VOL.78/2025.01

 

Spreading Its Wings To the World: The Seoul Letter Shop

 

2025.01.06

 

On October 12, 2023, I received an email from Shinwon Agency, Korea’s first copyright export agency. They wanted to meet me at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I was going to be there, so we agreed to meet on October 19. This was about a month after I had sent them a cold email looking for an export partner. Within that month, I sent them a cover letter for my publishing house, met with them to introduce my publication lineup, and passed on additional materials about the works they were interested in. Among them was a proposal for The Seoul Letter Shop (TXTY), including a synopsis.
It felt interesting and fateful that two Korean companies would be meeting in Frankfurt on October 19, 2023, to talk about working together. Shinwon said that there was a lot of interest from Anglo-American partner agencies and offered an exclusive agreement for The Seoul Letter Shop. I was flabbergasted because all I had was a proposal - but my heart was pounding. I knew this was an opportunity, and I didn’t want to miss it.

 

 

Returning to Korea, I discussed with the author, Baek Seung-Yeon, and accelerated the manuscript timeline by about a month from the original plan. We quickly completed the first draft of the prologue and chapter 1 and sent them to Shinwon. Although we received a contract offer, the manuscript had to be good for the deal to be finalized. Fortunately, Shinwon was satisfied, and we signed an exclusive agreement with PFD (Peters Fraser and Dunlop), Shinwon’s partner agency, with the goal of introducing the book at the London Book Fair in 2024. Though the timeline was tight, we communicated closely with Shinwon and progressively updated materials such as the author profile, cover, and English sample manuscript, and the entire manuscript was completed by the end of February.
Then, over three days on March 7, 8, and 9, just before the London Book Fair, I received pre-empt offers from German, Italian, and French publishers. I had never even received an offer from a European country in all my years of fiction publishing. The successive offers gave me an adrenaline rush. Offers have since continued; The Seoul Letter Shop was exported to 8 countries even before publication, and now it is set to be exported to 14 countries (UK, US, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Finland, Greece, Poland, Russia, Brazil, and Japan, in addition to the three European countries above), with the Netherlands being the first to see international readers in 2025.

 

 

The Seoul Letter Shop - Rooted in the foundations of Korean literature

 

There are many reasons for The Seoul Letter Shop’s achievements in exports. While “the agile and meticulous moves of the publisher and agency” and “the exquisite timing of its introduction just as the interest in healing fiction was reaching its end” created a niche of opportunity, “planning as a means of survival in the Korean publishing industry” and “the author’s capacity to grow up in the solidarity of her peers and the benevolent influence of senior writers in Korean literature” played a major role in the success of the book’s appeal to agents and editors around the world.
The Seoul Letter Shop is a “curated, planned novel,” conceptualized by publisher TXTY and written by the author. In early 2023, before TXTY had even released the first book, I asked myself the question: What kind of fiction would survive? I was the leader of a label that mainly publishes genre fiction, and I had several titles in the pipeline, but when I looked at the sales data for fiction at major bookstores, it was hard to be optimistic. The reading rate among Koreans was falling every year, so, of course, the publishing industry was in crisis every year. Moreover, fiction was one of the most preferred and least read genres in Korea.
Only three types of fiction were making meaningful sales numbers - pure literature, healing fiction, and genre fiction by named authors. Then, we started to eliminate them one by one: we didn’t think pure literature was our thing at the time, and since we were a new publisher that hadn’t even published its first book, we needed time to work with named authors. What remained were the healing novels. Even this one seemed to have established itself as a genre. However, after the success of The Second Chance Convenience Store (formerly known as The Uncannny Convenience Store) (Namu Bench) and Dallergut Dream Department Store (Sam & Parkers), we sensed that Korean readers were getting quite tired of so many healing novels over the years. When we looked at the sales figures of major bookstores in 2022, we found that the extent to which non-fiction sales had decreased compared to previous years was similar to the extent to which sales of healing novels had increased. So, we changed the question: How can we make a “new and distinctive healing novel”?
Convenience stores, laundromats, alteration shops, bookstores, cafes, and photo studios are common places that we can easily find around us. As a reader, I remember thinking to myself after reading a healing story that I would visit a store like this if it existed in real life. I tried to find a real shop that had never been used as a stage in a healing novel. I wanted to make a novel that could not only be read but also be experienced in person. That is when “Geulwoll,” a letter shop in Yeonhui-dong and Seongsu-dong, Seoul, came to mind. I thought that letters were the best material for healing, so I immediately went to Geulwoll and proposed a partnership.
Then, I looked for an author who would be able to embody the inspirational stories of everyday events in “Geulwoll”. I contacted Baek Seung-Yeon, who had made her debut through the literary magazine Munhak Sasang (문학사상) but hadn’t seen the light of day for years. I remember telling Baek about my vague idea and receiving the first draft shortly afterward. That was the moment I knew I had found the right author. When I received the manuscript, I was amazed that it was her first full-length novel - I could see that she had been honing herself as a novelist for a long time without giving up as a literature writer. It wasn’t until later that I realized she had been practicing writing consistently with her peers who had the same dream.

