Wednesday, April 20, 2011

My Review Helped a Book!

My review helped a book!


I've received wonderful news yesterday: Kosingas - The Order of the Dragon by Aleksandar Tesic will be bought by a Polish publishing house and translated into Polish. And my review helped that happen.

My story with the Kosingas trilogy (an epic fantasy trilogy with a flavor of Slavic mythology) began a few years ago, when I found the first book of the trilogy, the only one published at the time, in a local library. I've read it, enjoyed it, and wrote a favorable review at a website I was working for at the time.

When the second book in the trilogy came out, the publisher contacted me. It turned out they loved my review (it seems that, at the time, other reviewers of the book focused on some aspects of the book, and that nobody wrote just a review, an article telling people what the book was about, the good, the bad, the interesting... They just insisted on this or that aspect of the book, and some were quite overdoing it), and they gave me the second book in the trilogy. A book for free, yay! The book was good, and I wrote another favorable review.

By the time the third book came out, the website I was working for no longer published book reviews. Books, who needs them? Celebrities, women's issues, teens, love&sex, that's what they wanted, not book reviews. The publisher gave me the third book anyway, because we worked so well in the past.

The first book in the trilogy was translated into English. When I started to write for Suite101, I wrote the review of the book, this time in English, adapted for foreign readers. A Polish editor happened to read it, and less than a month from the review being published, he found me on Facebook and asked for the contact with the author and/or publisher of the English edition. He was interested to read the book, and perhaps to buy it for his publishing house. I gave him all the contacts I had. I contacted the author and told him about it, and he was very happy to hear about it.

A bit more than a week passed. Nothing. Maybe the editor wasn't interested, after all? Maybe those things didn't work so fast? I didn't know, but I wanted to hope for the best.

As I said, I've got great news yesterday. The first book of the Kosingas trilogy will be translated into Polish and published in Poland. And I helped it happen.

I'm still wondering if it's really true. I'm still not certain that my review could have had such an impact. Of course, it wasn't just the doing of my review, Mr. Tesic had written about 1500 pages of the trilogy (it really ended with the third book!), and good pages at that, but still. My review helped.

It's a great feeling. Even though I'm still a bit dazzled.

3 comments:

Cathy said...

well done!

Padmavani said...

That's fantastic! Great feeling I bet! :)
Cheers
Padmavani

angel011 said...

The feeling is sure great! Thanks for dropping by!