Writing books and getting them onto the shelves of bookstores, libraries and Amazon warehouses was a big milestone for me a few years ago. But up until now, my books were only available in English. At long last I now have a copy of my book that I can’t read. I can barely even pronounce the title. And that makes me pathetically happy.

A few months ago, my friend Darko Buldioski asked me if I fancied having my books translated into Macedonian. So without even waiting for him to finish his sentence, I enthusiastically screamed the word ‘yes’ at his bewildered face. So he immediately introduced me to the team at Ars Lamina. On our first call, we agreed that we’d translate two of my books, which made it doubly exciting.

The first of those – a translation of A User Guide to the Creative Mind – has just been released. In Macedonian it’s called ‘Упатство за употреба на креативниот ум’. (If your cyrillic is a bit rusty, you’d pronounce that something like ‘Oopatsvo za oopotreba na creativenyot oom’.)

Here’s a picture of the book looking wonderful in a book store. 

The team really pulled out the stops when I went to Skopje for the launch.

It started early in the morning with me being whisked to the national broadcaster to appear on the breakfast show. In the UK I’m used to being interviewed on TV and radio for 3 minutes, if I’m lucky. Not so in Macedonia. They gave me a full half hour of the show. Here it is, if your Macedonian is good enough to understand the simultaneous translation.

After the show, I was immediately rushed away to Darko’s fantastic AllWeb conference at Skopje’s Opera House. I joined him onstage to talk about the book before he announced to the attendees that every single one of them was getting a free copy.

This is the two of us chatting onstage (while I’m clearly also promoting How To Get To Great Ideas – cheeky bugger!)

When the conference was over, we all headed to the best bookshop in Skopje – Literatura MK – for a good old book launch. There was free booze, a DJ and a little bit of blathering in front of a wall of my books. It looked a bit like this:

It was a pretty amazing couple of days. I only wish my other book launches in the UK had been this good.

Ars Lamina is going to be releasing another of my books in the next few months. And they’ll be launching it before it comes out in English. If it ever comes out in English at all. More news on that one soon.