independent publishing

I just wanted to share a cover (big image, but I like it!). 🙂

Françoise has recently finished translating Seven Graves, One Winter into French, and, all being well, it went live today!

Seven Graves, One Winter was spotted on Amazon by an editor at the French publishing house Éditions de La Martinière, back in March 2018. I had self-published Seven Graves the previous month, so I was pretty psyched that it had been found.

Long story short – the publishers were going through a merger and already had a “Greenland” novel, so they passed. In the meantime, however, I had signed with a prestigious agency in Copenhagen (because publishers won’t work without going through and agent – sigh), and got sucked into the whole traditional publishing world.

Seven Graves, One Winter (and several of the books in the same series) was sold to publishers in Czech Republic, Spain, and Portugal. But it was never translated into French.

Until today!

Often, as in “pretty much all the time” authors going the traditional route are encouraged to have an agent. Agents are the gatekeepers. Without one, getting published (traditionally) is pretty damned hard. Getting translated is considered nigh on impossible.

Well…

Not so much! 🙂

Thanks to forward-thinking translators like Françoise we just made the impossible… possible!

Thanks, Françoise!

Chris

And here’s a link to the French Facebook page! I know. Just don’t ask. 😉

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