Business as usual

The next few months are going to be nice ´n busy. At home, fortunately, Duncan the gardener has been keeping the grass and weeds down so that´s not too much of a worry. Some building work will have to happen, but seeing as I´m not a builder nor a painter (unless it´s of the artistic kind) I can happily leave that to those who are. There´s quite a bit of workwork happening, though, which will no doubt make the 9 weeks ahead rush past... A few highlights:

• FracasEnglish is going to need a lot of attention to make the company grow and develop into what is already an exciting future.
• The Eastern European primary course, Magic Adventure (level 1), a project in which Niki is also involved as the writer of the Teachers´Editions, is nicely coming together and should be on the market around May, after which we will speed on to levels 2 and 3.
  
• The Dutch Realtime project will ask my full attention as series editor: editing three of five levels (written by approximately 10 authors) is a magnificent challenge!
• I was approached by a UK publisher who wants to commission a new secondary course for Mexico and surrounding countries and Niki and I are pitching for this project.
  

Another interesting development, which I keep forgetting to mention, is the fact that a business course which I co-wrote some 6 years ago, together with Joanne Collie, and part of which was written by the late Gillian Porter Laddouse, is getting a new lease of life. We had never been happy with the way in which the German publisher of the course, Klett, (a giant in its own right) had plugged this course into the international, i.e. global market. That is to say, they hadn´t, as German publishers tend to shy away from international markets. (Had Germany been an island, German publishers could easily be accused of being insular.)

After a few years of complaining about this, and after some insistent negotiation, late 2009 we managed to retrieve the rights to the international edition of the course . I immediately took the opportunity to scout around for a new publisher and found one in Garnet Education, a middle-sized but prestigious UK-based publishing house with a big and active international network of distributors. (They have also published the Award-winning series that my Tourism and Hospitality English book is part of). They had the course assessed by an external expert and the verdict was ´This is excellent material, and why isn´t it out there!´ Nuff said. So, an agreement is in the making and Link-up will be published under a new name, early 2011. It´s wonderful, for once, to be working on a project which has already largely been written! It will no doubt take considerable work to update it and get it out there, but we´re happy that we´re getting this opportunity.