Episode 023 - Reaching New Readers through Translations with Emma Prince
April 21, 2020
Emma Prince shares her process and learnings from translating her historical romances into German--reader outreach that, with some upfront preparation, can earn an author another stream of income from an existing piece of content with minimal ongoing effort.
Emma Prince is the USA Today bestselling author of steamy, emotional, page-turning Scottish and medieval historical romances. Emma grew up in drizzly Seattle but traded her rain boots for sunglasses when she and her husband moved to the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada.
She is the author of the Sinclair Brothers Trilogy, a series of books set in medieval Scotland; the Viking Lore series, which delves into the rich history of the Viking conquests; and the Highland Bodyguards series, also set in medieval Scotland, which follows the adventures of an elite corps of King Robert the Bruce’s bodyguards--and the women who capture their hearts!
She is the author of the Sinclair Brothers Trilogy, a series of books set in medieval Scotland; the Viking Lore series, which delves into the rich history of the Viking conquests; and the Highland Bodyguards series, also set in medieval Scotland, which follows the adventures of an elite corps of King Robert the Bruce’s bodyguards--and the women who capture their hearts!
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Emma Prince. Emma, how are you doing?
[00:00:07] Emma: I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:09] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give the listeners a little bit of background on you ... Emma Prince is the USA Today bestselling author of steamy, emotional, page-turning Scottish and medieval historical romances.
[00:00:22] Emma grew up in drizzly Seattle but traded her rain boots for sunglasses when she and her husband moved to the Eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. She's the author of the Sinclair Brothers Trilogy, a series of books set in medieval Scotland; the Viking Lore Series, which delves into the rich history of the Viking conquests; and the Highland Bodyguard Series, also set in medieval Scotland, which follows the adventures of an elite core of King Robert the Bruce's bodyguards and the women who capture their hearts.
[00:00:50] I first became acquainted with Emma through Mark Dawson's Self-Publishing Podcast in an interview she did with James Blatch, and it was Episode 217, the title was " How to Profit from Your Backlist during Downtime." I'm going to provide a link in the show notes to that episode because it was a great episode. The Self Publishing Podcast is a great podcast that I can highly recommend, but in terms of profiting from your backlist during downtime, Emma, you were planning for a very specific downtime. Is that right
[00:00:07] Emma: I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:09] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give the listeners a little bit of background on you ... Emma Prince is the USA Today bestselling author of steamy, emotional, page-turning Scottish and medieval historical romances.
[00:00:22] Emma grew up in drizzly Seattle but traded her rain boots for sunglasses when she and her husband moved to the Eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. She's the author of the Sinclair Brothers Trilogy, a series of books set in medieval Scotland; the Viking Lore Series, which delves into the rich history of the Viking conquests; and the Highland Bodyguard Series, also set in medieval Scotland, which follows the adventures of an elite core of King Robert the Bruce's bodyguards and the women who capture their hearts.
[00:00:50] I first became acquainted with Emma through Mark Dawson's Self-Publishing Podcast in an interview she did with James Blatch, and it was Episode 217, the title was " How to Profit from Your Backlist during Downtime." I'm going to provide a link in the show notes to that episode because it was a great episode. The Self Publishing Podcast is a great podcast that I can highly recommend, but in terms of profiting from your backlist during downtime, Emma, you were planning for a very specific downtime. Is that right
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[00:01:22] Emma: Yeah. I had a very specific situation come up. I became pregnant and I knew that that would involve some downtime, either toward the end of my pregnancy, afterward, or both. It ended up in the case being both. And so it was kind of good because I could plan for it. I mean, I knew that I was pregnant, and I knew, okay, I've got a nine-month lead time until this baby comes and it's going to sort of disrupt my normal writing and publishing schedule. So knowing ahead of time, that was good. Being able to plan to have that downtime and put a few things in place, make arrangements to let my book business run itself for a few months. And now having gone through that, I really recognize the benefit of, even if you don't know that a downtime is coming up, having some sort of contingency plan or thinking through what are three things you might do if you weren't able to write for a little while for whatever reason. So now I'm proselytizing that message now.
