Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Self-publishing


Corinne McKay

Options for self-publishing your own work

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! Registration for our April master class, Aiming for six figures as a freelancer (yes, even in the age of AI and MT!) is open! Registration ($75) includes the recording, and we’ll spend two hours looking at how to analyze your current work flow, set goals for a higher income, use green/yellow/red rate zones to guide your decisions, and what all of this means in the age of AI and MT. Come join us!

Now, on to today’s topic; a practical one! How to self-publish your own stuff. I say “stuff” because by that, I mean:

  • A book you want to write
  • A book you want to translate (with proper rights/permissions)
  • A video you want to make and sell
  • A business resource that you want to publish and distribute (How I found my first direct client, How I passed the court interpreter certification exam, etc.)

I’ve been self-publishing for a long time (the first edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator came out in 2006, when print-on-demand was a cutting-edge technology). But the options these days have increased exponentially, and I’ve recently attended a couple of webinars and listened to a bunch of podcasts to update my own knowledge of the topic for a few projects I have in the pipeline.

I honestly wonder why more translators and interpreters don’t self-publish their own work. For starters, just about any frustrated literary translator can find a source of books in the public domain and start translating one of them today. All of us have a lot of hard-won knowledge that other people would happily pay money to read about or watch. And it’s really not that hard or expensive to self-publish, at least at the entry level. Here are some ideas to get you started:

  • Bronze level: Use a digital download service like E-junkie to sell books/manuals in a simple format (Canva even has simple PDF e-book templates) like PDF e-books, or video files. I use E-junkie but this is not an affiliate deal, I just really like them, and the service isn’t expensive. With the $10/month plan, you can sell 40 digital products (PDF files, videos, really whatever you want) and you get up to 2 GB of storage space. You create “Buy Now” buttons for your website and then the person gets an instant download from E-junkie, and I’ve never had someone contact me to say that the download failed. This could be a great option if you just want to get your work out there in a simple, accessible way.
  • Silver level: When I started self-publishing, really all of the available services involved an up-front cost and you had to send them formatted files; like your cover file had to be the exact number of pixels that they needed, and the interior files needed to be formatted to their specifications. It’s still true that if you want a really professional-looking book, someone (you or a hired professional) has to do this. I would argue that high-end self-published books are now indistinguishable from traditionally published books, which is pretty amazing. But if you just want a “minimum viable product” book, there are now options that have no up-front cost, the primary one being Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (kind of a misleading name, because they also do print books, not just electronic). Amazon’s own resources are actually kind of confusing unless you already understand what KDP is and how it works, so I would recommend reading this article on the website Self-Publishing School before you dive in. KDP even has a Cover Creator tool, and there are websites where you can get a (pretty generic-looking but decent) book cover for as little as $100. Of course there are downsides to this zero-barrier-to-entry model, specifically that Amazon takes a large cut of what you earn. I personally would not go the Silver route, if you’re looking for a truly professional-looking book, but it’s an option if you have a tight budget and just want to start selling.
  • Gold level: At this level, you’re talking about something that will hopefully be on par with a traditionally published book. Thus, you want professionals to design and format the cover and the interior (some book designers do both, some only do one or the other), and you want to sell the book through a distribution service where they’re not getting a huge cut of your royalties and you’re not locked in to selling only through them. For example, you can hire your own designers, then use a service like BookBaby (again, I use them but this is not an affiliate deal) that will distribute your print and electronic books on every major sales platform, and you pay an up-front fee, but you get to keep all of the royalties. This is what I did with the third edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, and it cost me about $3,000 (total) for interior formatting and cover design, and I paid BookBaby about $600 for a distribution package (for print and electronic versions) where I get to keep all of the royalties.  Platforms like SelfPublishing.com will even, for a fee (in this case, $7,000) walk you through the entire process, from writing your book, to editing it, to formatting it, to designing the cover, to selling it.

A couple of other resources: I recently attended a self-publishing webinar by the Editorial Freelancers’ Association, and it was great! And if you’re an extreme DIY-er or you have a lot of time on your hands and you’d like to learn how to do all of this yourself (it’s possible), you want to follow Joanna Penn, a fiction author who learned to do all of her own self-publishing work, and now teaches other people how to do it!

