Translating your books can give them a new life

For years, I assumed that selling English language books wouldn't be too hard. Britain speaks English. America speaks something that is technically English, albeit with a strange fear of the letter U. Therefore, selling English-language books in the UK and US should be the easiest part of the business.

That was adorable – and naive.

The reality has been almost the exact opposite. Trying to sell my English-language books in the United States and Britain has often felt like opening a restaurant in the middle of a motorway and then wondering why nobody is stopping for lunch. The books are there. I'm waving cheerfully from the hard shoulder, but not even getting a honk.

Meanwhile, Germany, France, Italy and Spain have been considerably more welcoming to my books translated into their respective languages.

The English-Language Meat Grinder

The biggest lesson I've learned about the English-language book market is that being good is nowhere near enough. It might not even make the top five.

The US market in particular is absolutely enormous. That sounds wonderful until you remember that enormous markets contain enormous numbers of competitors. Who would have thought it, right?

Amazon.com is less a bookshop and more a digital landfill containing every novel written since Gutenberg first made the questionable decision to democratise publishing.Thousands upon thousands of new books appear constantly, and every author is fighting for exactly the same thing:

Visibility.

Because the greatest thriller ever written is commercially worthless if Amazon's algorithm quietly places it on page 847 underneath My Stepbrother Is a Billionaire Werewolf Surgeon.

Advertising: Where Money Goes to Jeff Bezos' New Yacht

Naturally, the solution is advertising. At least that is what every book marketing expert tells you shortly before trying to sell you a $997 course explaining how to advertise books.

Theoretically, you spend money to reach readers, readers buy books, and everyone goes home happy. In practice, you can spend $100 advertising a $3.99 book and receive $37 back. The advertising dashboard then congratulates you on your engagement. Wonderful. Perhaps I can pay the electricity bill in engagement.

Advertising into America and Britain means competing against authors and publishers with enormous budgets, established mailing lists and years of accumulated algorithmic momentum. Some authors are spending hundreds or even thousands per day. I would prefer not to sell a kidney.

Then something strange happened. I started translating the books. German first, then French, then Spanish, and I recently finished Italian. And suddenly something changed.

People bought them. Not millions of people though (not yet anyway). Hollywood hasn't yet arrived at my door carrying a suitcase of money and a screenplay contract. But readers appeared. Actual readers. The mysterious mythical creatures authors are forever told exist somewhere beyond the advertising dashboards. Books that struggled to gain traction in English began finding audiences in translation. Series started moving. Backlists woke up from hibernation. Readers moved from one book to another.

And I discovered one of the strangest realities of publishing. Sometimes the problem isn't your book. Sometimes you're simply standing in the wrong marketplace screaming at people who can't hear you.

Germany Was the Eye-Opener

The German market is particularly interesting. German readers buy a LOT of translated fiction. They don't seem remotely bothered that the original author is British. If the premise interests them, they'll read the book.

There's also something extremely satisfying about watching a thriller that struggled for oxygen in the English market suddenly start selling after being translated into German. Suddenly Amazon appears to remember that I exist. Apparently all my characters needed was a passport.

France and Spain then followed. The same pattern started appearing elsewhere. Not identically, because each market behaves differently. Anyone who thinks Europe is one giant homogeneous market has presumably never tried ordering coffee in four European countries.

But translation opened doors. There are fewer competing indie titles in some categories. There's different reader expectations, different advertising economics, and different algorithms. And crucially, less competition from the gigantic English-language indie publishing machine. The number of indie authors who bother to translate their books is actually surprisingly small.

The Counterintuitive Part

Here's the part that still amuses me. Translation is supposed to be the difficult option.

Traditionally, publishing wisdom goes something like this: first succeed in English, then expand internationally. That makes perfect sense if you are a major publisher. It makes considerably less sense if you are an independent author competing against approximately nine billion other independent authors.

My experience has increasingly suggested the reverse can work. Publish internationally. Find readers wherever they exist. Don't become emotionally attached to the idea that your "home market" (in my case, the UK) must automatically be your strongest market. Markets don't care about your feelings. Algorithms care even less. They would sell your grandmother if her click-through rate was high enough.

What I've Learned From This Experience

A bad market can make a good book look bad. Authors are constantly encouraged to interpret poor sales as evidence that something is wrong with the book. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes the cover is dreadful, the blurb reads like it was written by a committee of exhausted meerkats, or the opening chapter needs to be taken behind a shed and humanely destroyed. But sometimes the book is perfectly viable and the marketplace is simply saturated. That distinction matters enormously.

Next, competition matters more than market size. America has hundreds of millions of potential readers. Fantastic. It also has hundreds of thousands of authors attempting to reach them. A smaller market can sometimes be far easier to penetrate because the ratio between readers and competing books is better. Authors obsess over demand. They should obsess just as much over supply.

Then there's the fact that translation isn't a side business. This was probably my biggest mental shift. I originally thought of translation as secondary exploitation. An English book succeeds, then you translate it and squeeze a little extra revenue from foreign markets. I no longer see it that way. Translations can be an entirely separate publishing strategy. A book might be mediocre commercially in English and excellent commercially in German. Why should one market get to decide whether or not the book was successful? That's like opening five shops and closing the business because one branch in Dortmund had a bad Tuesday.

The next thing I learnt was that backlists become enormously more valuable. This is where the economics become interesting. If you have twenty books and translate them into four languages, you don't really have twenty commercial products anymore. You potentially have a hundred. Obviously there are translation costs, editing costs, covers, metadata, and the occasional linguistic disaster. But suddenly an old catalogue has new life. A book that finished its commercial cycle in English can effectively launch again.

Readers Are Not Obligated To Read Your Work

What authors need to remember is that readers don't owe authors anything. This sounds obvious, but authors forget it constantly. British readers don't owe me sales because I'm Scottish. American readers don't owe me sales because I write thrillers they theoretically enjoy. German readers don't owe me anything either. You put the product in front of them. They either want it or they don't. The job is to find the people who do. Everything else is vanity.

Would I give up on Britain and America? Hell no. That would be monumentally stupid. The English-language market is still enormous, and a successful English book can generate more money than several smaller territories combined. The upside is huge.

But I no longer consider failure to break through there as some kind of judgement on the books. It's a competition problem. A visibility problem. Sometimes a positioning problem. And occasionally, yes, a book problem. I've written a few stinkers in my time. But the trick is working out which one before setting fire to the manuscript.

Where I Am Now

My thinking has changed dramatically. Instead of asking: "How do I finally crack America?", I now ask: "Where can this book make money?" That's a much better question. Because readers are readers and royalties are royalties. €10 earned from someone in Munich is no different to €10 earned from someone in Manchester once it reaches the bank account.

The publishing world encourages authors to chase America because America is enormous. But enormous doesn't necessarily mean accessible. Sometimes the smarter strategy is finding overlooked markets where readers are hungry, competition is lower, and your catalogue has room to breathe. For me, that has increasingly meant Europe.

So after years of trying to persuade English-speaking readers to notice my books, I've accidentally discovered something rather liberating. Maybe I don't need to conquer the English-language market. Maybe I just need to sell books.