A new foreign edition arrived in the mail in the last week, from a very different part of the world to most places my books are published: China. Seeing my words translated into Chinese characters and printed such a different book format is fascinating. And the cover looks so exciting!
Welcome to my stories, Chinese readers. I hope you enjoy them!
I’ve been invited to be a guest at Supanova in Melbourne this year. What is Supanova? Well, I’ll steal a quote from their site because it describes the event perfectly:
Supanova Pop Culture Expo is where the adoring public comes face to face with Supa-Star celebrities and the creative talent that inspire their imaginary worlds under one big roof.
I’ll be on a panel with the lovely Jennifer Fallon, Marianne De Pierres and Rowena Cory Daniells. I’ll also be signing books at the Dymocks stand. I’ll let you know the times for both once closer to the event, when I have my schedule for the weekend.
So if you’re coming to Supanova in Melbourne, drop by and say hello!
I’ve been wanting to find out how hard it is to buy eBooks of my books for a while now, so I’ve been doing some investigation. First I checked my contracts. Sure enough, all eBook rights for all books in all english language territories have been sold. That means it’s all out of my hands, and responsibility falls down (or goes up) the line to the publishers and retailers. Here’s which publishers own which books:
Australasia:
HarperCollins Publishers Australia hold the rights for the Black Magician Trilogy and Age of the Five trilogy.
Little Brown hold the rights for the The Magician’s Apprentice and the Traitor Spy Trilogy.
UK (Commonwealth minus Australasia):
Little Brown hold the rights for the Black Magician Trilogy, Age of the Five, The Magician’s Apprentice and the Traitor Spy Trilogy.
US (and most of the rest of the world):
HarperCollins Publishers hold the rights for the Black Magician Trilogy and Age of the Five trilogy.
Little Brown hold the rights for the The Magician’s Apprentice and the Traitor Spy Trilogy.
Hunting around the internet, I sighted (based on the cover art) editions of all of my books from all territories, so it looks like the publishers have their act together, when it comes to producing them. However, when I hunted around the retailers’ sites, things got a bit odd.
I started with Amazon.com. If you search under ‘books’ and my name, you’ll find Kindle editions using the HarperCollins US cover of my first two trilogies, but when you click on them you get the HarperCollins Australia covers. (Buyers may want to note: The Novice doesn’t come up as an eBook under this search string, but if you search under ‘Kindle Store’ and my name it does appear.)
However, only the second book of the Age of the Five trilogy, Last of the Wilds is available. Not the first. Not the last.
On the Amazon.co.uk site different searches produce different eBook covers as well. If you search in the ‘Kindle Store’ you get only the UK versions. Search under ‘books’ and you can find the US covers, but when you select Kindle Edition it switches to the UK cover. Thankfully all of my books appear to be available (though only to UK customers, I assume).
Apple’s iBookstore only has Last of the Wilds and The Ambassador’s Mission. Kobo only has Priestess of the White and Last of the Wilds.
I have no idea why these big retailers don’t stock all of my books.
Most frustrating of all to me, as a customer, is that none of these sites indicate if any of the books are available to Australian customers, and I don’t want to have to sign up to Amazon or Kobo and attempt to buy my own book to find out. Territorial rights issues are not going to go away, so retailers really ought to be giving customers this information so they aren’t completely put off by the eBook buying experience.
A great example of this is a US based site called eBooks.com, that does stock all of my books. Each book entry has a “For copyright reasons, this ebook is only available to customers in this list of countries” link so you can check if it’s available. However, it lists The Magician’s Apprentice and The Ambassador’s Mission as available only in the United States, which is odd because those eBooks are produced by Orbit and had a worldwide release so there should be no territorial issues. I’d assumed this was because the site had a general policy of only selling within the US, but to my amusement I found that you can buy all of my other books from huge list of countries outside the US. You can buy my books if you order from Afganistan, Haiti, Bangladesh, China and Somalia, but not Australia. Still, it’s nice to know people in these countries can order my books as eBooks if they’d like to.
To research availability for Australian version of my eBooks, I tried a few local online stores (Angus & Roberston, Borders) and was disappointed to see how few of my books were available. I found only two books from my second trilogy on one site, and one on the other. I expected they’d at least have The Magician’s Apprentice and The Ambassador’s Mission (no territorial issues, blah blah).
So, while I started with one set of questions, I now have a whole new set of questions:
Can customers in Australia buy eBook version of my books from Amazon.com, iBookstore and Kobo? Has anybody managed to? Let me know!
Why aren’t Australian online stores stocking the eBooks of my books?
Why isn’t the full set of Age of the Five available on Amazon.com, when it is on at least one other US-accessible eBook site?
I will try to find out the answer to these questions, but what I can tell you, if you’re having trouble getting hold of my books as eBooks, is that they should be available. I don’t know why retailers aren’t listing all of my books, but hey, if customers start demanding a product a seller is crazy to not do something about stocking it, right? If you want it, ask for it.
There has been quite a rash of best books of 2010 lists out on the interwebs so naturally I considered doing one myself. However, when I wrote down the books I’d read in 2010 there were only ten of them.
I don’t read particularly fast these days. I used to read a minimum of a book a week. The first thing to slow me down was starting a home-based business way back in ’95. Without a train journey to work and back each day, I didn’t have a set amount of time for reading. Then I started having problems with my upper back and neck, and found I couldn’t read sitting up for more than half an hour without ending up in pain. I resolved that by reading lying down, but then in the early 00s I starting having chronic fatigue, and that meant if I lay down to read I’d fall asleep within a few minutes, so for a few years there I wasn’t able to read anything.
But the fatigue eased and a wonderful little invention called The Book Seat enabled me to read sitting up again. The scary thing is, I’d got out of the habit of reading. Also, I find that by the end of a day of writing I don’t always want to look at more words. It takes a really good book to hold my attention.
Which means that all of the ten books I read last year were really good books. So here’s the list:
In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan
I was looking for a book on health fads and found this. It’s about far more than health fads, and is full of sensible advice on eating well, fascinating and appalling historical information, and presented the first argument for eating organic food that I found convincing. I made some simple changes to our diet (mostly reducing carbs and increasing vegetables) and feel much better for it.
Outliers and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
A friend recommended the first book, which I really enjoyed. I have a suspicion that something like the outlier situations described happened in Australia with fantasy writers in the 90s and 00s. Lots of us emerged onto the world stage at the same time. I’m not sure what the catalyst was. Possibly because there was a nearly non-existant market locally before then, making it very difficult to get published overseas.
The Secret Ones by Nicole Murphy
I so love it when a hard working, lovely person that I know succeeds in something they love. There’s always a little trepidation when that think is writing books, because, well, what if I don’t like it? Thankfully I loved this book. It’s a fun, sexy fantasy/paranormal romance and I can’t want to read the following two books.
Nylon Angel by Marianne de Pierres
A book that I’d been meaning to try for many years, and now I’m wondering why I waited so long. Pacy science fiction with a kick-ass female lead.
Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
Since I don’t read much these days, I tend to read more local than overseas books because I know the authors and want to support them. Having met Ellen at Aussiecon4, and had her books recommended by people at my kaffeeklatsch, I bought a copy and read it soon after the con. It’s a wonderful book, both soulful and swashbuckling.
The One Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
I confess, I had this one for a long time before I read it, as it was sent to me by my publisher. I started it to see if I’d like it, and became utterly captivated. The following book, The Broken Kingdoms, firmly perched in my book seat ready to read, but I must admit to being a little scared to start until I have nothing on my plate that will suffer if I neglect it for a few days.
Solace and Grief and The Key to Starveldt by Foz Meadows
Having met and been impressed with Foz at a party, I picked up her book and discovered a new local writer with oodles of talent. Best part of this: I got to read the second book in the series before it was published (due this year some time). Now I can’t wait for book three.