[00:02:28] Matty: Yeah. Now is the time for it for sure. And what you talked about with James on the Self Publishing Formula Podcast is great if you're planning for a downtime, if you know something's coming up that's totally separate from your writing and publishing life or your marketing life. Or if you're planning for something that you don't know what's coming up but may come up. But it was also great advice for people who just want to be able to take their creative work and have it be doing something for them while they're working on something else. And something else might be having a baby or the something else might be working on the next book. It's really just a great example of creating multiple streams of income from one piece of work, making it work for you as hard as it can.
[00:03:10] One of the topics that really caught my attention, you and James covered a lot, which is why I recommend people listen to that podcast episode in addition to this one, was translations. And that's really what we want to be focusing on in our conversation today: reaching readers through translations.
[00:03:26] So to start out, can you describe what parameters you set when you were planning for your leave of absence for your pregnancy, and you were deciding what options you wanted to pursue, what was your criteria for which ones you pursued?
[00:03:41] Emma: So translations ended up being the central area that I focused on while I was taking this maternity leave because it fit the criteria perfectly for me. And that was something that I could just sort of throw money at and let it do its thing. I've actually set up my team of my translator and my proofer and arranged with my cover artists to change my covers before I got pregnant. And having that in place was really important because by the time I was doing my maternity leave, basically all I had to do was shoot back and forth a couple of emails, pay someone through Zelle or PayPal or TransferWise, and then hit publish through my KDP dash. That was the main thing I was looking at was I didn't want to have to learn anything new, because my brain was not functioning super well in the final months of the pregnancy and also a couple of months postpartum. I didn't want to have to have something that I had to daily monitor, like a Facebook ad or something like that, or even an Amazon ad.
[00:04:55] What I really wanted was to basically take those products that I had already made--a book--give it to someone else whose expertise was translating, throw money at them, and let them do their work on it.
[00:05:12] Translation is a really strange thing. The translator puts a ton of work into this thing, it creates this whole new object, this whole new product. On the other hand, it's based on the work you've already done. That was what I was looking for, going into this maternity leave was something really low hanging. I mean, translations are really expensive, but low hanging in terms of my effort, in terms of the amount of attention or frequent monitoring I would have to do, it ended up being very straightforward and streamlined for me.
[00:05:45] Matty: And because you're independently published, you could be making these decisions on your own without having to try to talk a publisher into this.
[00:05:51] Emma: Exactly. Yeah. That was super important to me. And the farther I go along in my indy career, the more I realize that maintaining your rights over your intellectual property is super important. So that I can make these decisions. I can pivot.
[00:06:07] I have focused on German translations right now, but at any point I could decide, I want to go into the Italian market, or I want to do French translations or whatever. And being able to pivot and make quick decisions like that has been the key to being able to move forward with the translations as fast as my translator can do them.
[00:06:29] Matty: What made you decide to go to the German market?
[00:06:32] Emma: The German market was first put on my radar because I was in this small Facebook group with fellow historical romance authors. And we swap ideas and help cross promote each other and just generally talk about what's working, what's not working, what trends do we notice.
[00:06:52] And a lot, maybe three or four people in that group were all saying the same thing, not only about translations in general, but specifically German translations: that they were making back the cost for production really rapidly, like in a couple of months.
[00:07:11] I was looking at that in terms of how does that compare to something like audio books. Romance actually doesn't tend to be a top audio book seller, so it can take a little while to make your money back from audio. Whereas the author friends in this group were saying German is earning out a lot faster.
[00:07:29] I'm not sure exactly why. I would probably have to get into some EU politics or something to understand fully why it is that Germany is such a hot market. I was already selling books in English in Germany. They weren't necessarily my strongest seller, obviously, I'm selling in the US and the UK and Canada and Australia in English stronger than I was in, say, Germany or France.
[00:07:56]But it seemed that the word on the street was just that Germany was a really strong market and it was important also for me to hear that from people who were in my sub genre because what sells and what doesn't, what functions well in Kindle Unlimited versus what functions better wide, is really genre specific.
[00:08:15] So hearing from my fellow Scottish medieval historical romance authors that their books in translation were selling really well in Germany, that planted the seed that, this is something that I want to make a move on.
