Fantasy Foundation Publications are putting out The First Law in Taiwan:
Always fascinating how different publishers with different markets choose to present the same book. I believe this is the 26th translation deal for The Blade Itself, if you can credit that. It’s rather wonderful to think of such diverse people thrilling, thrilling I say, to stuff that I basically dreamed up in the middle of the night for my own amusement. So my thanks to the wonderful editors and rights agents at Orion who’ve put all these deals together over the last seven or eight years, and my thanks to all the far-flung publishers who’ve taken a chance on the books. I won’t thank the readers. MY FANTASTIC WORK IS THANKS ENOUGH.
Thanks, readers.
Should you have considerably better command of traditional Chinese than I, you can order a copy at one of these online retailers.
And while we’re about it, here’s their forthcoming Before They are Hanged:
13 comments so far
Congratulations man.
Pretty incredible for your first series to get this much attention world-wide.
Fantastic books. Always like reading your blogs.
Keep up the work and bring back an intrusive Bayaz, I miss his character 🙁
Congrats, Lord Grimdark.
Nice covers, too.
Out of interest, do you get consulted as to changes? (e.g. if a word, directly translated, would be ambiguous, do they consult you as to which replacement gets the right nuance?)
Oh my. Out of curiosity, does this mean your works will soon enter mainland China as well since translation from traditional Chinese to simplified Chinese is pretty straightforward (minus some words tweaking). The continuing success of HBO Game of Throne series also broaden the audience of this niche in China (like everyone began to be interested in A Song of Ice and Fire after the debut of the series), this is a good chance to join the foray and earn some more gold, eh?
Ravenred,
Occasionally a translator will consult you, but usually you need to be fluent in the language they’re translating into to really understand what the ramifications of a given change are. So usually you have to leave it to the translator.
Inquisitor,
Yeah, there’ll be a simplified Chinese coming out in mainland China shortly, I believe.
Can I have a large hi-res version of that first one? I’d love to print that as a poster.
Because it’s freakin awesome.
I wish I could remember the name of the author this quote was from, someone very famous/quirky anyway, was asked why his books were published in so very many more languages ( I think from memory it was 40 odd ) than was normally done.
His answer was “None shall escape”.
=]
I wonder why your books are so low in stock. I read all the First Law triology, and got so intrigued. I want all my students to try the Blade Itself. They checked Amazon and found there’re only one hardcover and five paperbacks left. Would you tell us if there’s any reprint coming up?
“Can I have a large hi-res version of that first one? I’d love to print that as a poster.
Because it’s freakin awesome.”
+1
Maggie,
Hard for me to be sure without knowing where you are or which amazon you’re using. The US and UK ones seem in stock, and if not they should be in stock imminently. There’s nowhere they should be actively out of print, though, as far as I’m aware.
Glad to see you being so successful, this means you can afford minions to do all the boring day to day work while you dedicate yourself to writing more books. Yay.
Hi Joe,
you are absolutely right, your books are thanks enough!! Can’t wait to see what you will be writing next. Thanks also for your great blog! One of the best, in my humble opinion.
On the subject of the First Law books, I am working on an essay for my English class about different narrative techniques. I am using as an example of interesting narrative the internal monologue of a certain crippled inquisitor 🙂
My tutor advised me this was an ‘excellent choice’. I replied, ‘well duh’.