them to go and get them.

What’s your sense of the current zeitgeist? What stories or what types of themes are in demand?

Right now, consumer confidence is quite low, and there have been seismic changes in the way people are buying books. And there’s been a general slump in people subscribing to streaming services, whether it’s audio or video. There’s been an overall softening of the market. Reading habits have collapsed of late, and the nation appears to be addicted to watching short videos on Douyin. The only player in the reading space to have shown any real growth is WeChat Read.

Buyers of content at the moment are really bearish, and in the main are looking for big, high-profile titles that are pretty much a guaranteed winner. That means of course Harry Potter enjoys a strong position in the market, and the big, beefy, A-list books like Prince Harry’s autobiography have a lot of appeal. The key is to find a major IP brand or high-profile name that is not politically sensitive.

People are approaching us about the big titles at the moment. Sci-fi is always of big interest, as is business — these two categories are where international publishing has the strongest potential in China. Publishers and platforms are keen to get ahead of any future movie releases. But there haven’t been many big breakout sensations in Chinese publishing over the past year, so people are really watching and waiting for the next big thing at the moment.

It does feel as though the three years of China’s borders being closed has caused publishers to somehow lose their mojo. Being away from the global book fair round means many publishers have lost confidence in acquiring the outlier titles, the ones that can be a sleeper success in the market. If you look at genres and themes in publishing, tastes have in some ways stepped back in time: Eight to 10 years ago, people started to move past self-advancement and get-rich-quick titles and started looking more at the whole person, emotional meaning, inner peace, and resonant literature thinking about the big concerns. For now, though, it’s back to business and financial independence, rebuilding family finances, playing the stock markets, and so on. I don’t believe this is a long-term trend, though, I think it just reflects current social and economic concerns.

In some ways, for China, it’s been like the first year of the pandemic. America was very weird the first year, too, and then it normalized gradually.

Yes. Now China’s clearly in its post-pandemic economic phase. It’s easy to forget that the first year of the pandemic was open internally — and for publishers and streaming services, business was brisk. People were consuming a lot of content, they were home a lot, and they were feeling confident about China’s robust response. The events of 2022 really knocked peoples’ confidence, and interestingly, people did not binge content last year in the same way that they did in the first year of the pandemic. Right now, there is a preoccupation with getting lives back on track, and in Beijing, the sense I get is that people are just determinedly getting on with work and lives, and pushing forward; Shanghai feels more traumatized, people I meet in the industry seem to feel quite vulnerable, and there’s a sense of betrayal by the central government caused by their extended lockdown.

At times of difficulty, people generally do not consume altruistic content — the stuff that doesn’t necessarily have an outcome other than being appealing and interesting — but rather want to consume something that will have a direct positive impact on daily life, income, productivity, family education, and so on.

In your report, you say at the end that China will return to an international focus. But outside of China, the view is very much that China’s becoming a lot more closed off to foreign ideas, particularly Western ideas. Do you feel that that’s true?

On a general level, there may be less curiosity about the outside world within China. But there’s a genuine interest in really good, relevant stories. We are past the point now where Chinese publishers or Chinese readers or Chinese listeners will buy content because it’s foreign, or because it’s a window into America, but people will still consume content because it’s appealing, interesting, relevant on a deeper level.

It’s become like selling IP between the U.K. and the U.S.: A U.S. book will only work in the U.K. if it feels relevant. People in the U.K. aren’t going to read a U.S. book because it’s American. I think China’s at a similar stage in that there’s a general interest in reading things that are good and things that resonate.

For example, Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People has done really well in China — lots of people in publishing circles are talking about it. The appeal is not because it’s an Irish novel, but because it’s a universal story of teenagers finding themselves and growing up into an adult world.

China’s content producers know that to have a well-rounded portfolio, they need to go overseas and find sources of stories outside of their own market. Tastes have definitely turned inward somewhat, but I think that is a product of consumer tastes maturing rather than simply being a product of the political cycle.

For example, there never used to be much Chinese sci-fi, but now it is a huge category — and a space where international writers can also establish a readership. In recent years, children’s publishing was very much dominated by U.S., U.K. — particularly U.K. — properties in China.

Thanks to you!

Well, yeah. I’ll have to hold up my hand on the Peppa Pig front. I know there’s a whole generation of parents cursing me!

Children’s best sellers are sort of the bellwether of the overall market, because parents will always spend on their kids. That’s going to be the last thing that people economize on. And so, I was quite surprised to see that kids’ book sales fell last year. Not by a lot, but they’ve been growing 10%, 12% over recent years. This will have been caused by the government’s “double reduction” on the education sector.

I expected last year’s best sellers to be dominated by Chinese writers, because there has been a very specific government push to encourage Chinese children to read much more local writing. But actually, the change has been that it’s not dominated by U.S. and U.K. children’s books, but it is still dominated by foreign books.

There’s one German book, one Danish book, one French book, one British — one or two British — in the top 10. From memory, I think seven of Dangdang’s top 10 children’s best sellers in 2022 were from overseas, and it’s a big mixture of nationalities.

Another interesting thing is, a little side note, there was never a ban on U.S. IP in this current political cycle in the same way that has been in past political cycles when the Sino-U.S. relationship has gone through a chilly period. There has been no explicit instruction to not issue ISBNs to new U.S. books, which I think is actually very surprising.

I assumed from the moment Pelosi went to Taiwan that there would be some sort of retribution, introducing limits on U.S. publishing in China. It is true that readers and movie watchers are less inclined to choose American IP at the moment, so if they had thrown their weight around and stopped issuing ISBNs to American books, nobody would really have made a huge issue about it. But I had some U.S. work go through during that period with no question mark, no pause or need to double-check that approval would come. I was quite surprised about that.

What are the prospects for Prince Harry’s book?

I heard on the grapevine that there wasn’t originally a great expectation for it in China. But I think it could do really well. Prince Harry is in that sweet spot where he is deliciously, unpolitically aligned, as a true royal should be. So, he doesn’t casually mention meeting any Chinese official, or stumble into geopolitics. Even the stuff around the Taliban is extremely politically benign from a Chinese perspective. He doesn’t trip any trigger points.

The majority of books by major public figures are unpublishable in China just because, even if it’s not about China, there’s going to be somewhere in it that something comes up: Somebody visits somewhere, some big international moment happens in the background. And in general, the authors of these books will not agree to any edits and any changes. This means these books become unpublishable in China. In the case of Prince Harry, that is just completely absent, so there’s no reason it can’t be published. And then, if you take a sort of simplistic central government narrative, it’s well, it’s a member of the royal family…

Dishing dirt?

Dishing dirt on established royalty. Hereditary wealth, hereditary power, isn’t this all terrible? So, there’s a tick there. As somebody actually pointed out to me, you’d think the royal family is a dysfunctional intergenerational family business — look at a lot of the big Chinese trading families and the wars that happen. I think there’s going to be a certain relevance of people reading it, being like, “You amateurs. You want to see proper intergenerational family warfare? We can show you how it’s done.” There’s actually a surprising relevance going on through it. Which, if it’s published right and if it’s presented right, could be quite fun, and actually be quite relevant.