[00:08:31] Matty: You'd probably have to go back even further than EU history in order to understand why Scottish medieval characters are especially appealing to the German audience.
[00:08:41] Emma: Yes. And if you understand the history, they're appealing to the French as well, which is pretty interesting. So that might be the next translation move for me.
[00:08:50] Matty: Is that something you're thinking about? A French translation?
[00:08:53] Emma: I think France followed by maybe Italy would be the next ones I would move into. Right now, I'm so focused on Germany and I have this sort of big backlist I'm trying to move through and get them out that I'm going to keep focusing on that. I could definitely see once I catch up with my backlist in Germany, I could maybe pivot and head over to France at that point.
[00:09:21] There is this big upfront cost and you have to be mindful of your cashflow, because obviously Amazon pays 60 days after the month, the period of earning. So you also have to be aware of how long should I expect to wait to earn back the investment in the translation?
[00:09:43] So, so far, still really focused on Germany. I just started translating this 10-book series, it'll be 12 if I include the novellas, and I'm already starting to write new books now, so I'm like, "Oh man, I'm never going to catch up." I don't think--we'll see. Luckily, obviously if I find a French translator, it'll be a different person than my German translator. So I could potentially have two or more going at once, to hit those markets as fast as possible. That will be probably a future test.
[00:10:16] Matty: Setting aside for a moment the actual translation, if we're just thinking about the technology platforms that you were using, did you have to go outside the platforms that you were already using for your English work in order to get the German translations out to the German readers?
[00:10:32] Emma: No. I publish exclusively through Amazon. I'm in Kindle Unlimited, and I didn't realize this when I was publishing my English books, but within the KDP Dashboard, there's a way to select which is your primary market for the book that you're publishing, so you can select any one of their markets as your primary market.
[00:10:53] And you also select which language it's in. It's really just a couple of different toggles on the KDP Dashboard. And if you're already publishing through Amazon, that dashboard is probably fairly familiar to you. And then I can see all my books, all together, all at once, rather than having to go to a different platform to look at the German books, which is handy. I actually was just running a sale on my first in series translation, and I hadn't really thought about this, but because you're going through the same KDP dash and being a member of Kindle Select, you have access to the same types of promotion, so you can run a Kindle Countdown Deal on your German book in Germany.
[00:11:38] I happened to do a free run on this series starter book. And I hadn't really thought about that, but it's like, "Oh, of course, that makes sense." I have access to the same tools within the KDP dash and now that I realize that, I plan on making a little bit more use of the ability to do things like Countdown Deals, sales, to promote the other books in the series.
[00:12:01] Matty: Is Amazon matching up the language to the countries it's available in?
[00:12:07]Emma: You can make your translation available in all countries, which can be handy because it's pretty rare, but occasionally there'll be someone who maybe feels more comfortable reading in German, or maybe they're learning German and they want to practice reading, or, who knows, but someone in the US will buy the German edition of my book or someone in France will buy the German edition or in the UK. So you can actually set it to be available in all countries, all territories, and it's really just like another book. It's like a new book. It has its new slot. It's not linked in any way with your English version. But you can link it in a series. You can do all the usual stuff with it.
[00:12:50] Matty: If you could describe the actual mechanics of the translation process, the people involved, the technology involved, that would be great.
[00:12:58] Emma: Yeah, I have to admit, it's a little bit silly because I don't speak any German, and so there's a lot of trust. There's a lot of using Google Translate along the way. So how it works for me, like I mentioned, in the fall and winter of 2018 it was my end of the year goal to set up my team. I started by getting in touch with people I knew had already done translations, again within my sub-genre, and getting recommendations for a translator, as well as a proofreader, which should be two separate people. In the same way that when you're writing, you need a fresh pair of eyes on your book, an editor, or, at a minimum, a proofreader, same thing applies for a translation.
[00:13:45] So, I went through some connections, emailed a couple of people, collected their rates, and also got a sense of their timeline, how quickly they would be able to turn around a book, how busy they were. A lot of translators right now are very busy, which is great, it's a booming industry, but I also didn't want to have to wait six months or a year to be able to get my book out.