It’s important to think about what you want out of the self-publishing process. In the 18 (!!) years since I started self-publishing, I’ve made over $90,000 in book royalties. I’m not going to retire from translation and interpreting and live off that money, but it’s paid for some nice family vacations! I’m actually really glad that I did not go the “quick and dirty” route with my flagship books, and that I invested the time and money to make them look professional. And, I’m glad that quick and dirty options exist, for when you just want to create something and get it out there!

I hope that these tips are helpful if you have some of your own self-publishing ambitions!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!


Corinne McKay

Expanding your book sales beyond your Facebook friends

Publishing has been on my mind a lot lately, as I gear up to get my next book out the door and start writing another one. Let’s say that you too have a book lurking inside your head, or better yet, a book lurking on your hard drive and waiting to see the light of day. These days, publishing the book is the easy part, if you do it yourself. Using the services of BookBaby, BookBrewer, Lulu and/or CreateSpace, I’ve seen authors go from idea to published book in under two months. But after that “Christmas morning” moment when you open the box or the PDF with the proof copy of your self-published book in it, you’re up against some tough odds. Various articles (such as this one and this one) note the similarity between the average number of copies that a self-published book sells (about 150) and the number of Facebook friends that the average person has (about 190). So, let’s look at some potential strategies for expanding your book sales beyond your Facebook friends. Many of these apply to self-published and traditionally-published authors!

You need a niche or a very targeted readership. My first book, How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, has sold about 5,000 copies. Hopefully it’s a good book, but it also fills a very targeted niche (people who want to become translators; translators who want to improve their businesses) and appeals to a very specific kind of person. And no niche is too small; one of Lulu’s current bestsellers is about the 1940 census in Mendocino, California. Just make sure that you can complete the sentence, “The kind of person who would buy my book is…”

You need a platform. This wisdom comes from my good friend and social media guru Beth Hayden. At first, I didn’t want to hear it. I just wanted to be a word artist and forget the marketing stuff. But 5,000 books later, Beth was right. You cannot just put your book up for sale and expect that people will find it and buy it. “A platform” can take many forms: maybe everyone in your industry knows you from your previous writing (like Chris Durban, author of The Prosperous Translator). Maybe you create a whole new website, blog and seminars that complement your book (like Judy and Dagmar Jenner did for The Entrepreneurial Linguist). Maybe you go on a book tour and do tons of interviews in all kinds of media (like Nataly Kelly did for Found in Translation). But you cannot just throw your book at the Internet and hope that it sticks.

Your book has to actually be good. This might seem obvious, but it isn’t. Stereotypes of self-published books exist for a reason: lots of them read like a stream of consciousness that the author banged out at 3 in the morning, saved as a PDF and printed. Many seem not to have even been spell-checked before printing. It takes time, money or both to create a professional-looking book.

You have to get good, unbiased reviews of your book. Your mom and your Facebook friends are guaranteed to love your book, and that’s how you’ll stall out at 150 sales, unless your mom buys them for all of her friends, and then maybe you’ll sell 200. I’m being a little harsh here, but part of what will sell your book is the opinion of people who matter, or people who rave about you in an unbiased way. There’s a big difference between your college roommate writing an Amazon review that says “This book is awesome and everyone should read it” and someone you don’t know writing “I was about to call an attorney to help incorporate my freelance business. This book showed me exactly the steps to follow, in a way that I could understand. Right there, I saved over $1,000.”

Once the book is out, you have to promote it. Send out review copies, do signings, blog blog blog, Tweet Tweet Tweet, package the book with an hour of your consulting time, ask your local bookstores to feature it, flog it to your college alumni magazines, and anything else you can think of. When you’ve exhausted your bank of ideas, read John Kremer’s 1,001 Ways to Market Your Books and steal some of his ideas. Think way outside the box, like this Brooklyn novelist who opened a “Novelade stand” and offered free cookies to anyone who bought her (published by Houghton Mifflin) novel.

You have to believe that you can do this. Here in Boulder, we’re all about “putting it out to the universe” and other techniques that may or may not work. But the older I get, the more I believe in the power of a mindset. The indie author wave (and by “indie” I mean both self-published and traditionally-published authors; basically anyone who isn’t Janet Evanovich or David Baldacci) isn’t just coming, it’s here. A couple of months ago, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reported that 27 of the top 100 Kindle books were self-published. Hugh Howey, author of the hugely successful self-published science fiction series Wool, reports that his Kindle Direct royalties often top six figures per month. My book certainly isn’t in that category, but the royalties (normally $400-$600 per month) have paid for some sweet vacations.

