You’d think by now we’d have learned things always take longer than you think, but no. Old dogs, new tricks, and all that. Even four years in to running Ignite, we’re capable of telling ourselves it’ll take ten minutes to write a blog, then finding it eats up half the afternoon. Or we’ll set aside a week for reading a manuscript, but still be ploughing through it nearly a month later. And you know what? Every single time comes as a surprise.
All of which is by way of an explanation. We spent the autumn filling social media with one excited status after another, all promising Big news coming soon! And then…. nothing happened. You’d have been forgiven for thinking we were making it all up. We weren’t. We were just busy forgetting – again – how long it takes to make the move from this-seems-like-a-good-idea to that idea being signed, sealed, and delivered.
They say good things come to those who wait. And you’ve been waiting. Now here’s the news.
Way back in late August we started chatting with a US publisher about them licensing the North American rights to City Baby. Finally, this week, nearly five months after we first started the conversation, the deal is done, and we can announce to the world that New York publishers Bazillion Points will be putting out a US imprint of City Baby late this spring.
It’s fantastic news, and it opens up the US market for sales of City Baby in a way which Ignite, as a small independent publisher based in the UK, simply can’t do. It means that all the thousands of GBH fans in North America – as well as anyone who lives there and is into punk rock, or who simply loves a good story well told – will be able to get their hands on the book way more easily than they have up to now. It’s good news for them, it’s good news for Ross, and it’s good news for Ignite too.
It’ll be a little while before the US version is in the shops – the publishing date isn’t set in stone – but it looks likely to be ready by late May 2015, just in time for the next GBH tour of the US. We’ll keep you up-to-date with any developments. Meanwhile, wherever you live, you can still buy copies of City Baby from our website. And if you get your skates on, you’ll be able to catch the last few days of our January sale, too.
