R.L. Stine Visits Chinese Fans
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By Sally Lodge -- Publishers Weekly, 5/28/2009
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Stine signs books for fans in Xi'an. |
Zhu Xiaohui, copyright manager at Jieli, says that the company issued the rare invitation to give Stine the chance “to meet his millions of little Chinese fans. The author and his Goosebumps books are so very popular among Chinese children that we thought it was time to invite him here.”
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Stine at the Forbidden City in Beijing. |
The venues, like the crowds, were vast. “Everything was enormous,” says Stine. “In Beijing we went to a bookstore the size of a Wal-Mart that was entirely filled with people—reading and buying books. And in Shanghai I had an autographing at a bookstore that had seven stories—all packed with books and people.” In the industrial city of Ji’nan, Stine spoke at what he calls “China’s version of BEA, a huge gathering of 22,000 people in publishing.”
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Bookstore signage featuring Stine. |
Jieli, which Stine says will begin publishing his Goosebumps HorrorLand series in July, uses the same cover art as Scholastic’s American editions, but translates the titles as well as Stine’s surname. “Looking at the writing on the covers,” he says, “the only thing I recognized was the ‘R.L.’ They made up a Chinese last name for me, and since there every name has at least two levels of meaning, they decided to call me something that was a bit scary. It’s ‘Kong Bu’—that’s Bu as in boo.”
