Rosmei orders and novel impressions

[headstone]

Some interest was expressed in a writeup of the Rosmei titles I've acquired over the last year, so I wrote up some of my impressions of their books, as well as my experience ordering from each of the two main North American distributors. On my personal site: https://durandal.blog/blog/rosmei/

I don't have comments set up on my blog so feel free to ask questions or discuss under this post. Feel free to suggest any relevant tags, as well.

Comments

[duckprintspress]

So, I've been pre-ordering all the titles through Yiggybean as they come out - I'm in the US, so don't have some of the same international/cross-border issues, but otherwise your experience basically matches mine. All in all I think this is a damn good write-up and I would agree with it, so when below I only talk about the parts where I differ a little, it's not meant as anything negative about the post as a whole, I just think all the rest is A+. :D

My Nanchan also got caught up in the customs snafu, and while I also wish they had e-mailed as well as updating the webpage, well... it was what it was. You mentioned wondering if a GO might have been better, and for that... I ALSO once had a GO I was in get involved a customs snafu. With Yiggybean, they communicated at least somewhat, and were able to negotiate to get the books sent back to Singapore and then returned to the US, resulting in me ultimately getting my book without any increase in price. When the same thing happened to a merch order I did in a GO, the group order person was NOT able to negotiate to get their stuff removed from impound, it was deep-sixed permanently, and the GO runner could only issue apologies and partial refunds out of their own pocket (I declined mine; it wasn't worth taking $10 from this person who was surely already dealing with a ton of people who were way more pissed than I was). Now, this doesn't mean "Yiggybean had the pull and the GO didn't" because we don't know the full circumstances - why were each orders impounded, what were the other factors and other impacted orders, etc. - but at least from my extremely limited experience, I'd definitely favor Yiggybean over a GO if customs issues are a major concern. (they're not a huge concern from me; like. I ordered from that GO after the issue, I figured things like this are bound to happen ordering through the hurdles we face in North America getting things from China. It's annoying but some amount of it is probably inevitable. Not that I think you disagree with that, to be clear, just explaining my own attitude.)

Re: back blurbs, I've seen this discussed many other places but this is a disconnect in how books are marketed different places. No back blurb is standard practice in a lot of Asian countries. My understanding is that Rosmei was really taken by surprise by how different the culture in NA is in that regard, and I think I heard they're adding back blurbs to at least some of their upcoming titles?

Re: volume counts for the Rosmei titles, they're all here (this is a blog post I wrote and that I update as new licenses are announced): https://duckprintspress.com/2024/03/26/danmei-and-baihe-c-novels-and-manhua-officially-licensed-in-english/#rosmei-flag

Anyway yeah, great post, thanks for sharing it, and hope my little additional babbling here is helpful.

[duckprintspress]

also god yeah the speed at which they're coming out is glacial it's driving me insane. I usually don't start a danmei that's new to me unless I have access to it all, which means I've only read a couple so far - I read How to Survive as a Villain, because I wanted to assess their translations before I ordered more, and so I lined up a fantranslation for the rest, and I've read Global Examination because that's a re-read for me. I might die of old age before I finally get to read Lie Huo Jiao Chou it's the worst.

Oh, I read You're Too OP! too, cause it was stand alone.

The rest I'm just. patiently accumulating in a stack. so I can read them once I have the whole story, sigh.

[headstone]

This all makes a lot of sense and is great additional context, thank you!

Yeah, I've never bought from a GO before and don't seriously expect that they would be better in this regard, so it's good to have it confirmed that I was probably right to assume in the first place that even if a shipment did get impounded, it'd have a better chance of getting recovered if I went through an established retailer.

And yeah, the communication levels around the delay truly weren't a big issue; if anything, it seemed worse in retrospect purely due to how communicative The Beguiling were throughout the process. Despite how it might sound in the post, I would definitely order from Yiggybean again if there weren't a domestic alternative (or the border considerations.) I mentioned the stuff about the delay in the interest of expectation-setting for folks (like myself) who may not have a ton of experience buying from overseas; it's good to know in advance the kinds of things that can happen.

The back blurb info makes a lot of sense (and yeah I'm sure there's a lot of conversations about this stuff I'm not privy to since my social media use these days is minimal.) I had a feeling it might just be a difference in publishing industry conventions. I'll update the post later to reflect this, I just don't have my computer on me right now.

Thanks for the link to the post with volume numbers! That's extremely helpful. Where did you get that info? It's very possible it's on their site and I just couldn't find it...

[duckprintspress]

nodnod that makes a lot of sense. I've been in danmei fandoms for over 5 years, and I've bought every single English edition I could get my hands on since I found out English editions existed so... all the Peach Flower titles, all the Via Lactea ones tho I'm dealing with the shipping issue in reverse - they're in Canada and they have a couple pre-orders right now and because of shipping I flat-out cannot afford them right now, I'll have to wait until I get holiday money of some kind - ofc all the 7S, and the Rosmei, and I've gotten Chinese editions from like six different sources, including GOs, so I've ended up with a decent amount of experience (this makes it sound like I have a lot of money lmao, when in fact this is like... every spare penny I've had this entire time. other hobbies? what other hobbies?) AND I'm quite active on Tumblr and other platforms, so I tend to be relatively looped, and I often forget that a lot of people... aren't. Which is reasonable! I've hyperfocused on this as a special interest and not everyone gonna do that lol.

The publisher I'm currently pissed at is Aloha - they've got some manhua - Nirvana in Fire, Link Click, the donghua-made manhua for Tian Guan Ci Fu (as opposed to the manhua by Starember), and they recently announced they got the first two volumes of Little Mushroom - and I spent like $250 to pre-order TGCF and Link Click in like January, they said they'd be out during the spring, and there hasn't been a *peep* since then, and I'm slowly going from annoyed to "maybe I'll just never buy from you again" because that is a LOT of money to just get. nothing. not even an e-mail suggesting when they WILL be out. It's especially frustrating because I've seen the physical books at Kinokuniya and I know some are out. So why haven't pre-orders been fulfilled???

Re: the volume numbers, the Rosmei website is - as you said - a nightmare to use. I only have the progress update link because I found someone else had it. It's here: https://rosmeihey.top/pages/progressreport and as far as I know it's basically accurate. In addition to the list I keep up-to-date, there's also this one - https://licenseddanmei.carrd.co/ - the person who maintains that one is a HUGE LHJC fan so they follow the Rosmei updates pretty closely; I follow them on Bluesky and also get some info that way.

[aurumcalendula]

I haven't ordered any Rosmei books via Yiggybean yet (I'm impatiently waiting for the preorders for Ning Yuan's booka to open), but it defintely sounds like they might have more recourse than GOs over customs snafus.

I'm pretty sure blurbs on the dust jacket flaps or back cover, depending if it's a hardback or paperback, are fairly standard in western English language publishing, not just NA (like the UK published books I have usually include them)?

[duckprintspress]

Yeah that's been my limited experience with European books too but I didn't want to assume cause that's definitely not my main, uh, sphere? but yeah, books I've encountered from the UK, France, and Spain have had back blurbs. I've figured it's a feature of publishing traditions based in European tradition but I'm not familiar enough with publishing in a lot of areas of Europe to want to make any blanket statements in that regard, whereas at least for the US and Canada I could say it with confidence that I was right.