Ways to self-publish your writing or translations

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! I hope you’re all doing well, and here’s what’s up with T4T this week. 

Upcoming classes 

• On Wednesday, May 21, I’m teaching a two-hour master class on Translating official documents from French to English. We’ll discuss the translation technique and the business aspects of this topic; registration is $75 and includes the recording
• From June 2-27, I’ll be running my four-week, self-paced class, Direct client marketing launch pad. This class combines self-paced video lessons, weekly assignments, and question and answer sessions that you can attend live or watch the recording. Registration is $250 ($30 discount for members of the American Translators Association) and you have access to the course materials for six months.

This week’s topic: Ways to self-publish your writing or translations 

By definition, translators like to write. Lots of interpreters also like to write! And perhaps you’d like to get that writing out into the world, without going through the traditional publishing process. Maybe you’d like to publish a glossary, or a business how-to book, or something about your specialization? Let’s take a look at some ways of doing that; I’m basing this on my experience self-publishing a bunch of books and other materials, using all of the channels that I’ll describe here. 

I honestly think translators and interpreters should publish more books; maybe you could…:

• Publish glossaries for your specializations
• Publish a literary translation: find a book in the public domain on Project Gutenberg, translate it, and self-publish it! 
• Publish manuals to software that you use 
• Publish marketing plans and business strategies that have worked for you 

In order to do this, you need to:

1. Write the book, probably in either Word, Google Docs, or Scrivener 
2. Design the interior
3. Design the cover
4. Publish it
5. Market it 

My favorite general resources 

My two favorite resources on self-publishing in general are:

• Joanna Penn’s website The Creative Penn. Joanna Penn is herself a thriller author, but taught herself how to format and publish her own books. She talks about both the craft and the process of writing, and I find her stuff really helpful. Her Tools page contains all of the resources (software and people) that she uses for her own books. 
• Dave Chesson’s website Kindlepreneur. Admittedly geared toward Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing option, this website has tons of resources on every stage of the self-publishing process: how to write and edit your manuscript, design the interior, design the cover, it’s all there! 

First: The minimum viable product option

These days, it’s completely possible to self-publish a book that is indistinguishable from a traditionally published book. More on that later. But that option takes time, and money, and may cause you to overthink it or get bogged down in the details (not that any of us ever do that…). If so, consider the MVP (minimum viable product) option:

• Write or translate the thing that you want to write or translate; format it nicely enough that it looks decent and people will want to read it. Maybe hire a graphic designer to make some sort of cover for you. 
• Make it into a PDF
• Sell it as an instant download, using a service like E-junkie. There are lots of other services like this, I just use and like E-junkie, and it’s inexpensive. 

There; you’re done! I honestly think this is an underrated option; just get the thing out there! I’ve used this option for a couple of my e-books and I’ve been very happy with it. I’ve since upgraded to a Woo Commerce store that allows me to sell digital files directly from my website, but I’m still a fan of this MVP approach! 

Pluses: It’s easy and inexpensive, and allows you to focus on the content, rather than the publishing process. 
Minuses: It doesn’t look like a “real book,” and you have to figure out how and where to market it, because it’s not on any distribution platforms. 

Next up: An entry-level self-publishing option like Kindle Direct 

If we’re ranking these options like Gold, Silver, Bronze, this would be the Silver option. You can make a real book with no up-front cost, by publishing on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which (despite the name) publishes print and e-books. This is what I did for my book Finding and Marketing to Translation Agencies. In my case, I hired my own cover designer and interior designer so I did have an up-front cost, but KDP itself costs nothing, and you can upload a Word file and KDP will convert it into a publishable format for you. 

Pluses: When they say “simple,” they’re not kidding. I’ve talked to a couple of self-published authors who went from “idea stage” to published book in, like, a month. KDP is a way to get a “real book” out into the world at a low cost. 
Minuses: There’s a lot of junk published by KDP, and your book may be thrown into that mix. If you use KDP’s built-in book conversion options (make a Word file into a book), it shows. And I find the quality of their print books to be not great. 

I think that most independent authors have a love/hate relationship with Amazon. It’s, well, Amazon, *and* it’s the way most books are sold. My self-published books are available on almost any channel you can think of, from my own website to independent bookstores, and the Amazon sales crush every other channel. So it’s up to you: be on Amazon or don’t be on Amazon, but if you’re going to go the non-Amazon route, you need a very robust plan on how to market your book outside your circle of friends and family. Personally, I find the quality of KDP’s print books to be subpar if you’re a book snob; that will bother some people, and not others. 

Another option with no up-front cost is Ingram Spark, but it’s less full-featured than KDP. KDP requires basically no self-publishing skills if you’re OK with a book that looks like a Word document made into a book, but for Ingram Spark you’ll need to either hire an interior designer and a cover designer, or use a resource like Joanna Penn’s website to learn to do that yourself. Yet another possibility is a service like Ebook Launch (thanks to JT Hine for this recommendation!) that offers a menu of book design, editing, and formatting services. I’m actually thinking about using them for a compilation of my blog posts; you send them a Word document and they guarantee that the e-book file will be accepted by all of the major distributors, and they offer template-based book covers for as little as $99. 

This “Silver” option is what I did for the first three editions of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator. The editing, interior design, and cover design were done by some combination of myself, my husband, and freelance designers, and I used Lulu (kind of the O.G. print-on-demand service) to publish and distribute the books. And hey, I managed to sell 15,000 books that way, so it’s a good option; it just requires a lot of coordination between the various stages of the publishing process. 

Gold: Hire a publishing service to do all of this for you 

My resolution for this year was/is to start publishing at least one book a year until I run out of ideas (will that be in 2026 or 2050…who knows?). Self-publishing has changed a lot since my last book, so I did some research on the “modern” options, which yielded an entirely new paradigm: the hybrid publisher. I’ve always maintained that my books would be a complete non-starter for a traditional publisher. They’re too niche, they need a while to gain traction in the market, and very few people walk into a brick and mortar bookstore in search of a book about how to become a translator. And yet, the Silver option is still a lot of work; that, plus the retirement of my longtime book designer pushed me to consider other ways of doing this. 

While reading Austin Church’s book Free Money, I was impressed with the quality (of the writing and the actual book) and noticed the Tilt Publishing imprint on the cover. Hmmm. What could this be? It turns out that Tilt is the hybrid publishing arm of my old friend Lulu, and there are other hybrid publishers out there as well. Hybrid publishing is basically a “general contractor” approach to self-publishing: the hybrid publisher does all of the legwork for you, in return for a lump sum fee, while you keep all the royalties from the book.

In Tilt’s case, they had my book proofread (I was happy with the quality), got the ISBN, had the cover designed, did the interior layout, formatted the e-book, set the book up for global distribution, and set up print-on-demand on Lulu so that I can order my own discounted copies. I paid $3,700 for this, and it looks like this has now increased to $4,500. Whether this is a good investment really depends on your goals and your book’s sales potential. If you’re envisioning a few hundred sales to family and friends, I’d probably go a different route. Since I’ve already earned close to six figures from book sales, this was an appealing way to go, and it saved me a lot of time and hassle; I’m already considering using them for the 20th anniversary edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator. 

I hope these tips are helpful if you have a book lurking inside you!

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