Elsewhere

Foreign-Language Editions and the Markets Nobody Mentions

Translation used to cost more than most indie books earn. It doesn't anymore, which reopens a question almost nobody has reopened.

Elsewhere is a book in the Indie Author Guide Line: short, source-checked guides for independent authors who have finished writing and now have to be found. This book covers which foreign markets are large enough to matter and which are structurally closed, and what happens when you hand a manuscript to a machine translator and a native reader instead.

Every cost figure here is dated and stated plainly to have moved recently, because they will move again.

What's inside:

• Which foreign-language markets are actually large enough to matter for an indie author
• What a machine translation genuinely produces, versus what it claims to produce
• The cost of getting a translation wrong in a market where you cannot read your own reviews
• What metadata a translated edition needs that an English edition doesn't
• The honest verdict on which genres and categories travel well across languages
• How to weigh the current cost of translation against likely return

This is not a promise that translation will open a new income stream. What it will do is give you an honest, current read on which markets are worth the cost, and which aren't yet.

From the Indie Author Guide Line, from Novel Concepts Publishing.