I had just resigned myself to accepting that my books would not get translated by the people at Babelcube.com
It is a great site for authors to get their books translated into foreign languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, etc). My difficulty is that I don't (yet) have the track record of the established authors with hundreds of reviews on Amazon. I was more concerned about writing my books and felt that the marketing would take care of itself in due course.
I'm here to reiterate what anyone in the industry knows: marketing does not take care of itself. Something like 700,000 books are published in the US alone EACH YEAR (roughly 50-50 between traditional paper publishing and ebooks). I have read something in the region of two million books are published globally each year. This is daunting. But, focus on your genre and eliminate the fact that 99% of the authors think like me (or, like I thought) and are more concerned about their writing than their selling. Because, let's face it, you don't go into writing to make money. It is something I love and I do for myself as much as others. But, by the same token, we live in a world of mortgages, rents and taxes of various sorts. It is tougher than ever before to be a proper starving artist. Welfare helps for some but even that is under attack!
So... the good news is that a translator said yes! I will, assuming all the stars and planets align, have The Art of Wealth translated into Spanish by the first week in October. I just received the offer today. I accepted, uploaded my manuscript and that's it!
And... a colleague of mine sent out my YouTube blogs (ie. these blogs) and got 91 likes. It may not seem like much for those who have 100k of website traffic or generate 2,000 new emails per month from promotions, but this is a major step for me.
The lesson I learned is this: one step in front of the other down the right path will eventually get you to your destination. There are people who have walked those steps before me and there will be those who walk those steps after me. The key thing to remember is that there are steps. Just add perseverance.
RSS Feed