The Undivided by Jennifer Fallon
At risk of sounding like I’m showing off, I also got to read the first book in Jenny’s new series, and oh boy do fans (and new readers) of her books have a treat in store. Release date is the 1st of Feb I think.
If you’re interested in buying these books, most should be available in all english language territories, but some may be local (Australasian) titles only. You could wait and hope that a publisher outside of Australia releases the book, or you can order it from an Australian bookstore. (Just type “Australian science fiction and fantasy bookstore” and you’ll find plenty of them.)
I’ve noticed that a few other authors are posting about their plans for 2011 and I thought ‘I can do that!’. So here’s what I should/hope to be doing:
Authory Stuff:
Writing The Traitor Queen, book three of the Traitor Spy Trilogy (sequel to the Black Magician Trilogy for those who are new to my books)
Going on tour in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Poland (to coincide with The Rogue going on sale on the 5th May)
Finishing, polishing and editing The Traitor Queen
Bringing together ideas, writing a proposal for and selling the next series
Writing more short stories
Non-authory Stuff:
Honing my drawing/painting skills
Continuing making things and learning new skills
Reading more (or listen to audio books when my back is too stuffed for reading)
Walking more
Spending less time sitting at the computer making my back worse
Hmm. In general 2011 is going to be mostly about work and writing. I must try to squeeze in a few breaks here and there, but that’s never easy when there are deadlines and publicity work to tackle!
May 2011 bring you happiness, success and lots of good books to read!
I’m on holidays at the moment, and in order to have a proper break I’m restricting my internet usage. But I’ll be back in work mode on Monday.
‘Avagoodweekend!
An email arrived the other day with an exciting attachment – the cover for the Bulgarian edition of Priestess of the White, published by Vakon Publishing. Seeing my books coming out in other languages all over the world never gets old.
Welcome to my stories of Auraya, Mischief, Dreamweavers and gods, dear Bulgarian readers. I hope you enjoy them!
At the moment I’m checking the editorial corrections on The Rogue, scouring it for errors and tweaking it to make it, as my art teacher used to say, ‘more betterer’, which is going to make for a very busy weekend-less couple of weeks. I don’t have time to write long and fascinating posts here and there’s been no concrete news on new editions or events to come, so I thought I’d simply answer a question I’m asked on Twitter a lot.
Yes, I am going to be doing a tour.
But here’s where the details get vague. I can’t tell you exactly when or where yet, but I can narrow it down a bit. Part of it will be around the time The Rogue is released (next May), but how much earlier it starts and how long after the release I can’t say. It is going to include the UK and France, and very likely Germany and possibly Poland as well. I would expect it to involve mainly capital cities, since we’ll have a lot of territory to cover and that doesn’t always allow time to visit smaller towns, but who knows?
I can’t give much detail yet as it’s all still being worked out, so keep an eye on this blog. I’ll definitely be posting more information when I have it.
When I was signing books at Aussiecon4, I noticed that one of the books had a little sticker on it with the above words on it. Turns out that The Magician’s Apprentice had been selected to be included in a government/Australia Council for the Arts initiative. I’ve only just managed to get hold of one of the little guides:
Look – there’s my book!
There was a free book, events and iPhone app and giveaways, but I didn’t learn until I got the booklet that it all happened during September. But I’m still pretty excited! Thanks for choosing my book Australia Council for the Arts! And I hope it helped get more people into reading.
Trudi Canavan is an Australian fantasy writer and the author of the international bestseller, the Black Magician Trilogy.
The Rogue is the second volume of the Traitor Spy Trilogy, which takes up the action a generation after the events in The High Lord.
The Ambassador’s Mission is the first volume of the Traitor Spy Trilogy, which takes up the action a generation after the events in The High Lord.
Set hundreds of years before the events of Black Magician Trilogy, this stand-alone novel can be read as an introduction to, or an addition to, the story of Kyralia and its magicians. Learn More
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