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douqiA couple of days ago, Alyza Liu, an editor at Simon & Schuster, announced on Twitter that she'd acquired world English rights for the yanqing novel Goodbye My Princess by Fei Wo Si Chun, on which the 2019 drama of the same title is based. The English version of the novel will be out in June 2025.
I find this intriguing because it is, as far as I know, the first time a Big 5 publisher has acquired a title from the pulpier, romance end of Chinese genre publishing (please correct me if I'm wrong on this). The other genre novels I know of (famously, Liu Cixin's Three-Body Problem) that have been given this treatment tend to be the 'respectable', more 'literary' ones. My view is that I would love to see more English translations of c-webnovels being brought out via this model instead of the by-now-familiar light novels pipeline (Fitzcarraldo to license a c-webnovel?? one can dream). I'm interested in seeing how they manage the translation process and what the quality of the final product is.
I had a quick search about Fei Wo Si Chun, and she seems to have a number of 'serious writer' accolades, including once serving as vice-president of the Hubei Writers' Association. A number of her novels seem to have been published traditionally, including this one (again, please correct me if I'm wrong; the data is quite hard to find on a basic internet search). But at least some of her works were definitely first serialised online, likely on JJWXC — I found her profile here. Intriguingly, her Baike entry suggests that she once released a danmei novel online, but I haven't been able to find out anything else about it (admittedly after a very cursory search).
I find this intriguing because it is, as far as I know, the first time a Big 5 publisher has acquired a title from the pulpier, romance end of Chinese genre publishing (please correct me if I'm wrong on this). The other genre novels I know of (famously, Liu Cixin's Three-Body Problem) that have been given this treatment tend to be the 'respectable', more 'literary' ones. My view is that I would love to see more English translations of c-webnovels being brought out via this model instead of the by-now-familiar light novels pipeline (Fitzcarraldo to license a c-webnovel?? one can dream). I'm interested in seeing how they manage the translation process and what the quality of the final product is.
I had a quick search about Fei Wo Si Chun, and she seems to have a number of 'serious writer' accolades, including once serving as vice-president of the Hubei Writers' Association. A number of her novels seem to have been published traditionally, including this one (again, please correct me if I'm wrong; the data is quite hard to find on a basic internet search). But at least some of her works were definitely first serialised online, likely on JJWXC — I found her profile here. Intriguingly, her Baike entry suggests that she once released a danmei novel online, but I haven't been able to find out anything else about it (admittedly after a very cursory search).
