Wormworld Saga lauches in France

wormworldsaga.fr is the new place to goe for French readers of the Wormworld Saga

I've already talked about the French edition of the Wormworld Saga here and there in older posts. Today can be regarded as the day on which the Wormworld Saga officially starts its adventurous journey into the Franco-Belgian market. Today the French version of the Wormworld Saga website has been launched:

www.wormworldsaga.fr

So, now there are two Wormworld Saga websites which is quite an interesting development. Right from the beginning of the project my goal has been to reach an international audience with my story and to publish the Wormworld Saga in several different languages. With the amazing support from the fan translators and my volunteering layout assistant Ivan Berov (I can't praise him enough - by now I owe him at least one of my offsprings for all the chapter layouts he's already done...) this approach has branched out in ways I could never have imagined.
But of course there are limitation to how much content can be handled  in a reasonable amount of time by a small group of people. The Wormworld Saga website itself has always been in English and the special content of the Wormworld Saga App and The Attic only exists in English, too. There's not even a translation into my German mother language of these things. Everything - all the making of articles and author commentary - is created by me besides the graphic novel and it's just impossible for me to handle more than the English version of that content.

When Dupuis entered as the publisher of the French book edition of the Wormworld Saga we also talked about the digital version of the story and how we could develop it to support the printed version. I explained to them pretty much the things that I've written in the paragraph above: not even if they would provide translations for everything I wouldn't have the time to implement and maintain that content. That's when we decided that the only way to do it would be to branch of a French version of the Wormworld Saga website that would be completely maintained by Dupuis. And that's where we actually arrived today.

Louis-Antoine Dujardin and me at the French office of Dupuis in Paris

The new website brings some substancial advantages for the French readers of the Wormworld Saga. The most obvious one being that the whole website is in French language. More important, it features professionally edited versions of the French chapters. You won't believe the amount of typos and layout glitches that were fixed in the editing process! And the French readers can look forward to be able to access the special features of the Wormworld Saga in French language sometimes in the near future. The thing that I'm most happy about is the fact that Dupuis will keep access to the chapters free on the website. I actually hadn't expected that from a big publisher and I had already prepared to accept payed chapters as a compromise in exchange for the effort that is put into the website. But since the chapters remain free I can honestly say that this colaboration comes with absolutely no drawback for the fans.
As you can see, wormworldsaga.fr also comes with it's own design and feature set. When we first talked about the project I thought we might just copy the international website. But now that it received its own design, I'm loving the idea of a design competition between the two websites. I will have a close look at wormworldsaga.fr and I will definitely adopt ideas that work well for wormworldsaga.com (I really like that cover flow...).

Dupuis is on the children books fair in Montreuil now and is handing out the first info material about the upcoming book edition. I wish them a good time and hope that the Wormworld Saga has a great reception over there. I'm really looking forward to developing the French branch of the Wormworld Saga with the great team from Dupuis. Many thanks to Louis-Antoine, Laetitia, Mathias and all the other people involved.

And since wormworldsaga.fr has already revelead the covers of the first two French books I can share the cover illustration of book 1 with you! It's a custom version of one of the final panels of Chapter 3 and I really like how it turned out.