Cornelia Funke launches publishing company after editorial disagreements

German author and illustrator Cornelia Funke, best known for her children’s fantasy series ‘Inkheart’ and ‘Mirrorworld’, has started her own publishing company in response to editorial disagreements with her US and UK publishers, reports Publishers Weekly and the Bookseller. Funke, who is published by Little, Brown in the US and Chicken House in the UK, said her editors asked her to move the first chapter of The Golden Yarn, the third book in the Mirrorworld series, to a different place in the book as the birth scene was ‘a little drastic for our audience’. She will now publish The Golden Yarn through her new publishing company Breathing Books in partnership with US multimedia storytelling company Mirada Studios. ‘From the very beginning, I had the problem of Little, Brown placing the Mirrorworld series in the 9–12 age group when I had told them it was age 14 and up,’ said Funke. ‘The last seven years were bitter at times because of that argument.’ Little, Brown and Chicken House have relinquished the rights to earlier books in the ‘Mirrorworld’ series.

Category: International news