[00:14:11] So, I contacted a few people. I asked one person to do a test translation. I gave her maybe a thousand or 2000 words of a book and she translated it. And then I had already arranged for a proofreader who I also found through connections, through other author friends who were using this proofreader. And she actually came from the reader group of a fellow author. She was just a reader who has a great eye and who's a native German speaker. She has sort of tapped into this community of indy authors who are translating now.
[00:14:50] So I gave the test translation that the translator had done to the proofreader and basically asked her, is this any good? Not minding if there are a few errors in it, but is it capturing the story? Is it fluent German? Is it native German?
[00:15:06] And when she gave me the green light, that's when I started working on a contract with this translator and having her getting going on these books. That's all sort of the backstory. So onto the actual process of getting the books translated.
[00:15:22] So I give the translator my manuscript and she gives me a deadline when she'll have it back to me. She gives me back a fully translated manuscript. I open it to make sure it can open.
[00:15:36] Matty: It has words in it.
[00:15:39] Emma: Yeah. It has words. It looks like German to my uneducated eye. And then I just directly pass it straight off to my proofreader.
[00:15:47] And that's where, especially when I was taking a leave and wanting some really low hanging fruit, that's what I mean. Like, literally. I received an email and sent an email, and that's sort of moving the process along.
[00:15:58] Matty: The idea of having a proofreader is really valuable because one of the things that has kept me from pursuing translations more actively is that quality assurance aspect. How do I know whether they're doing a good job? But that idea that you have a proofreader and, if the proofreader is somebody you know is a fan of the genre, that's even nicer because they know what to look for.
[00:16:18] Emma: Yes. And in the same ways that there's this rising industry of translators, there's also this rising industry of translation proofreaders. And it's a really interesting skillset. Super important, especially if you don't know the language, because there is that lurking fear of, "Oh my gosh, what if I put up some things super amateurish or just something that looks terrible and this is going to stick to my name forever." I do not want that.
[00:16:48] In addition to a proofreader, one thing you could also consider is, depending on how large people's reader bases are, what the breadth of their reader base is, I've heard of some authors putting out a call within their readers to their newsletter or on their social media page asking for native speakers who would be willing to just kind of beta read, not an official proofreading role. I would imagine this would be a great extra step to insert in between the proofer and publishing where you'd hopefully have a clean and polished manuscript, but then having a couple of readers who might find it really fun to read, they'd be getting a book for free. And you wouldn't be asking them to do a ton of heavy lifting or a deep proofread or edit or anything like that, but just, "Hey, could you let me know if you notice any typos" or "Could you let me know if this sounds smooth enough," and at least that would be a fail-safe against publishing and having it just be a disaster.
[00:17:51] Matty: Do you have any language in your books that's odd, would be odd to a current reader because it's medieval Scotland.
[00:18:00] Emma: Yes. In my first series, I didn't write the Scottish accent, which is really a common feature in books in my genre. I have gotten a few comments over the years: " I like the Highlanders to sound like Highlanders," "I like the Scots to sound like Scots." And what they mean by that is writing in that accent, like, "I dinna ken," that type of thing. I actually did that in my next series, which I've just started to translate, and I wasn't really sure how the translator was going to handle that, that there's this sort of heavy written accent into the book as well as a few medieval flavored words, like naught and ought and things like that.
[00:18:44] I don't know German, but it seems like a very complex language to me. And what I found really interesting was, the translator made several comments and notes in the margins of my Word doc in German, so I didn't know what they said. And then the proofreader read them and let me know she loved the notes because the translator was explaining why she made certain decisions.
[00:19:08] Using a formal tense versus an informal tense to indicate things like accent. That was sort of how they handled that. They used the word "aye" and "nay" for the Scots and "yes" or "no" for the English characters in the book. That's why I think finding a really good translator and a really good proofreader, they're worth their weight in gold because picking up on nuances like that, and, I don't think you can really translate that accent into a different language, but something to give it that feel or that flavor.
[00:19:45] And I guess it's worth thinking about for people in other genres as well. If there's any really specific terms or things that might be difficult to translate, it's worth discussing with your translator what you might do with that or how you convey the feel that you've written into the English book.
