Many of you have been asking, “When is How To Ditch Your Fairy going to be published in Australia?” I apologise for not answering. For ages I did not know if it would be or not and then it sold and I was not allowed to tell you. But now I can!
How To Ditch Your Fairy will be published in Australia in late February by the fabulous Allen & Unwin. That’s right I am now published by the same house that publishes Ursula Dubosarsky, Margo Lanagan, Garth Nix, Penni Russon and Lili Wilkinson amongst many other fabulously wonderful Oz YA writers.
What’s more A&U are not only publishing HTDYF, they’re publishing the liar book too!
Keeping this news to myself has been excruciating!
Not only will the book be coming out in Oz next Feb, which is mere months away, but I may even be doing a few appearances in support of it. Possibly in parts of Australia other than Sydney or Melbourne. More details as soon as I have them.
As you can tell I’m very excited. I feel like I’ve found a wonderful home in Australia just as I have with Bloomsbury in the USA. I hope to be with both houses for many years to come.
Update: Several people have written to ask me whether the Oz edition will have the same cover as the US one. Yes, it will. The fonts will be slightly different and “colour” and “realise” wil be spelled correctly. It will also be a paperback not a hardcover.
Hooray Justine! Today Australia, tomorrow – the world. (Including Ireland, if I have any sort of luck fairy at all.)
Thanks, Sarah! Some day I will be published in Ireland. I’m sure of it!
Hmmmm. Wait till Feb or just order it from bookdepository.co.uk, which sadly, probably, would not only be faster but cheaper (it usually is – not only due to the free postage) than the Australian edition? Decisions, decisions. And I bet they post to Ireland, too.
Great news Justine!
They do post to Ireland, and my copy of HTDYF is in the mail, but I have a bad post fairy and it was already sent and returned once to my infinite chagrin.
Besides, it’d be nice to see Justine’s name sparkling at me from a bookshop bookshelf. 🙂
I ALWAYS get in trouble with my writing groups because I spell with the Canadian/British/Australian spellings, and people consider it an affectation because I am a US citizen living in the US currently. And my first drafts are sprinkled with “colour” and “centre” and “cheque”.
Except I blame Susan Cooper and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and M. M. Kaye*, because I’d been spelling half-British-English, half-American-English for decades and then I moved to Canada for three years, which kinda cemented my spelling habits. I wish I had dual citizenship just so I can spell grey-with-an-e because it looks so much prettier and then nobody would give me grief. Isn’t it enough that I used American-English for final drafts and proofing graphic design stuff?
(I notice you used tonnes the other day on the blog as well.)
*At what point did publishers start getting anal about the usage variations between the US and all other English speaking countries? Because my original copies of the Chronicles of Narnia had English spellings, but my new ones don’t and are in the wrong order. My Canadian copies of Harry Potter have the Britishisms intact, even though they don’t use all the slang, but the US ones don’t. I liked it better when US YA publishers let me find out MORE about the world instead of LESS. Part of the reason I read was to get away from my perfectly safe little Utah neighbourhood. But I digress….oh boy, howdy, do I digress.
Great news for us Down Under (as well as you, of course, Justine). I’m really looking forward to reading this one. Congratulations!
Thanks for the update – and yay, congratulations! It’ll be great to see more of your books out over here.