My social media feeds have been full of pictures of people on their summer holidays. I haven’t actually been on holiday yet, though several Gees did enjoy a lovely short break in Wales in the spring, and later in the year me and Mrs Gee plan to go somewhere to celebrate our nth wedding anniversary. I don’t feel too deprived given that I live in a holiday resort anyway, and can go to the beach and have a paddle and an ice cream whenever I like.
Back at the ranch I have been putting the finishing touches to my next book, which is to say, I have approved the corrected text, and the next thing will be to get the corrected proofs so I can compile an index. Compiling an index is great. I find it to be one of the most interesting things you can do with your clothes on. What I wish to avoid is having to compile two indexes (one can have too much of a good thing), one each for the UK and US editions, so I hope that they’ll have the same paginations.
While on the subject of different editions, the foreign-rights people at my publisher, who are a bunch of eager terriers, have already sold the rights to editions in six other languages. I have some way to go to eclipse J. K. Rowling who’s published all seven of her Harry Potter books in 85 languages. My previous book has managed to get within the same order of magnitude, with 25 foreign-rights sales (we shan’t mention the pirated edition in Bengali). Most of the time the publisher will send me one or more complimentary copies. Here is my current shelfie:
From left to right you can see the UK, US, Estonian, Indonesian, Italian, Chinese (simplified), Polish, Korean, Spanish, Romanian, Turkish, Hungarian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, French, Albanian, German, Greek and Portuguese editions. They’ll soon be joined, I hope, by editions in Swedish, Czech, Slovak, Chinese (traditional) and Azerbaijani. I believe that there are Ukrainian and Russian editions out there, but I doubt that I’ll get to see these in the foreseeable future because of the current unpleasantness. My father is hoping for an edition in Yiddish, while I am holding out for Sindarin. The Foreign Rights director said that they didn’t have many sales representatives in Middle-earth. We discussed the possibility of an edition in the Black Speech of Mordor, but she warned me that this ‘was not a language she would utter here.’
A fun side-effect of foreign translation rights has been that when an edition appears in a territory, and the foreign publisher gets behind it, I get to do interviews for foreign newspapers and broadcasters. The French edition went down well in this regard, as did the Romanian and Portuguese editions, and there was a week earlier this summer when I was Big in Brazil.
Although most people have said they love the book, quite a few have complained that there aren’t many pictures. To remedy this, I’ve written a much shorter version aimed at pre-teens, and it’s currently being illustrated. The illustrations I have seen are lovely, but as is often the way with publishing, this may take a while to come out, but I hope to be able to show you something soon.
In the meantime I’ve been working on something else, but it’s at an early stage and I have promised myself not to say anything about it in case I jinx it.
