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

[douqi]

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.

[halfcactus]

While not as relevant, the Asian books in my experience typically had blurbs: original Taiwanese manhua (with varying levels of independent), traditional Chinese translations of Japanese manga, and non-East-Asian Asian novels.

As far as I know, the cnovel physicals that didn't have back blurbs still to had the summaries up on the respective websites/listings; a lot of the pushback was because the English summaries were not in Rosmei's website OR its preorder page OR anywhere official, which they have since amended (mostly) (after fifteen months). Like maybe if the issue was trying to keep things on the down-low because of censorship I'd get it, but it does seem more like a lack of foresight that they passed off as East-West differences.

Re: baihe - PERSONALLY I think 7S should go for the alpaca baihe because 1) it's transmigration, which seems sellable, 2) alpaca baihe seems like it will fit in well with the translated fish danmeis (I don't know how many there are, but I think there are at least two?)

[headstone]

a lot of the pushback was because the English summaries were not in Rosmei's website OR its preorder page OR anywhere official, which they have since amended (mostly) (after fifteen months).

For sure. From where I stand, it's deeply frustrating as a prospective consumer because the amount of time and effort required to put some simple copy together and update their website is low any way you slice it. The effort to impact ratio is so disproportionate that the fact they are still not caught up (as I mentioned in the post, The Defectives is still listed as "TBA" and without cover art on their site months after its release) suggests they're either really disorganized or have strange priorities. I understand that they're a young, small company, but they've acquired a lot of licenses and I'd prefer they took the time to get their processes in order and complete the publication of some of their novels in progress before continuing to expand.

It really speaks to the dire state of the English-language cnovel publishing landscape that even with all this in mind, Rosmei are unquestionably one of the more reputable and professional extant publishers simply by virtue of the fact they a) actually publish books and b) maintain a reasonable standard of quality of said books...

I also agree with douqi that regardless of standards and conventions within Rosmei's regional publishing sphere, the international English readership is clearly a pillar of their business model and it behooves them to do some basic market research about what said audience will expect.

[duckprintspress]

re what other people said - none of the manga I've gotten from Japan has had back blurbs, and none of the manhua or danmei novels I've bought from mainland China have had them.

It may depend on genre and/or publisher, then.

but yeah, their webpage is a disaster, and especially considering how much they're relying on cross-country cross-language buyers, I definitely agree their priorities are all wrong in that regard and I agree with you that they've had more than enough time to course-correct but still haven't and that's weird.

To speak from a little personal experience... so I own a book publisher! that publishes books! lol. Our first four print books, I never anticipated selling in any context where the physical book would need a back blurb - I thought they'd only be online - so we printed them without back blurbs. That was like the first year or so of us putting out books. And then it became clear I'd misgauged the market and I would be selling in person and the books would need back blurbs. So all subsequent books have had them, and for two of those first four I have done reprints so they now have them too. For Reasons, I haven't been able to reprint the other two, so I printed out cards that have the back blurbs and I bring those cards to in-person events so that every time I see someone pick those two up, turn them over, and go "uhh..." I have the thing in hand to go "yeah sorry those two don't have back blurbs but you can read the blurb here" and hand it to them. So it's not like this is a super difficult course correction to make, and I'm doing it with a fraction of their manpower - I'm my company's only full-time employee and I have to do a lot of this logistical stuff myself. And the books don't already have blurbs, whereas c-novels all do. So their lag on adjusting their strategy is. not great.