Milestones

This short post can’t do it justice, but I just wanted to say a huge thanks to Françoise. She’s translated six of the Greenland Missing Persons stories into French this year. It’s a huge project and I am both humbled and fortunate to have Françoise helping me get my books out to a wider audience.

Thank you, Françoise!

I’ve just uploaded La Fille du Chaman – book 6 – and am waiting for it to reach distributors.

The game changer this year was Draft2Digital – a book aggregator who distributes books to eBook platforms (stores). In late 2020 they announced plans to make it possible to do a royalty split between authors. Previously, independent authors had to trust each other to share the royalties, much like a traditionally published author must trust the publisher to give them their share of the royalties. Well, that’s not transparent at all, and there are far too many associated pitfalls and problems – including traditional publishing.

But with the tools available today, it is possible to make things work, and setup transparent and legally binding processes that make it possible for authors and, in this case, authors and translators, to collaborate.

For the authors among you – independent and traditional – you might like the following links to Draft2Digital (affiliate link) and Eversign for legally binding digital contracts. It’s up to you to decide and agree on a fair contract with your collaborator, but remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and a fair contract can last the length of copyright.

The future is really bright for collaboration, and I look forward to posting more milestones soon.

Oh, and a last thought, with tools such as the ones I’ve linked to, it feels like anything is possible. And that is very exciting indeed.

Chris