Well it seems like most folks would like to see more Survival Guides. So we’ll do that. I’ll post up a few more of the old ones before too long, and send out a call for letters when I’m ready to start answering new one. So start stockpiling your problems now.
And, for those of you who give a care, here are the newest editions to The Name of the Wind family.
This cover should look familiar to most of you, as it’s pretty much the same as the UK cover.
Soon, my thumb will be so famous from all these appearances that it will become a celebrity in its own right. I predict it will leave for Hollywood, have a whirlwind affair with Kate Moss, develop a drinking problem, and then eventually come crawling back to Wisconsin. Which is a good thing because I need it to hit the space bar.
Anyway, the Polish version of the book has lovely paper, and a new cover which clearly depicts the scene where Kvothe, um… goes forth. Into… some manner of… um cloudy desert.
I kid. I kid. I know that not ever book gets its own tailor-made cover. By now, when a version of my book comes out with a cover that’s obviously a piece of stock-art, I feel like it’s one of my kids coming up to me and saying. “Guess what happened today? I went out and fought a dragon, and met a guy with a nipple ring, and I rode an elephant, and it was really cool!” I know it’s not the truth, but it’s still my kid, and I can’t be too upset. I’m just glad he’s out there, meeting new people.
The other thing I do is make up little stories that go along with the cover. For this one the story would be:
Kvothe strode through the dread portal, leaning heavily on his staff. A lesser man might have been concerned by the skulls, or been anxious about the unnatural weather that loomed on the near horizon.
But Kvothe was made of sterner stuff than this, and his thoughts dwelled on ponderous matters: “My hat,” he thought to himself. “is certainly pointy. But is it pointy enough to impress the Archduke Isigniglidir?”
This morning he had been so sure, but now, looking at the Archduke’s tower, Kvothe worried. This was obviously a man who was not fond of half-measures where pointy was concerned. Kvothe also wondered if it might also explain why the Archduke’s new wife seemed so dissatisfied in her letter. “The tower.” She had written. “Should have been my first clue.”
Go on, take a stab at it yourself in the comments section. It’s tons of fun.
pat
A New Addition to the Family: Portugal
The Name of the Wind just came out in Portugal. They tell me that at the beginning of the month it was actually #7 on the bestseller lists over there. Which, I will admit, gives me a little bit of a tingle….
I haven’t actually held one in my hands yet, but the cover looks pretty cool:
I always like seeing new covers for the book. Especially when the art has obviously been commissioned especially for the book.
Though I’ve only recently become a father, I’ve compared writing a book to having a baby for years. My mom used to refer to it as “her grandbook.” And one of my friends used to ask about it in those terms. We wouldn’t see each other for months, and when we got together and caught up on the news, she’d eventually ask, “And how’s the baby doing…?”
Now that I’ve been a dad for a couple of weeks, I realize that the baby analogy is better than I thought. Before I was mostly referring to the emotional connection you feel to your own book. But now, having dealt with a newborn, I realize that writing a book is not entirely dissimilar to actually raising a child.
You feed it. Change it. Cuddle it. Dress it. Undress it. Change it. Feed it. Change it. Change it. Get it to take a nap. Change it.
And then, at the end of the day, you look at it and realize that it’s pretty useless.
Don’t get me wrong, you love it. You love it like nobody’s business. But unless you’re an idiot, you realize this thing really isn’t good for anything yet. You’re going to have months and months of thankless, repetitive work before it’s capable of going out into the world on its own.
Later, when your book is published, it’s very cool and very scary. That’s when your baby has grown up enough to leave the nest. It’s out there, meeting people all on its own. If you’ve raised it properly, it hopefully makes a good impression. Hopefully it makes friends.
But the foreign editions of the book are… different. It’s still my baby, but it’s not *really* my baby. It’s like someone has cloned my baby and dressed it up in lederhosen and made it smoke a pipe for marketing reasons.
Yeah. The analogy really starts to fall apart after a while, I guess.
What was my point? No point. I don’t always have to have a point, you know….
Wait! I guess I do have a point. It’s that sometimes they make your baby smoke a pipe and you have to shrug it off. You don’t know what sells books in Bangladesh, or Berlin, or Brigadoon. For the most part, you have to trust that the publisher knows what they’re doing. For all you know, those Doonies are loonies for pipes…
But it’s nice when you see the marketing and it appeals to your aesthetic. Like the trailer I posted before. Or this picture that I stumbled onto when I was googling up an image of the cover for this blog.
(Click to Embiggen)
Hell, if I’d have been able to come up with promo copy like that on my own, it wouldn’t have taken me five years to sell the thing.
Later, you hoopy froods….
pat