Re: English "Young Wizards" fandom…

by Diane

Guys, I didn’t say I had no English fandom! I know you’re out there. But my royalty statements from Corgi (such as they were) suggest strongly that all the books together sold about a thousand copies in the UK (and via export to Australia, New Zealand, etc) over the course of two years or more. This is secondary to the books’ editors going freelance (not that I grudge them that! — but no dedicated SF editors came in to replace them); as a result, no one was left in-house at Corgi who felt any great impulse to urge the books on the sales force — and this went for the “Door Into…” books as well.

The truly weird thing is that, even in the wake of all the Pottermania, my UK agent still cannot get any UK publisher interested in the “Young Wizards” group. They all either point to the horrible Corgi sales figures (nobody in the present market wants “books with a bad history”) or else they say one of these things: (a) “We already have something like that” (they do??), (b) “Too American.” Or sometimes they do both. The long-suffering Meg has hit every single major UK publisher, repeatedly, as editorial staff and other circumstances change. No dice. I tell you, it’s enough to make a girl go off and write movies or something.

…The upshot of all this is that Harcourt is arranging with our UK and US agents to start exporting the books into the UK market itself (distribution in the Canadian market is already handled by Raincoast). No idea how this is going to affect the Antipodean markets as yet.

In other bizarre news: the Russian publisher which has just picked up the rights for the books is the same one presently being (pur)sued by Scholastic regarding their publication of “Tanya Grotter and the Double Bass”. How this is going to affect the YW books, there’s no way to tell.

PS — Emily: Thunderbolts? What thunderbolts? I prefer the subtle approach. I might silt up your local harbor, but that’s about as blatant as I get. 😉

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