Signed to a Japanese publisher!

Today, several pieces of paper arrived in the post. Very important pieces of paper. These are contracts from Macmillan LanguageHouse, the English-language learning material imprint of Macmillans, the publishers.

Now the publisher and I have both signed these pieces of paper, Tales of Old Japanese will appear later this year as two volumes of stories with glossaries – probably slightly simplified to take account of the TOEIC requirements. These will be among the first issues in a new series of graded English readers to be released in the autumn.

Of course, the Inknbeans editions (paperback and Kindle) of Tales of Old Japanese will still be available – this contract only applies to the EFL teaching edition.

But wait – there’s more. Though it was Tales of Old Japanese that first caught the eye of these publishers, they liked the look of my Sherlock Holmes stories as well, and they have taken Sherlock Holmes and the Bradfield Push as well. This was originally published as a standalone Kindle title, but is now part of Secrets from the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD. This will also appear this autumn.

My sincere thanks to Kevin Cleary, who introduced my work to the publishers, and to Jo, the Boss Bean at Inknbeans, who has been marvellously supportive of all this, and has worked with me to come up with a solution that protects all our interests and works out well for all of us.

Anyway, it’s a wonderful feeling – almost as good as being published by Inknbeans – and maybe it will spur some interest in these titles here in Japan – there has been relatively little notice taken of Tales of Old Japanese locally (and I think there should be).