AmazonCrossing chooses books in various different ways – through literary agents and foreign publishers, through authors already publishing on Kindle Direct in languages other than English, through recommendations from translators, and through its editors' own reading.
Most are published through licensing agreements in which foreign publishers use the Playboy brand name and agree to publish content that hews to the Playboy philosophy.
Rather than selling publication rights to American publishing houses, as most foreign publishers do, Cassava Republic prints and distributes its titles to American booksellers through Consortium, a book distributor based in Minnesota.
Most foreign publishers keep up with American publishing by reading American newspapers and magazines, and at least once a year they visit New York to talk with literary agents, editors and publishers.
Canada has more than 300 publishing houses, including the offices of foreign publishers.
Only a few years ago, most foreign publishers waited until English-language books were published in the United States or Britain before buying them for their own lists.
Salem House, founded three years ago, co-publishes about 250 titles a year with foreign publishers.
But Bloomsbury is betting I am wrong, publishing some 250,000 hardcover copies simultaneously in the United States, Britain and Germany, with 17 foreign publishers currently finishing their translations.
After college, Rowan held a series of jobs in publishing; at one point, he worked for a book-scouting agency for foreign publishers, where, to his boss's dismay, he rejected Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," which eventually won a Pulitzer.
Foreign publishers howled.
Foreign publishers have already bid hard for "L'Adversaire".