[00:20:03] Matty: With something like “dinna ken,” you can imagine there are a couple of approaches they could take. They could take German words and contract them so it was the auditory equivalent of " don't know," or they could use a German medieval term to indicate the medieval-ness of it, but then they'd lose the Scottish-ness of it. It's a very interesting question.
[00:20:25] Emma: That would be really interesting. I forgot to talk to my proofreader and my translator about this, but they were talking to each other, so it seems that they worked it out. And the proofer who is a fan of this genre and who's read a lot in the genre, I think understands the flavor that we're going for in the books, which is that sort of secret sauce that goes into translations that I'm just amazed by is if it's not a direct word translation, how do you convey the feeling, the emotion, the flavor, the tone, especially with things like class differences. A lot of writers transmit with word choice and written accent and things like that. It's a really interesting issue.
[00:21:12] Matty: It's probably helpful that it sounds as if in the community of medieval Scottish writers that you associate with, if multiple of you are doing translations, there could be an emerging standard in how to handle those medieval terms, or specifically Scottish terms, that would keep a reader in that genre from encountering different approaches from book to book. It would be a smoother experience for them if there was a standard that was being applied.
[00:21:39] Emma: Yeah. And it could be that each translator is developing their own house style. Or maybe something is emerging. I mean, a lot of us use the same translators. I could think of maybe three or four off the top of my head, but my translator translates at least four other authors in my sub-genre. So, yeah, that's an interesting question. From the German reader perspective, is there an emerging style or a standard way of conveying an accent.
[00:22:09] Matty: Do you have any mechanism to get that kind of reader feedback that if it were a book in English, you would maybe just go scan the reader reviews? Does your proofreader, or someone else help you mediate that experience?
[00:22:23] Emma: So far I haven't received any emails or anything from German readers, although I'm seeing that more people with German email addresses are signing up for my newsletter, which is great. What I have been using are the reviews, and I literally just pull up the amazon.de store, the German store, and look at my books and see, "Oh, it looks like I got another review on one of my books," and then I just copy paste and put it into Google Translate.
[00:22:54] It's a little bit rough. And I wouldn't use it for any official communication or anything, but it really does give you a sense like, "Oh, okay, this person, maybe they rated it lower, but it was because they didn't like something about the story. Okay." Or much worse would be someone reading it and saying, "This is a really shoddy translation and it sounded like it was done by AI," or something bad like that. That would be a red flag. It would be such a bummer to learn about a problem with the translation that way, because it would mean that it's already out there. It's already reached readers and then turned readers off.
[00:23:32] But on the other hand, at least you would know, and then you could potentially go back and fix it either using beta readers or a different proofreader or whatever, wherever is sort of the issue.
[00:23:46] Matty: In terms of communicating with the team that you built up, I'm assuming that there was no issue with the translator, by definition.
[00:23:55] Emma: Yeah. They have to be able to speak fluently in both languages. So there has been no problem so far with communication, both with the translator and with the proofer. I mean, it's crazy to live in this modern world and only speak English and also have to expect and count on everyone else being able to speak English to you. It's a huge privilege. But, yeah, it's been smooth communicating, even down to things like you want to be really careful with things like contracts and, even that, you know, smooth sailing, because by definition, the translator and the proofer need to be able to communicate fluently.
[00:24:37] Matty: Were any of your contracts written in German?
[00:24:39] Emma: No, they were all in English.
[00:24:41] Matty: Were there any other business scenarios where you were dealing with someone at amazon.de or any other business scenarios where you needed to get help with the translation?
[00:24:52] Emma: Yeah. A few. Recently, I got an email and if this has through the regular amazon.com, the US store, they occasionally email out authors. To me, it seems to happen randomly with no rhyme or reason to it. But they occasionally email authors and say, " Hey, do you want to be considered for a Kindle Monthly Deal or a Kindle Daily Deal?"
[00:25:17] I actually got one of those emails from the amazon.de store asking if I would be interested in having one of my books considered for a promotion. And the whole email was in German. So I was like, "Uh oh, pull up my handy old Google Translate again!" And once I actually ran it through the translation, it was very clear that it was the exact same form letter that the .com sends. Then I was like, "Okay, I know what this is. I understand what they're asking of me."
