[Bond]

All right so I've been a member of these forums for a long time as a fantasy reader. I've gradually come to realize that a lot of others that come to this site are very serious enthusiasts and sideline as bloggers and reviewers if not being employed by the publishing industry outright. One of the perks seems to be that you get sent free books to review which I've seen referred to as ARCs although don't know what that stands for. Considering the amount of time I've spent around here it has dawned on me that maybe I should get in on the action. :)

One of the things I realize that might be useful is that I spend a lot of time in an English speaking country that is not the United States or of Anglo-Saxon extraction. I notice a lot of the books mentioned here as up and coming take considerable time to show up in local bookstores if at all. The options then are placing an order with the bookstore if they have it listed, ordering via the internet, or buying the books on trips abroad. I'm wondering is there a possibility of a role here that needs to be filled? Could someone like myself act as a useful agent in some way? Or are the established distribution lines pretty efficient and any buyer locally has ready access to materials if they already have contact with the main book distributors? Do the smaller publishers have need for representation in smaller markets? Is it possible fantasy enthusiasts that visit this site from various countries are in a position to facilitate making more of these books available in the bookstores in our backyard?

[KatG]

I forget -- which country are you in again?

1) ARC stands for advanced reading copy. Basically, bound proof pages of a novel, usually these days with the cover art on the front, but not the actual book itself. It's the most basic promotional thing a publisher does for a book -- sending out ARC's (also called bound galleys) to reviewers, libraries, booksellers, etc. to try and generate word-of-mouth excitement for the book and media coverage, mainly reviews. ARC's are rarer for mass market paperbacks, which make up at least half or more of the original publications of the category SFF market. But they've become a bit more common for mmp's because the Internet has provided a whole other pile of non-professional reviewers who are willing to read mass market paperbacks. In that case, the ARC's are often the actual paperbacks, just a bit ahead of the publisher's release date.

2) The blog reviewers who get stuff from publishers don't get them automatically. Usually, they've been reviewing material unpaid for years, for the love of it, and have demonstrated enough of a presence in the Internet fan community and enough of a following of their reviews that the publisher thinks they are worth sending an ARC copy to in hopes of a good review. The blogs are really an extension of the tradition in SFF of fan writing and reviewing that has been going on since the 1920's. Blog reviewers usually review or write commentary for several sites as well as their own blog. They become, essentially, amateur columnists. So to get the ARC's, you would have to establish yourself on the Internet first. One way to start is to volunteer to review stuff for major SFF sites and see if you get any takers.

3) Bringing a book into another country or territory involves either export sales (a publisher in the U.S., say, ships their copies of a novel for sale in another country,) or foreign rights sales (a U.S. publisher or an author/agent in the U.S. sell the English-language or other language rights to publish the book in another country to a publisher in that country or to a publisher who publishes titles for that country.)

So Tor U.S. publishes Title X and ships their copies to the U.K. via a distrubtor or via Tor U.K. That's an export sale. Or Tor U.S. publishes Title X and sells the U.K. publication rights to Warner Orbit U.K. who puts out their own edition, and sells French language publication rights to a French publisher who translates the book into French and puts out their own French language edition of it.

The publishers have subsidiary rights divisions whose job it is to sell ancilliary rights, including publication rights in other countries. These divisions sell directly to foreign publishers or they sell to them with the help of a foreign rights agent. A foreign rights agent may or may not also be a literary agent. They make deals between publishers in different countries or between authors (usually via their literary agents,) and publishers in different countries. (It depends on who holds the right to license the rights, the author or if the author gave those rights to the publisher as part of their license.)

There are also distribution companies in various countries who distribute and sell export copies of books from other countries to booksellers and vendors in their territory. So, if this idea interests you, you can look into whether there are foreign rights agents in your area or book distributors who do exports. But I don't know if any of them specialize only in SFF.

The transfer of a title from one country to another is not automatic. It used to be moderately rare with SFF, because publishers usually only wanted the bestsellers from other countries and the feeling was that U.S. readers would not read many novels that didn't star U.S. characters (a self-fulfilling prophecy which was disproved.) But there still is hesitancy, especially in countries where SFF doesn't sell that well. You have to make a good case that the books will sell in a particular territory.

As a fan, you can review books. You can also try to get to know the publishers in your territory who do sometimes do SFF, exported or original, and talk to them about a particular title. International SFF conventions can be good for that, since editors often attend. But that would be unpaid work out of fandom. To get paid for it, you have to be a contracted agent for the person or publisher who holds the license rights.