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Post by Dante on Jan 16, 2014 13:26:45 GMT -5
I'd grown a little suspicious of the fact that there weren't any listings for an Egmont-published edition of File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents, so I asked Egmont via Twitter what its status was. The conclusion you may read above; they do intend to publish it, but don't know exactly when. Readers in the U.K. should be prepared for the possibility of an additional wait after the U.S. publication date on April 1st. It's a little disappointing, but given that my worry was that we wouldn't be getting it at all, I'm actually a little relieved. It's already been established that ATWQ's sales may not have been entirely up to speed in the U.K., as Egmont had to change the format for the second book to make it considerably larger in size than the first, which was getting a little bit lost in the crowd. Fortunately, indications at present are that File Under won't be directly relevant to the continuing ATWQ plotline, so with any luck the U.K. won't be left too far behind in the event of a delay.
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Post by Tryina Denouement on Jan 17, 2014 13:08:26 GMT -5
I shall prepare myself to buy the (US) book when it's published!
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Post by Dante on Apr 2, 2014 10:12:53 GMT -5
Presenting my thoughts to Agathological's question here: I'll wait I guess...odd why it's delayed. Well... I don't want to seem paranoid about this. There might be some kind of rights issue for Egmont, perhaps with the audiobook narrators, or File Under doesn't fit into their present release schedule and they think it'd be optimal to release it some other time in the year. And in the same vein, when they changed the format of the series for ?2 to a much larger book, the question of the book's visibility might have been a minor one. But what worries me is that I think the subtext here is that ATWQ isn't selling well in the U.K. So they have to scale up the books from ?2 to be more attention-grabbing, it's no longer a priority to do a simultaneous release for a supplementary volume, they aren't sure how much the supplementary volume will recoup publishing costs... That would explain a lot, but it'd be a tragedy if so, because ATWQ is great. I think, in retrospect, that maybe there was a general blunder with the cover art; well, I said this about the Little Brown edition of ?1, and I think the same definitely applies to the Egmont edition of ?2. The covers aren't necessarily designed for the best audience. I haven't exactly made a secret of my feelings about the bright colours and balloon writing, but I do think there's a danger that, in reaching out to a new audience, the new audience that those covers are aimed at is actually quite a young one, too young, one which is subsequently disappointed by the more complicated vocabulary and plots and the dour tone. And likewise, older readers see the covers and think they're too young for them. But it may even be an issue of saturation of the market. ASoUE is a big name and Egmont's made sure the series is still in print, so there might be just too many Snicket novels on retailers' store shelves, and the new books don't stand out over the old ones. And as for veteran readers of ASoUE - there was a six-year publication gap in which the Snicket name lost a lot of momentum and attention, and readers grew up, quite often too much to go back. And what you see on social media sometimes is that people are surprised that Snicket's even still around; they simply don't know about the new books at all. Heck, it might even just be that the kind of novel Snicket writes simply isn't trendy at the moment. So there are many possible obstacles to ATWQ's success, and I'm concerned that they're no longer just possible. So yeah, I'm a bit worried about the state of ATWQ in the U.K., basically, but diagnosing the problem, and even if there is a problem, is no simple matter. I could be worrying about nothing.
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Post by Hermes on Apr 2, 2014 14:39:42 GMT -5
I'm afraid the 'betrayal' of The End, which got a lot of publicity, has had an ongoing effect on Snicket's popularity. If only he had told us what happened to the Quagmires!
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Post by Dante on Apr 2, 2014 15:04:24 GMT -5
Har har, yes. Well, while The End wasn't really as bad as all that - we know pretty much everything there is to know about Lemony Snicket and V.F.D., we learnt the fate of the Quagmires, and anyone expecting to find out the true nature of a giant shadowy question mark called "the Great Unknown" was very naive - then people still do reference having been "burned" by the book years later. I should have noted that as well. It would be a real shame if those who resent The End let it continue to burn, though, as ATWQ is constructed much more carefully and we have Handler's assurance that he will answer the major questions.
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