[00:25:47] And then I guess the only other occasion where it taken just a little bit of extra work to figure out what I'm doing is when I set up payment for both my translator and my proofreader. They both go through TransferWise, which is like PayPal, but more geared toward international so that there are fewer fees if you're going from country to country. When I'm setting that up, they require a ton of information. You know, they want the physical address of the person you're sending to and their name, their email, their bank routing number.
[00:26:21] And that got a little bit tricky because of things like dates, needing to remember to use European style dates rather than American style dates, addresses. "Is this a territory? Is this a region? I'm not sure. Is it a province? What's the equivalent of a zip code over there? I don't know." So, yeah, getting those filled out took a few more brain cells, took a little bit more time. But then once that was all set up then it's been smooth to transmit payments that way. And the nice thing about TransferWise is that you can transfer from one currency to another and you can either set, this is how much I'm paying in my currency, or this is how much the recipient needs to receive in their currency.
[00:27:07] My translator actually lives in New Zealand. She's in New Zealand, a native German speaker in New Zealand. My proofreader lives in Germany. We've kind of got our dots all over the world and are connecting across multiple currencies and time zones and things like that.
[00:27:24] Matty: It's really a great example of the opportunities that indy authors have that would have been possible, but much, much more difficult if we had gone back a decade or decade-and-a-half.
[00:27:34] Emma: Yes. Simple things that don't seem revolutionary to us now, but secure ways of paying people that are halfway across the world. That's making all this translation stuff possible. Being able to email back and forth really rapidly. Only a few hours lag time given, you know, if someone's asleep or something, Yeah, it wouldn't have been possible even maybe five or 10 years ago.
[00:28:01] Matty: Are you thinking of engaging more directly with German readers on any platforms, either having a German version of your newsletter or German social media or anything like that?
[00:28:11] Emma: It's a great question, and something that I've been pondering a lot because again, not speaking the language, it is hard to figure out how do I attract more readers? How do I reach the readers I already have? It is tricky, again, being in this insanely privileged position to speak English and have a certain expectation that many, many people in the world speak some degree of English as well.
[00:28:38] There is that sense of, well, maybe if a reader in Germany wants to connect, wants to send me an email or wants to participate with me on social media or whatever, they might be able to piece something together in English. On the other hand, if they're buying a German edition of a book, that sort of indicates that either maybe they don't feel like speaking or writing in English, or maybe it's a little bit more of a challenge or they're just not interested in doing that. So that can create a little bit of a problem, like how do I bridge that language gap when I don't speak the language?
[00:29:16] This doesn't really speak to how do I connect more one on one with readers, but something I've been thinking about is how do I run ads with my German book, how do I write ad copy?
[00:29:28] And I know some other authors are hiring their translators to help them translate things like Facebook ad copy or a tagline for an Amazon ad. Now that Amazon has opened up their ads platform to the German store, that's really helpful to have that opportunity to advertise there. On the other hand, it's another instance where there's a language barrier where the whole German advertising page is in German. You have to be really careful with your numbers and making sure you aren't putting the comma or the decimal in the wrong place.
[00:30:08] Matty: I was thinking it might be fun if you got to a certain number of German email addresses on your newsletter, you could have a sentence or two that you would be sending to your English-speaking newsletter subscribers and ask your translator to just translate part of that. Maybe not the whole email, because obviously if they're subscribing, they read English, but it might be fun for them just to see a little blurb.
[00:30:31] Emma: That's a great idea. I just participated in this free promo and free run of several books, and it was actually a multi author promo. And one of the other authors in the promotion mentioned that she had started segmenting her German readers on her newsletter list, with a tag or putting them in a group or a segment or whatever, and she said she had already noted at least a hundred German readers. And then she was emailing them specifically when she had a new book coming out or if there was a sale or something like that. And that makes a ton of sense because on an email list where 99% of the people on it are native English speakers and are never going to be interested in a German translation, it can feel sort of spammy or just sort of "I'm not interested in this" if I was sending out information about my German books. So it would be a good idea. Like you mentioned, I love the idea of throwing in some language. I mean, I can say danke. That's about it.
