Why Terry Pratchett Dumped His German Publisher

By all accounts, the author best known for his Diskworld series was not particularly difficult to work with from a publisher perspective, so when he dropped his German publisher, Hayne, for another.

There was in issue with the accuracy of the translations of the German version.

Perhaps, "Issues with translation," is not a strong enough term.

What Pratchett objected to was that his publisher was splicing advertisements for Maggi soup into the text.

No, we are not talking about something on the back cover, or something on the inside back cover, nor was it in the frontispiece.

It was placed in the body of the book, inline with the text:

Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne for a dozen books to raising sales. I remember reading it in the Jahrbuch der Science Fiction and Fantasy 1994 (Annual of Science Fiction and Fantasy): It stated in a rather laconic tone that his books would now be published by Goldmann instead of Heyne. The brisk tone of the notice (where most others would have had a small quip with amazing insider info on different deals) might have been connected with the fact that the editor of the Jahrbuch was also the chief editor of Heyne, and he was reporting about himself losing a bestselling author.

The reason for the change was… well… the Heyne publishing house put in a soup advert in one of his books without asking, and would not promise to not do it again. As Pterry said himself:

There were a number of reasons for switching to Goldmann, but a deeply personal one for me was the way Heyne (in Sourcery, I think, although it may have been in other books) inserted a soup advert in the text … a few black lines and then something like ‘Around about now our heroes must be pretty hungry and what better than a nourishing bowl’… etc, etc. My editor was pretty sick about it, but the company wouldn’t promise not to do it again, so that made it very easy to leave them. They did it to Iain Banks, too, and apparently at a con he tore out the offending page and ate it. Without croutons.

Apart from the obvious question for Mr. Banks, does publisher rat-fuckery go with a red or a white wine, this appears to be to be a very good reason to fire your publisher ……… Out of a cannon ……… And into the sun.

An ad for cuppa soup?  Really.