Most maps of the publishing world are drawn through three cities: London, New York, Frankfurt. It is a useful map, and an incomplete one. A different axis has been assembling for years now, largely off to the side of that familiar story — one that runs between the Arabian Gulf and Asia. CO.MINT sits on it by design, so this first dispatch begins there.

Consider how deliberately one end of that axis has been built. Sharjah, one of the seven emirates of the UAE, spent the last two decades turning itself into a publishing capital. It was named UNESCO World Book Capital in 2019. It built the world's first free zone dedicated entirely to publishing. Its book fair has grown into the largest rights marketplace on earth: the most recent edition drew more than 1.4 million visitors and some 2,350 publishing houses from over 200 countries. And its leading publishing figure, Sheikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi, went on to serve as president of the International Publishers Association — an Arab publisher at the head of the global industry's representative body. None of this is decoration. It is infrastructure with intent.

Through 2026, that infrastructure has been reaching east. Sharjah's publishing free zone joined the UAE delegation at the Beijing International Book Fair, presenting the emirate as a gateway between a fast-growing Arab publishing sector and the Asian markets that anchor much of the world's printing, rights trading, and digital distribution. Weeks earlier, the Sharjah Book Authority had sent a senior delegation into Malaysia ahead of the Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair — a fair that named Saudi Arabia its focus country. Behind these visits lies more than ceremony. The Malaysian book-retail venture Big Bad Wolf and its BookXcess brand now run a warehouse and events footprint that stretches from Southeast Asia across the Gulf into East Africa, with Sharjah as a hub. A corridor is being paved in both directions at once.

And so the question that matters for an agency like ours becomes simple: what travels through it?

Increasingly, the answer is source IP. Korea's content export model has quietly inverted. Where the country once sold finished dramas and films abroad, it now exports the stories themselves — the webtoons and webnovels that become the origin point for adaptations across screen, game, and print. By the Korea Creative Content Agency's count, the webcomic industry alone earned well over two trillion won in 2024, and Southeast Asia is already a rising share of its overseas market. The direction of travel is visible in individual titles: a Kakao webtoon, Love Always, has been reported as the basis for India's first Korean-webtoon-derived streaming adaptation, slated for the second half of 2026 — Korean-origin IP rebuilt for a South Asian audience rather than simply subtitled for it. When AI translation then collapsed the cost of moving Korean fiction into new languages, the economics of reaching readers in Jakarta, or across the Arab world, changed almost overnight.

What is easy to miss is the financial plumbing beneath all this — and it is where the corridor becomes concrete. Both ends of the axis have built public money to push books outward, and those flows now point straight at each other. On the Arab side, Sharjah's Turjuman Award, launched in 2016, puts a prize of over 350,000 dollars behind Arabic titles translated into other languages, with the larger share going to the foreign publisher that takes on the translation rights and a portion to the original Arab house and the translator. Alongside it, the Sharjah International Book Fair has run a translation grant fund since 2011, and Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Zayed Book Award funds translations of Arabic literary and children's titles. On the Korean side, LTI Korea and KPIPA run translation and publication grants for overseas publishers, paid out — tellingly — only once a publishing contract with the rights holder is in place. Read together, these are two national systems subsidising the same journey from opposite banks: Arabic reaching outward, Korean reaching outward, and a growing incentive for a publisher on either side to pick up the other's list.

Nowhere is that clearer than in children's books, which may be the corridor's fastest lane. Picture books travel on illustration more than language, they are heavily supported by grants, and they sit at the centre of both markets. The global children's rights trade runs through the Bologna Children's Book Fair, but the buyers and sellers increasingly include an Arabic children's publishing sector — anchored by houses such as Kalimat, founded in Sharjah by Sheikha Bodour — and a Korean picture-book sector with a deep, award-winning backlist. Shared themes, strong art, and grant funding on both sides make these natural counterparts. This is not a hypothetical for us: it is the everyday work of moving a Korean picture book toward an Arabic edition, and an Arabic list toward Asian readers.

Put the pieces together — a deliberate Gulf-to-Asia corridor, a Korean IP engine now built to travel, and public money subsidising the crossing — and CO.MINT's position stops looking incidental. We represent Korean and Asian source material. On parts of our catalogue we hold exclusive mandates precisely in the Arabic-language and Indian-language markets this corridor serves, while other territories remain open. Through our work with Arab children's publishing, we act as an exclusive agent into Asia. We are not describing this axis from the outside. We work inside it.

In the field — Tanweer Festival, Sharjah (2025). In November 2025, Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi's Tanweer Festival gathered 183 artists from 23 nations in the Mleiha desert under a theme borrowed from Rumi — "What You Seek Is Seeking You." Among its large-scale desert installations stood a monumental chain sculpture by the Korean sculptor Seo Young Deok: a serene human head with closed eyes, welded from rusted chains, on the theme of meditation. CO.MINT produced and delivered the artist-and-work introduction film — shot at the sculptor's studio in Korea — that presented his practice to the festival's international audience. In it, he ties his own work to the very Rumi line the festival was built around: what we seek is already moving toward us. Korean creative work, commissioned into the heart of the Arab cultural calendar — with CO.MINT bridging the two.

That is why this section exists, and why it carries the perspective it does. Industry news is everywhere; what is scarce is a reading of that news from someone standing at the meeting point of these two markets.

For the creators we represent, the practical takeaway is this: your work's next home may not be an English one. It may be Arabic, or Indonesian, or Thai — markets that a London-centred map tends to leave until last, and that this corridor is bringing forward. For the partners who buy from us, the takeaway is that a bridge is only as good as the people who can read both banks. Rights move cleanly when someone understands the language, the contract customs, the grant paperwork, and the exclusivity lines on both sides at once.

We will report from this corridor each month — the fairs, the deals, the grant programmes, and the shifts in how rights move between Asia and the Arab world — and we will always close with the same question we ask of every title we carry: what does this mean for the people whose stories are traveling?

The next major waypoint is already on the calendar. In early November, Sharjah's publishers conference gathers the rights and translation trade ahead of the book fair that has become, for five years running, the largest rights marketplace in the world. We will be reading it closely, and reporting back.

News & Insights reflects CO.MINT's market perspective as a rights agency working across Asian and Arab publishing. Figures cited are drawn from public industry reporting and may change as programmes and deals evolve.