[00:31:34] Matty: You can have your translator coach you in a sentence or two of German that you could write out phonetically, then you could send them a little video of you, saying hi to the German, which would be fun.
[00:31:45] Emma: Oh, that would be so great. Yeah.
[00:31:48] Matty: Did you get different covers for your books?
[00:31:51] Emma: I use the same covers, but I did put the German title on the books and it's been a little bit of a complicated process.
[00:32:02] Some people do a whole separate cover and there's really interesting research even just between the US and the UK, there are some different cover conventions based on your genre and some people have separate covers altogether, which is cool to think about. And I think some people do that for German as well.
[00:32:21] My covers have what we lovingly refer to in my genre as "man chest" on them. They are about Highland warriors and they have some steamy times in them. It's a little flag to readers if you have a bare- chested man on your cover, like, okay, this will have a certain heat level and this will be a Scottish medieval, and all that.
[00:32:46] Matty: And enough of the rest of his torso so you can see he's wearing a kilt, right?
[00:32:49] Emma: Yes. You've got to see the kilts. Exactly. Whether it's historically accurate or not, there's always a kilt. So, I've actually noticed that the man chest covers, there aren't as many of them in the German store within my sub-genre.
[00:33:03] And I have noticed also that some authors who have what maybe you would call just slightly more racy covers in the US -- maybe a couple embracing and the woman's dress is coming down her shoulders -- they are more covered up in the German store. I'm not sure why, it could just be a convention or that people look at the man chest covers and go, "Oh, this isn't a book for me."
[00:33:27] I have opted to use the same covers because when I started doing this, I was treating it as what's the minimum viable product to make this profitable, make this a new income stream for me. Also, especially the covers for my first series, which is the first one that I translated, have been really popular and I really liked the way they look. They've sold really well. They look really cohesive as a series. And because of that, I thought, these are good covers.
[00:33:58] I've worked with a few different cover designers over the years, and one issue I ran into was that, for this first series, I had used one cover designer who is no longer working with, and I wanted my new cover designer to be able to change the title and make it into the German title. But we didn't have the files with the layers on them. He did a great job, but he had to go in and using a computer, erase the English title, and then reimpose the German title.
[00:34:29] It worked, but I'm thinking about more now going forward, knowing that I will probably want to translate my current books, is making sure that I can address having a German cover made with my cover designer. Right now, my current cover designer, she makes me an ebook, a paperback cover, and an audio book cover. And it might be that the new conversation is do the ebook, the paperback, the audio, and a German cover once I have the German title, and bundle that in.
[00:35:01] So it is worth thinking about, what cover you'll use and how you will go about making that cover, whether that's using a cover designer, which I would recommend, rather than doing it yourself. But if you have skill going in and erasing things and adding things back in, go for it.
[00:35:19] Matty: I did an episode on book cover design with Jane Gorman and I can't remember if we mentioned it there, but I always ask my book cover designer for the raw material files, and I've had a couple of people say they've been surprised that I've gotten that, but I've never had a problem. I've worked with several book cover designers and they've always been willing to give me the raw materials, so that if they go out of business or exactly the scenario you're describing, you have a way of dealing with that.
[00:35:49] Emma: It's a really important thing to ask. I recently started to ask for not only the layers, but just a version of the cover without any text in it. And I find it super useful for making promo graphics, my Facebook page cover, things like that. And I know that some cover artists would charge for making ad images or making Facebook covers or Twitter covers or whatever. And because of that, I think some are hesitant to give out the layers because that takes business from them. But on the other hand, some are saying sure, but just it's $25 upcharge or whatever to get the layers and others are just giving the layers, which is great too. But an important thing to ask. Especially having one with no text on it, then you can you can potentially use that for several different translations. You put a French title on there, Italian, Spanish, German, whatever you're translating into.
[00:36:48] Matty: Did you find that your payback period was similar to the short pay back periods that you said your other Scottish medieval writers had experienced?
[00:36:57] Emma: Yeah. The German market for me has been really great. I think my first one came out in March 2019, and my baby was born in October and I got to say like June, July, August, September were a wash, like I almost didn't do anything during that time.
