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Hello, I’m Bella Andre, and I’m so pleased to let you know
that my course on “How To Make Money With Translations” is going to
be released soon!
Before I let you know more about the
course, I thought it might help if I give you a little information
about my background in both traditional and indie publishing to help
you feel confident that the information in my course on making great
money from translations is coming from someone who has been way down
deep in the indie publishing trenches since the very beginning.
After seven years in traditional
publishing, where I wrote both contemporary romance and romantic
suspense for three of the biggest New York publishing houses, my very
small and very low paid traditional career hit the wall. My Random
House editor, who I am still friends with to this day, called me
personally after my first three books tanked to tell me that her boss
said they couldn’t buy any more “Bella Andre” books because no one
wanted to read them. I was devastated. Just like that, it was time to
either give up or start over with a new name.
Fortunately, right at that same time
a close writer friend of mine asked if I had a Kindle, which I did.
She let me know that she had heard there were a few people publishing
their own books through Amazon, and that they seemed to be doing
pretty well. Well, that was all I needed to hear! I immediately wrote
two sequels to two different series that Simon & Schuster had
said they didn’t want anymore. By the end of 2010, I was the first
self-published author to hit the top 25 at a major retailer (B&N)
and The Washington
Post sent a fantastic writer (we’re also still friends,
all these years later) to spend three days with me for a three
full-page story on the “new world” of indie publishing, where I was
held up as the poster child for self-publishing. After that, Time Magazine came
to my house in California to do a feature, then The Wall Street Journal,
and then Publishers
Weekly named my indie publishing company the “Fastest-Growing Independent Publisher
in the US”.
Self-publishing was not only fun–I
could hardly believe that I could write whatever I wanted without any
editorial boards or sales teams weighing in on a book proposal—but it
was amazingly lucrative, especially when I began to publish books in
2011 about a fictional family called The Sullivans. There are now 26
books available in that series, and my plan is to write about them
forever, along with several other New
York Times bestselling series, including The Maverick
Billionaires and The Davenports.
Fast forward to late 2012 and I had
an a-ha moment: What if there was more to indie publishing than just
writing and putting out books and audiobooks in English? What if I
found translators and self-published my books in other languages?
Literally minutes after having the thought, I went onto sites where
you could hire contractors and put together
translator/editor/proofreader teams in several languages. Within a
matter of months I was self-publishing in German, Spanish, Italian
and French all at the same time. The good news was that the books
sold fantastically well right out of the gate. The bad news? The
reviews all said the same thing in each language: “These translations
are terrible.”
I had thought that the people I hired
online to translate/copyedit/proof each translation would do a great
job for me in each language. