Chinese Novels

Thanks for sharing this! Great to have your impressions. It also dovetails with mine in that Rosmei is pretty good at producing books as physical objects (which IMO it shares with the Taiwanese/HK/Macau publishers I buy from), but not necessarily the best publisher.

Re: back blurbs — I've heard this a lot, but in my extensive experience 'no back blurbs' is NOT necessarily the standard in Asian countries. The mainland Chinese print novels I own, across a bunch of genres, have back blurbs of some sort in many cases. E.g. the Chinese translation of Kim Ji-Young, born 1982, by a press which also publishes webnovels in print, has a fairly detailed summary on the back cover. I also think that if a publisher is targeting a particular market (e.g. readers in the West, reading in English), it ought to do basic market research about the expectations and norms in that market.

Re: future of baihe publishing, in particular — the existing Seven Seas and Rosmei baihe licences feel, to me, very experimental, with a vibe of 'let's see how these do before we invest any more in this genre'. I'm also not sure where Seven Seas will be able to branch out to if it sticks with this current formula of: has an existing fan translation + short (hence lower risk) + historical, preferably wuxia/xianxia.