The internationalisation of a manuscript : finding the potent generic

While publication on the Internet is often a truly global enterprise involving writers, readers and editors from all over the world, print publishing is still a significantly locale-specific venture. This was brought home to us when we were involved in the final editing of our book, The Girl's Guide to Work and Life: How to Create the Life You Want (Brien & Brady 2004). This paper addresses issues arising from working through the process of turning a manuscript originally written for an Australian readership into one suitable for international sales and distribution - a process which we soon discovered entailed more than looking at spelling or taking out all the slang. While the very idea of this process is often perceived as culturally demeaning, we found it could be turned around to make a positive contribution to the de-colonisation of contemporary Australian writing and publishing. The first book in this series, The Girl's Guide to Real Estate: How to Enjoy Investing in Property (Brady & Brien 2002), attracted solid sales in Australia and, as a consequence, has been backlisted, but there was little interest in overseas sales or producing a new overseas edition. This was initially disappointing, as we were hoping to attract those export dollars but, in hindsight, the lack of overseas interest in the title should have been obvious to us. The buying and selling of real estate is a locale-specific venture and our book was very Australian in content - for instance, there are different legal/contract conditions and processes in buying real estate in the various Australian states, let alone in various countries. These differences meant that much of the content of the book was specific to Australia. Examples of this were the lists of the Land Titles Offices, Consumer Protection Organisations and Real Estate Institutes in the various Australian States that we included throughout the text. In short, we wrote that book without any understanding of what it means, in actual terms, to produce a text for the international, as well as a national, marketplace.