Max Quigley, Technically Not a Bully

Huzzah! My first US book has just been released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It's more or less a rejacket and slight reworking of my 2007 UQP book Problem Child.

To me, the most exciting thing about all this, quite apart from the 20,000 hardback copies HMH is printing, is that I got to keep most of the Australian-ness of the original: I didn't have to change 'Mum' to 'Mom'; after a brief discussion Triffin Nordstrom was allowed to keep living in 'the bush' rather than 'the woods'; I dropped a couple of unnecessary details like Vegemite and cricket; and Nerdstrom now enjoys playing with 'Legos', rather than 'Lego'. And they study 'math' rather than 'maths'.

I also had to lessen the number of times I used 'a bit'. As in, 'When I ran over her foot in the car, Mum was a bit cross.' It's an Australian trick of understatement that the US publishers didn't feel would work very well for their market. And since I do use that mini-phrase quite often, I had to trim its use back a bit (!).

I find the differences between the way we look at publishing here and the US quite interesting. I was chatting with an American man on the flight back from NZ, and I told him how excited I was to finally have a book in hardcover. His response: 'Well, I hope it sells so well that it's soon in paperback.'

Good call.

Finally, here is the YouTube trailer I made for the book. Please distribute and share freely: