The dust has settled a bit, and it got announced in Publishers Marketplace, so now I can say, with a reasonable degree of confidence, that The Warehouse has sold to publishers in seventeen countries.
I’m astounded. Because I never sold foreign rights on the Ash books, but also, The Warehouse is very much about the American economy. So I figured—no one outside the U.S. would care.
But my wife pointed out: the American economy is the world economy, and she’s generally smarter than me, so I’ll go with that.
Come next year the book should be available in (deep breath):
Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Brazil, Russia, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Japan, Italy, Greece, France, the Czech Republic, Taiwan, Turkey, and China.
I’m thrilled to be in each and every one of these countries, but a few of them hold special places in my heart: I’ve visited the UK, Prague, and Poland, and loved them all. I’ve always wanted to visit Germany and I hope this means I might get that chance. And I took French in high school, so even though I can’t remember much beyond the pleasantries, it’s still nice to know I’ll have a French edition of this book.
More than that, I will have very many editions of this book I cannot read. Which is fascinating. How is the translation going to change the text? What are the covers going to look like? I already spoke to my publisher in the UK, Transworld, and they have some incredible ideas for how the book might look (which is one of the things that tipped me in their favor).
As always it’s important for me to thank my agent, Josh Getzler, for doing such an incredible job on this. The last few weeks have been non-stop—we were at auction in a lot of these countries, so the numbers were constantly changing, and then we were doing the movie deal at the same time. So we spent a lot of the last month in constant contact.
Normally publishing news comes out of New York, which is where I live anyway, so it’s standard business hours for me. But the European markets are ahead, time zone wise, and L.A., where the movie stuff happens, is behind. So I would wake up to updates on foreign, and then by the time I got home from work, I’d hear about film. I spent a lot of hours in the middle wondering what the hell was going on.
It’s fun, too, to Google conversion rates. Because a house in London makes an offer, and then you realize it’s in pounds, and then you look up the current exchange rate, and the news is usually good. I don’t know what that says about the strength of the dollar, but, hey, whatever, I’m not an economist.
Josh did an incredible job on this, and so did all his sub-agents. A little publishing 101: agents generally aren’t making the foreign deals themselves. They’re working with sub-agents in other countries. So, for example, my book was sold in the UK by a very nice man named Caspian who I promised a pint to when I come through on tour, because damn did he earn it.
Below is a screenshot of the Publishers Marketplace announcement, just to show you the depth of the bench here (and in case you want to see who is publishing me where).
And it really goes to show what an incredible job Josh did, keeping all of this on track.
This is nuts. I’m hugely excited to see what happens next, but also, as someone who loves to travel, I’m looking forward to putting some more stamps in my passport, because a couple of these publishers have already said they’re going to bring me out for promo…
Rob Hart 