 

 

The Crisis of Korean Literature is the Power of Korean Literature

 

Korean literature is always in a state of crisis. Publishers specializing in literature, as opposed to large general publishing houses, have to plan books for survival before even thinking of making a great hit, and writers have to face the fear of not being able to become novelists, or the fear that their books will not be read, and endure it through reading and writing literature, and forming solidarity with their fellow writers.
The crisis of Korean literature is parallel to the crisis of Korean society. Korea has undergone compressed economic and industrial growth and rapid democratization. This has resulted in a cultural powerhouse centered on K-pop, but beneath the glitz and glamor are disgraceful indicators, including the lowest happiness rate and the highest suicide rate among OECD countries. The country has suffered so many national wounds in such a short period of time that it is no exaggeration to say that all Koreans have a sense of resentment and sensitivity deep inside them. As such, while the Korean public has become distanced from books because they are easily thrown into life crises amidst social crises, they are ironically living like characters in literary works without realizing it. Eventually, the value of Korean literature will continue to grow. If literature is all about questions of life and death, I can’t think of a better country for literature than Korea.
That is probably why so many Korean literary writers, aspiring writers, planners, and editors of Korean literature endure the pain of life with the power of literature and plunge into the depths of creation every day with the hope of sharing that power with the world. It seems that they have learned how Korean literature can be strong from the resilience of the Korean people. Many writers are skilled in dealing with very realistic and conflicted characters and narratives as they have had to juggle their lives with writing in order to survive because of the poor domestic market, and readers demand artistic depth as well as entertainment as they have experiences of some of the world’s leading content as well as K-pop, K-drama, and K-movies. Korean literature is thriving and growing stronger in the midst of a crisis.

 

Korean literature is set to grow

 

Two events coincided to make 2024 a pivotal year for Korea and Korean literature. If the news of Han Kang’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature brought a pleasant shock to the country, the declaration of martial law, thought to be a legacy of the 20th century, came as a horrifying shock. Ironically, Han’s acceptance speech resonated with Koreans at a time when protests were raging to impeach the president, who had started what has been characterized as an unjustified rebellion. Han said that literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life, and that she wants to share the meaning of the prize by standing together against violence.

 

 

Han’s Nobel Prize in Literature will increase global interest in Korean literature, and Korean readers have learned through an intense experience what literature means in times of crisis. This, in turn, will lead to the expansion of the literary market, and publishers and authors will be able to produce literature with a little less competition and a lot more depth. Therefore, I am confident. The potential of Korean literature will continue to grow and will eventually burst.

 

 

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Written by Cho Min-Wook (CP at TXTY CIC / Chief Producer)