I’m still recovering from DAMOP, so no really substantive blogging today. I did want to mention a couple of recent developments regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I think I mentioned a while back that the Portugese rights had been sold. Not long after that, the Korean rights were sold, and last week, the Chinese rights sold. So, there are editions in the works for languages I don’t even share a character set with.
I don’t envy whoever has to translate this into Chinese. Then again, somebody already translated “Many Worlds, Many Treats”, so maybe it isn’t that bad…
This is cool not just because it means the book will show up in other parts of the world, but also as a reassurance that my editor and agent aren’t completely crazy. There’s always a slight nagging fear in the back of my mind that the whole “physics book with a talking dog” thing isn’t really as commercial as they think. If publishers in other countries are willing to pay for it, though, that suggests that there really is a market for this. The international rights for those three countries have sold for about 2/3rds of what I was paid for the international rights, which suggests that they have a pretty decent model of how this will sell.
It doesn’t completely dispel the nagging doubts, of course, but that’s why authors are generally neurotic, isn’t it?