Meanwhile Fair Game was picked up by Harlequin Mondari, the largest romance publisher in Italy as their first foray into male-male fiction. One of my German publishers (I have two) is about to pitch A Dangerous Thing to their acquisitions committee -- which sounds like the German edition of Fatal Shadows must be doing reasonably well. My other Italian publisher (I guess I have two of those as well?) sent the cover art for Out of the Blue. And I'm about to list the Spanish edition of A Dangerous Thing on Amazon.
Se Habla Espanol! Only we don't. And therein lies the rub.
There’s a lot going on with translations right now -- translation and audio are suddenly hotly contested rights in contract negotiations -- more because of where the book market is heading (a global direction) than where it is right at the moment. We can all see the trend. It's a small world after all.
Not all of my forays into translation have been successful. Dutch was a disaster. And I've sold less than ten copies of either of my Finnish translations. And zero of my sole Portuguese translation. Spanish has not been a great success, but then again the free Spanish edition of The French Have a Word for it had hundreds of downloads. So.
As I look at the results...the Finnish translations did not have publisher support behind them and I do think that makes a difference. Then again, the Dutch translations were through a publisher but frankly, they might as well have gone through a pirate site. The Portuguese translation was through a new company called Babelcube. It operates on a business model similar to that of ACX (the Amazon company that produces DIY audio books). You don't pay for the translation up front, you split the profits on a sliding scale with the translator and Babelcube. Bablecube lists the work in a number of venues -- some of which the author could access but some which the author probably couldn't (at least without a fair bit of research and effort).
It's an ingenious idea, but there are inherent difficulties: no quality control, no production oversight, and no real promotional or marketing support.
It is enormously exciting to reach new readers -- is there a greater test of the universality of a story than putting it into another language and seeing how it holds up? But there is also the problem of not being able to converse with these readers, not knowing how or where to market to them. I don't speak Japanese, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, German, French (okay, a little tiny bit of French), Portuguese or Dutch. I've received wonderful support from Italian bloggers and from Japanese writers and readers. Spanish readers seem very enthusiastic, so we'll see what happens when this next book
comes out.
One disconcerting thing is every single translation -- whether through a huge publisher or a hired freelancer at some point gets slammed for the quality of the translation. I'm not exaggerating. Can translation be subjective? I don't know.
I know that translators are generally underpaid and underappreciated.
I also know that so far translations have not been enormously lucrative for me. Some of them are more lucrative than I expected, but I am not getting rich off any of them. And in some cases, the translations have not even paid for the cover art and formatting. But then I am not Dan Brown or Nora Roberts and I'm not expecting those kinds of results. I'm basically just laying the groundwork for the future global book market. I noticed years ago I was getting letters from readers all around the world, and that's the beauty of the digital age. Now these readers can enjoy my work in their native language. Or maybe more to the point, recommend the books to their friends and family who do not read English?
Anyway, what do you think? If English is not your first language, how important is it to you to read the books in your first language? If English is not your first language, how did you discover my work? Or the male-male genre for that matter?
Not all of my forays into translation have been successful. Dutch was a disaster. And I've sold less than ten copies of either of my Finnish translations. And zero of my sole Portuguese translation. Spanish has not been a great success, but then again the free Spanish edition of The French Have a Word for it had hundreds of downloads. So.
As I look at the results...the Finnish translations did not have publisher support behind them and I do think that makes a difference. Then again, the Dutch translations were through a publisher but frankly, they might as well have gone through a pirate site. The Portuguese translation was through a new company called Babelcube. It operates on a business model similar to that of ACX (the Amazon company that produces DIY audio books). You don't pay for the translation up front, you split the profits on a sliding scale with the translator and Babelcube. Bablecube lists the work in a number of venues -- some of which the author could access but some which the author probably couldn't (at least without a fair bit of research and effort).It's an ingenious idea, but there are inherent difficulties: no quality control, no production oversight, and no real promotional or marketing support.It is enormously exciting to reach new readers -- is there a greater test of the universality of a story than putting it into another language and seeing how it holds up? But there is also the problem of not being able to converse with these readers, not knowing how or where to market to them. I don't speak Japanese, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, German, French (okay, a little tiny bit of French), Portuguese or Dutch. I've received wonderful support from Italian bloggers and from Japanese writers and readers. Spanish readers seem very enthusiastic, so we'll see what happens when this next book
comes out.
One disconcerting thing is every single translation -- whether through a huge publisher or a hired freelancer at some point gets slammed for the quality of the translation. I'm not exaggerating. Can translation be subjective? I don't know.
I know that translators are generally underpaid and underappreciated.
I also know that so far translations have not been enormously lucrative for me. Some of them are more lucrative than I expected, but I am not getting rich off any of them. And in some cases, the translations have not even paid for the cover art and formatting. But then I am not Dan Brown or Nora Roberts and I'm not expecting those kinds of results. I'm basically just laying the groundwork for the future global book market. I noticed years ago I was getting letters from readers all around the world, and that's the beauty of the digital age. Now these readers can enjoy my work in their native language. Or maybe more to the point, recommend the books to their friends and family who do not read English?Anyway, what do you think? If English is not your first language, how important is it to you to read the books in your first language? If English is not your first language, how did you discover my work? Or the male-male genre for that matter?
