In the Young Wizards universe: the New Millennium Editions go international

Some of you will have seen the post that went up at Ebooks Direct in 2021 regarding the effects of Brexit on our household ebook-sales business. The Young Wizards books went into their first non-North American English language editions via the UK’s Transworld/Corgi all the way back in 1991… and the thought that the UK YW fans (a steadfast, patient and faithful bunch) were going to be shut out of access to the YW-verse by the irrationality of their government has been bothering me.

That said, the UK government has had way too much fun painting itself into an increasingly Europhobic corner to see sense right now (or any time soon). So this annoying situation has become an opportunity to advance some plans that have been bubbling around here for a while.

We’re now going to start slowly launching the revised-and-updated Young Wizards New Millennium edition novels in paperback and ebook formats worldwide*, via Amazon. (And yes, I know: I share a lot of people’s ambivalence regarding using this particular distribution entity. But right now it’s the best way to go forward with this effort and still maintain control over which countries and territories are in play—as I must do to be in compliance with my existing contracts.)

A bit of detail on this: I can’t independently release the NMEs in print format in North America and the Philippines, because those rights are held by the present US/Canadian traditional publisher, Harcourt. Nor can I “go wide” on the NME ebook rights in the North American market: similar (if a bit more complex) reasons. But, that said… both print and ebook rights in the rest of the world are another matter.

So as we begin our rollout, if you’re in any country that is not the USA, Canada or the Philippines—barring any unexpected difficulties at the big-river end of things—you will soon be able to buy print versions of the Young Wizards New Millennium Editions via Amazon. (Hardcovers remain an exercise for 2025.) Amazon is presently putting in place ways to deal with the UK’s Brexit madness, which will relieve me of the effort of handling the paperwork-and-VAT complications at my end.

An additional bonus: this tranche of books and ebooks will also include Games Wizards Play, which until now has not been available through sales channels anywhere outside of North America. …In countries which have previously had English- or other-language versions of the original non-NME Young Wizards texts (the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, China, etc etc…) the books will be branded as New Millennium editions. In other countries, the NMEs will be the default editions and will not need to wear any additional branding.

We are also looking at doing outside-of-North-America audiobooks of the NMEs… but since there’s no publisher to finance them (or more accurately, I’m the publisher), I must bear the cost. And if we’re going to match the quality of the US-based Recorded Books audiobooks, it’s not going to be cheap. (In particular, I’d really like to retain the fabulous Christina Moore, who has done all the YW books so far. We’ll have to see if that’s possible.) This side of the project, therefore, is one that is unlikely to start up before 2025/6, and will depend on the success of the NMEs’ world publication to finance them. So we’ll discuss this aspect of things further in a year or so.

Further news about the progress of this project as a whole (which involves creating new print versions of the ten main-sequence books and new cover art, etc., for all of them) will be posted on YoungWizards.com and the soon-to-open YoungWizardsSeries.com as it becomes available.

Meanwhile, you can find the first of the new paperbacks / Kindle ebooks, So You Want To Be A Wizard, here at Amazon:

And thanks for being interested, everybody! It’s a pleasure to be doing this work for you.