[00:37:16] But I was putting out these books and the first book I think took two and a half or three months to earn out. And then when the second book came out, it earned out even faster because it gave a boost to both the first and the second book, the same way with a series, if something is on the up and up or it's starting to gain momentum, the more books you put out in that series, it gives that boost to all of the previous ones as well.
[00:37:45] And then they just kept earning out faster and faster, which was great. I think the last one in that series came out in November and, you know, I wasn't doing anything at that point besides just trying to stay alive and keep this newborn baby alive. But they were making me really good money and at one month, my German income was the same as my income from the US store. In January, I got an all-star bonus in Germany, which was awesome. I wasn't expecting that. That's based on number of pages read, One's for individual titles and then they do ones for authors. And I think it was authors, because at that point all of the books in this first series were out at the same time and they were all just feeding off of each other and getting tons of pages read in KU. And so, yeah, I got the lowest level of all star bonus, which was great, cause it feels like free money.
[00:38:42] Matty: Absolutely. And it sounds as if there's quite a bit of work to find the people you want to work with, to build your team, find the translator, find the proofreader, and you want to be extra careful about that because if you do it right the first time, if everybody's happy in that scenario, you can just continue working with those people through an entire series or through a series of books.
[00:39:06] Emma: Yes.
[00:39:07] Matty: Once you had gotten past that point, how much work did you have to continue putting into it in order to keep that business going?
[00:39:14] Emma: It's a matter of emailing and paying people, and that's about it. I'm using the same team that I started with, the same translator and proofer and you're right, it was a bit of a time investment to put together the team. And it can be really daunting too. It's just it's like, where do you start? I would definitely recommend breaking it into small pieces: send email to X author about who they use to translate or send an email to this translator and figure out what their rates are or whatever.
[00:39:48] Because it's daunting. So for me, I just started on this new series. The first book just came out in the new series. I knew that I would want to do a minimum of the first three books in the series to give it a fair chance to see is this going to sell as well as the first series I translated.
[00:40:07] And because of that effect of, as you release more books in the series, it gives a boost to the previous ones as well, I wanted to do at least three. My translator and I did a contract for all three and I put down a deposit for all three. And then I sent her the manuscripts, one email for me, and she had set out some deadlines, like, "I'll have the first book to you by such and such a date. The second book by this state, the third book by that date."
[00:40:36] Matty: How long was that time period?
[00:40:38] Emma: I think it was about a month and a half to two months between books. This particular translator has been really good about being on time. Occasionally, she's even been a little bit earlier. She has more clients than just me. It was really important for me when I specifically wanted to book these first three because it can take a while. And then after she has it, I give it to the proofer, and it can take her upwards of a month to get it back.
[00:41:07] It can take three months to get the translation out. I publish a new book every three months, so it takes almost as long as just producing a brand-new book, which it kind of is producing a brand new book.
[00:41:18] Matty: You're going to have to take another leave of absence to let them catch up.
[00:41:21] Emma: I know. I was thinking about that the other day. I was like, I am never going to catch up to my front list if I just keep putting out new books. So we'll see. Maybe I'll take another leave sometime.
[00:41:34] Matty: That's great. Well, Emma, thank you so much. This was fascinating and so much fun to talk to you about it.
[00:41:40] Emma: Yeah, I love talking about it, and if anyone wants to shoot me an email and ask more questions, feel free. I'm happy to share information.
[00:41:48] Matty: Please let everybody know for they can go to find out more about you and your work.
[00:41:51] Emma: Sure. My website is www.emmaprincebooks.com, and that has links to all my books, my audio, a little bit more about me and the research that goes into the books and things like that. I'm on Facebook as Emma Prince, Author, and you can shoot me an email if you just want to talk more about translations or have questions about anything that I mentioned, I'm at [email protected].
[00:42:18] Matty: Great. Thank you so much, Emma. This was great.
[00:42:20] Emma: Thank you so much for having me.
Links
Emma's interview on Mark Dawson's Self-Publishing Podcast with James Blatch - Episode 217, the title was " How to Profit from Your Backlist during Downtime"
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