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From: Marc Aronson <75664.3110>
Date: 07 Mar 96 09:26:30 EST
We do have, somewhere, reviews of DAMNED STRONG LOVE in Germany. The publisher always sends them in the early days to encourage you to acquire the book. I always find this somewhat silly, since if I could read the reviews, I could read the book, in which case I would not need the reviews to tell me what to think.. And if I send the book to a translator, I've already made the commitment, I don't want to waste her time translating reviews. Still I could dig them out. So far we have not sold it in English to any other country. The Dutch have expressed interested in translating it, but that would go via the German publisher.
I'd rather not name the specific German novels. Every season we look through the catalogs of publishers from many countries. We ask to see books that look interesting. Belz, as an example, often has books that catch our attention. But we only acquire a few. It is often frustrating because we find books with many strong aspects that ultimately do not work. The Germans, for example, have many of their multicultural fault lines around the Turkish people who live and work in Germany. There are interesting parallels and differences with our own racial and ethnic conflicts. But, whether written from the Turkish or the German point of view, we have not found the book to tell that story to American kids. Obviously the Holocaust comes up often in German books, and in many forms. But it is rare to find a book like DAMNED STRONG LOVE that works for us.
Publishers' catalogs are not hard to get, CCBC-net members interested in keeping tabs on forgeign houses should look them up in the ILMP (Internatinal Literary Marketplace) and contact their rights department. Though you would not really be buying foreign rights (the right to publish the book in America) that is the department that would have an English-language catalog. Should anyone do so, and find a book that he or she believes really should be published here, we and other publishers would certainly like to know that.
Marc Aronson
Received on Thu 07 Mar 1996 08:26:30 AM CST
Date: 07 Mar 96 09:26:30 EST
We do have, somewhere, reviews of DAMNED STRONG LOVE in Germany. The publisher always sends them in the early days to encourage you to acquire the book. I always find this somewhat silly, since if I could read the reviews, I could read the book, in which case I would not need the reviews to tell me what to think.. And if I send the book to a translator, I've already made the commitment, I don't want to waste her time translating reviews. Still I could dig them out. So far we have not sold it in English to any other country. The Dutch have expressed interested in translating it, but that would go via the German publisher.
I'd rather not name the specific German novels. Every season we look through the catalogs of publishers from many countries. We ask to see books that look interesting. Belz, as an example, often has books that catch our attention. But we only acquire a few. It is often frustrating because we find books with many strong aspects that ultimately do not work. The Germans, for example, have many of their multicultural fault lines around the Turkish people who live and work in Germany. There are interesting parallels and differences with our own racial and ethnic conflicts. But, whether written from the Turkish or the German point of view, we have not found the book to tell that story to American kids. Obviously the Holocaust comes up often in German books, and in many forms. But it is rare to find a book like DAMNED STRONG LOVE that works for us.
Publishers' catalogs are not hard to get, CCBC-net members interested in keeping tabs on forgeign houses should look them up in the ILMP (Internatinal Literary Marketplace) and contact their rights department. Though you would not really be buying foreign rights (the right to publish the book in America) that is the department that would have an English-language catalog. Should anyone do so, and find a book that he or she believes really should be published here, we and other publishers would certainly like to know that.
Marc Aronson
Received on Thu 07 Mar 1996 08:26:30 AM CST
