A QUESTION OF COUNTRIES

Hello, my ducky darlings! Welcome to Thursday, and another reader question which was left by Giora in the comments.

 "...my questions about your books are: Did any of your novel been translated to a foreign language and did you have a book event outside Great Britain?"

Let me take the last part of this question first. Sadly no, I've never done a book event outside the UK. Generally authors are too skint (that's poor, for non-Northerners) and lack the connections to set up book events for themselves, especially foreign ones, which are obviously more expensive because of the costs of travel and accomodation. Therefore almost all the events we do, with the exception of things like local school or library visits, or maybe local signings, are arranged between a publisher, who will pay the author's expenses, and a bookshop or conference or other venue which wants to invite the author to take part in a signing or reading or panel event in order to sell books and add value for their customers. The author doesn't really have any say in what events they do, or where those are, or even if they do events at all. It's all about demand from outside.

There are exceptions to this; some well off (usually bestselling) authors sometimes can afford to combine a research trip or holiday abroad with meeting fans in other countries, if large enough numbers of fans from those countries contact them to express an interest. Sadly, I am not one of these well-off authors, so my visits are confined to ones which are either arranged by my publisher, or very local.

If anyone ever contacts me to ask me to do an event in another country, and can afford to pay my expenses, I promise that I will be only too delighted to take them up on it. In fact, I keep my passport current in hopes that one day such a thing will happen to me. But I'll probably need to sell quite a few more copies of my books first.

Now, the first part of your question has a more cheerful answer, thankfully! Yes, several of my books have been bought by foreign publishers and translated into a couple of different languages. Shadows on the Moon and The Swan Kingdom, my two fairytale re-tellings, were both translated into Polish by Egmont Poland.

And my most recent high fantasy novel, FrostFire, has been translated into German by Carlsen Verlag and will be coming out in Germany at the beginning of October year.

Those are all the translations that my books have had so far, but I have fingers crossed that more will come in the future. If there are any non-English-language publishers are reading this, please feel very free to contact Walker Books!

I hope this all makes sense, Giora. Thank you for your question. See you all next week, honeys!