I was startled, Thursday morning, to discover this in my in-box:
It was dropped there by our subsidiary rights department, which passes along to editors the translated editions of our titles that come in from foreign publishers. Thing was, I couldn’t recall any recent title (heck, any title) that featured gun-wielding, bikini-clad babes. And I don’t read Cyrillic. The title page clued me in. Can you guess? If not, here’s a link to the original Del Rey version:
The Russian publisher apparently feels that this look will bring in new readers to our author’s latest series. I’m all for bringing in new readers—hope it works out for them.
But it gave me cause to look over the other foreign editions I have sitting around. Random House’s foreign rights department does a terrific job of licensing translation rights on behalf of our authors. (Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, for example, has been sold into 28 territories, from Israel to Iceland.) Random House employs a network of subagents on different continents whose job it is to know all the potential publishing houses in odd corners of the world. If a book doesn’t sell immediately, our rights people keep it on their lists and continue to offer it year after year. The popularity of different types of stories rises and falls at different times in different countries, so we never know what might become in demand years after its initial pub in the U.S. As an example, paranormal fantasy/romance, which has been such a white-hot subgenre here in the U.S. for the last couple of years, is only now beginning to be picked up in Europe.
And every foreign publisher has a different idea for how a cover should look. Once in a while our cover art will be reused by a foreign publisher, but quite often they will execute their own look. Just for fun, here are some comparisons of recent Del Rey titles.
More covers after the jump…
Here's another example of Terry Brooks. The book is his first graphic novel, created here in the U.S. to appeal largely to the teenage audience who reads manga. In Italy, however, Terry's publisher turned this book into a gorgeous hardcover volume with gold foil type on an embossed jacket resembling dragon skin. Very classy.
Most foreign publishers change the cover art, as I've said, but in the case of His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik, almost every one of the foreign licensees liked our version enough either to pick it up directly or to incorporate the dragon centerpiece. Here are the Del Rey edition and the Korean version.
HarperCollins U.K. took a different tack. Here's their current cover look compared to ours.
In the case of Maurice Dantec's Cosmos Incorporated, the French version came first. We licensed English-language rights and came up with our own version of cover art for this cerebral science fiction story.
And here's one last British/U.S. cover comparison. I think I understand why the Brits went with a fighter jet. The Settling Accounts series is an alternate history which postulates a Confederate States of America becoming a world power and affecting events on the world stage. Our cover, of course, features the ever-eyecatching Confederate flag.
The Korean edition of His Majesty's Dragon is beautiful! Simple and elegant.