After only a few months, The Melting has sold 30,000 copies in Belgium. About a young woman who returns to her childhood village to take revenge on its inhabitants, the novel was hatched at a literary summer camp in Flanders. Its publisher thinks it has taken off thanks to strong reviews and a crowdfunding promotion.
Book title: The Melting (published in Flemish as Het smelt)
First published: January 16
Format: It was released in two paperback editions--a luxury edition sold through a crowdfunding campaign, and a bookshop one.
Author: Lize Spit was born in a small village in Flanders, in the late 1980s. When she was 18, she moved to Brussels, where she still lives. In 2014 she attended the Das Mag Summer Camp, which pairs young writers with veteran ones, and her writing caught the eye of Das Mag's publisher.
Acquiring Editor: Daniël van der Meer, founder and publisher of Das Mag, along with Toine Donk, who is also a publisher at Das Mag. Van der Meer launched Das Mag as a literary magazine in 2011. Since then, he has expanded the company to include bookclubs, the summer writing camp and, as of November, a publishing house.
How It’s Done: The book's sales, according to Van der Meer, are coming from its particularly strong performance in Flanders; he estimated that more than 80 percent of the book's sales have been made in the region, which has 6 million inhabitants. The Melting has been on the bestseller list in Flanders for five weeks, and there is strong interest in film rights. Translation rights have been sold in Denmark (to Rosinante), Spain (Planeta), and Norway (Cappelen Damm).
Why It’s Working: The Melting, which is the second book Das Mag has published, was a surprise hit for van der Meer. It was helped, in part, by a crowdfunding promotion that helped launch the publishing house. In November, van der Meer unveiled a campaign to raise €190,000 to help fund his new book publishing venture. As part of that campaign, van der Meer sold the first three books from the house, one of which was The Melting. The novel also benefited from strong reviews. On the day of its release, it received a three-page, five-star review in De Standaard, Flanders's biggest newspaper. Finally, for van der Meer, Spit represents something Flanders has been craving for some time: a local literary star. "For the last ten years, most new writers have come from The Netherlands," he said. "Flanders needed a young star, so they embraced Lize as if she were their own daughter."
