'Chronicles of a Harry Potter Fan' finally available in English!

I have some amazing news! 'Chronicles of a Harry Potter Fan' by Thomas Sailer, a great book about his experiences in running the 'Knight' s Bus' and in bringing together numerous of Harry Potter fans! I've read excerpts of the book and it sounds amazing! Here's the blurb:

For many years, Thomas Sailer was active in the virtual Harry Potter fandom: After he had developed a huge fancy for the story in autumn 2004, he started to help out on the renowned fan portal ‘Emma Watson Empire’ the next spring; and it did not take long until he advanced to the site’s representative.

Two years later, he founded the ‘Knight Bus’, a widescale directory for Harry Potter websites. And finally, he even tried to mobilise fans from all countries by means of an organisation.
During his years as an active member of the fan community, he has accomplished quite a lot and made contacts to fans and website owners from all over the world. However, what he has basically intended with his activity, did not happen to become real.
In this book, he talks about his work in the international fandom, his motives and how the Harry Potter story has influenced his life.

When first released in November 2012, the original German version of the book caused a stir within the fan community: Although it has never been on a bestseller-list, there appeared to be several reports about Thomas Sailer’s story on many fan based websites from all around the world.

Hop on over to Amazon or his website for more details!

In the excerpt below he tells us of how Slovenian Harry Potter fans managed to save Harry Potter from terrible translations! With some help from Mr. Sailer of course!

'Among other things, I might have been inspired by an explosive case of fan-activism in Slovenia: In May 2007, soon after I founded the Knight Bus, I received an e-mail from the admin of a fan based website called ‘Harry Potter Slovenija’. He asked me to help point out a mischief in Slovenia: Epta, the publisher that owned the marketing rights for the Slovenian translation of the Harry Potter books, no longer charged Jakob Kenda, who was liked among the Slovenian readers, with the translation of the sixth book, but Branko Gradišnik instead. He freely admitted that he had never read the five previous books at all; and consequently, his translation was seen as unacceptable according to the Slovenian fan site admin. Now, the Slovenian fans feared that the translation of the seventh and final book would not match their expectations as well.
I was happy to help the Slovenian back then; and I did not just publish a news entry concerning this matter on the Knight Bus, both in German as well as in English, but helped to make other fan based websites aware of this issue as well. 

And indeed, the Slovenians were successful with their protest: The affair caused some attention within the fan community and got through to Joanne K. Rowling. As a matter of fact, Epta lost the publication rights for the Slovenian Harry Potter translation; they were passed over to Mladinska knjiga, a much bigger Slovenian publisher. So the seventh Harry Potter novel was translated into Slovenian by Jakob Kenda again. 

I thoroughly liked how the Slovenian fans handled their problem: A single fan would not have been able to cause this change. Even a nationwide known fan website would not have managed that single-handedly. But the public circularisation within the fan community and the viral spread of the lore of this campaign finally made a difference. And at that time, I had been waiting for a very long time to be able to make an actual difference!'

The power we fans have is remarkable sometimes! Hope you enjoyed it!