So, now that you feel inspired, get it done! 2013 could be your year to break beyond the publishing averages; if you have other tips for authors, please add them in the comments!


Corinne McKay

Self-publishing with Lulu

Thanks to Andrew Bell for suggesting this post idea!

Years ago, becoming a published author was a really big deal; one had to write up a book proposal, find an agent, shop the book around to various publishing houses and hope that one of them would sign on to publish the book. In the traditional publishing model, the author also relinquishes a good deal of control over the manuscript, may be expected to do most of his/her own marketing and may receive a royalty in the range of 5-10% of the cover price for each book sold (this information is based on anecdotal evidence from people I know who have worked with traditional publishers). I hate to look at the glass half empty, but to me, earning $1-$2 per copy of a $20 book is a tough way to make a living.

Recently, the self-publishing industry has really been revolutionized by the advent of high-quality Print on demand (POD) services. POD, previously derided as one cut above a photocopied manuscript, is now in widespread use. As its name suggests, POD books are printed one at a time when someone orders a copy; thus there’s no inventory, no waste, no storage issues, etc. Many traditional publishers, especially academic publishers, are now using POD to keep their backlist of books “in print” pretty much indefinitely. POD books have also come a long way in terms of quality and appearance; I’ve even had people comment that the paper and printing in my book look superior to what some traditional publishers produce. POD also offers authors the option to update their manuscripts at any time and start distributing the new edition immediately since there is no backlog of books that have to be sold or destroyed.

I used the POD service Lulu to publish my book
How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator in 2006, and I’ve been thrilled with the process (I don’t have any affiliate deal with Lulu, I just love them). The book has since sold over 2,800 copies and has risen to #59 on Lulu’s all-time bestseller list. I estimate that I’ve made about $15,000 in book royalties; all of this isn’t to brag, but to say that if I can do it, you can do it! POD royalties vary, but seem to fall in the range of 25-50% of the cover price depending on how expensive the book is.

I really wonder why more translators don’t self-publish using POD services. Translators love to write and translators consume a lot of information. Why aren’t people publishing subject-specific glossaries, or manuals to all of the software applications that we battle with on a daily basis, or their own literary translations (after securing copyright permission of course)?

Self-publishing on Lulu is easy, and getting easier all the time. You can have your book for sale only through Lulu (you can then order whatever quantities of the book you want and sell it yourself, or people can buy it off the Lulu website) or you can purchase an ISBN and have the book for sale through major retail outlets (Amazon, Barnes&Noble, by special order from bookstores, etc.). If your book is for sale only through Lulu, you pay nothing up front and Lulu takes a commission on each book that you sell; their “Published by You” service which includes an ISBN costs $99.95. You can also make an e-book or an audio CD of your book and Lulu will sell that too. In addition, Lulu offers a wide array of service levels, from DIY (the option I selected) to their “publishing packs” ($369-$1,369) which get you phone and e-mail support, a cover design, editorial support, formatting services, etc. In addition, you set the price of your book, so you determine how much royalty you earn off each copy. And unless you specifically want to handle the distribution and sales yourself, Lulu does it for you, then deposits the revenue in your PayPal account.

Basically, Lulu will publish anything that you can upload as a PDF or Word document; then you can pick whether you want your book to be hardcover, paperback, spiral bound, etc. If you want your book to be distributed through major retail channels, it must meet certain requirements (these are imposed by wholesale book distributors, not by Lulu). Lulu offers templates to help you meet these requirements, so in theory you could just write your book in Word or OpenOffice, upload it, and Lulu will create a suitable PDF of it. For my book, my husband served as the editor and designer, so he did the layout using a free program called LyX, which I think produces a book that looks much more professional (much more “like a traditional book”) than one that is generated from a Word or OpenOffice document.

If you’re interested in self-publishing on Lulu, the easiest first step is to browse their Publish section and check out the options. Then you can decide what you feel comfortable handling yourself and what you need to hire someone to do for you. I think that a nice cover design goes a long way toward making your book look professional; for my book, we were able to find an image from an illuminated manuscript that showed a Medieval translator and that happened to be in the public domain. Before you use a piece of artwork for your cover, make sure that you are in compliance with fair use and copyright law; some online stock art sites specifically require you to purchase an extended license if you want to use an image for a POD product.

Now, all that is left is to write your book! Feel free to post your book ideas in the comments, I would love to see what other people have in mind.