The No Asshole Rule has now been released in
quite a few different countries. I have
written about Der
Arschloch Faktor, and how it was released in Germany in October
of last year. People ask me why it was released in Germany
almost six months before the U.S.
(and they had to take the extra time to translate the book into German, in
fact, it was done twice because my editor Martin Janik was dissatisfied with
first translation).
The book industry is
so strange that I don’t think that anyone actually understands it, but the reason Der Arschloch Faktor came out so early
was — in part- – so we could link a little book tour to the famous Frankfurt Book Fair
in October. This is the biggest gathering of people in the publishing business in the world. Der Arschloch Faktor has sold well in Germany. It was
on several of their best-seller lists for several months, and like the U.S.,
the range of places that it has been written about is dizzying, from the
tabloid Bild (one of the stories was
on the same page as a topless woman), which is among the most widely read
papers in Europe. Another story was
written in the far more respectable German version of the Financial Times, and a recent article was published in Chrismon, a publication of the German Lutheran Church read by 1.5 million Germans (see The
Sacred and the Profane).
The
news this week is that Objectif
Zéro-Sale-Con just came out in France, and the initial reaction looks promising. The book has
just started appearing in shops, but it
has been in the top ten books on Amazon in France much of the time (at #7 as of
this writing) and my publisher sent me a screen shot yesterday as it was
briefly the #1 book overall. I would be very
curious to hear from any French readers about the apparent appeal of the book
and how distinct features of the French
culture shape what assholes in your country do, how they are dealt with, and
how French organizations take steps to keep them out (or perhaps unwittingly encourage them, as so
many U.S. companies do).
Finally,
some of the other countries that the book will be published in during the
coming months include Brazil, China, Denmark, Holland, Korea, Japan, Turkey, Taiwan, and Spain.
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