Herman Jonas: Often his rights are represented by an agent or a publisher. This person will determine with which foreign publisher to do business. The company that offers most money, or that will be prepared to share in the costs of a new project, will be chosen. It's a liberated gang, for example, one can never be certain of the rights of an entire series. If another publisher offers more, you've lost the series.
Concerning Andreas, his books are published in France mostly by Delcourt. Le Lombard also does some strips, but it keeps the translations into its own hand. At a certain moment we heard that Delcourt wanted to publish Le triangle rouge. Accordingly we have expressed our interest for a Dutch translation. This was short-wired then fairly quickly with Delcourt. We took part of the total printing costs for our account. The Dutch version thus was printed at the same time as the French version - this cuts printing costs - and published simultaneously too.

Herman Jonas: No, publishers don't correspond a lot with each other. There is no consulting-culture, there is a kind of competition, an aversion to telling a colleague what you are working on. Actually this is not good. There should be more communication in the strips publishing world, for example to determine if we as publishers are not saturating the market. Or that we inform each other if one of us attracts a foreign author that is also enlisted with another publisher. But I fear that publishers are to much individualists to have a structural contact with each other.

Mat Schifferstein (Sherpa): Sherpa only publishes a handful of books each year, though there are enough other books in which we are interested. It's just that we simply do not have the money for it, or another strips publisher hijacks the title from under our noses. Our negotiating position with Delcourt for example is not so strong, because we are less commercially oriented than most other publishers. A high impression (site-editor: number of published copies) is difficult for us, let alone that we can pour a lot of money in a cooperative relationship. Thus it can happen that a story like Le triangle rouge ends up with Arboris.
That Le retour de Cromwell Stone has been published by Sherpa had to with the fact that we had done the first part as well. And it is a black-and-white strip. Many publishers judge the printing of it to be too costly in comparison to the profits. That's how we could come to an agreement with Delcourt. Only, it took nine months, after the publication of the French version, before we had round up everything with Delcourt. Then we published Le retour de Cromwell Stone as fast as possible, and that coincided unexpectedly with the publication of Le triangle rouge.

Yves Sente: The main cause is that strip draftsmen are currently working not for one fixed, but several publishers. We also loose the overview regularly. Added to this, I use are yearplanning in which every month a fixed number of books is to appear, according to a certain distribution. For example one leader - a new album from a well-known series - and two new first albums of a brand new series. This is enough work for me and I can't also take into account the plans of my colleagues.