I've been licensing books in translation and also self-publishing others for more than a decade. Here's an overview.
In 2013, I experimented with doing royalty split deals with translators. In 2014, I self-published books in German, Spanish and Italian having learned a great deal along the way! But I was too early. There was no mature Kindle market and no real way to advertise so sales were small.
In 2017, I withdrew my self-published translations, mainly because I couldn't maintain marketing in languages I couldn't speak or understand. I decided to focus on rights licensing instead. I've done multiple foreign language deals for my fiction and non-fiction since.
In 2019, when ebooks started to take off in other non-English language markets, I produced 3 non-fiction books in German. I used Deepl for the first draft and then human editors to complete the books as well as working with a number of beta readers. Tips for Self-Publishing in German: Adventures in AI Translation [Nov 2019]
In 2024, after AI translation began to mature and possibilities expanded, I worked with WordCount.ink to translate and edit more of my non-fiction.
I have books in German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Korean, as well as English.
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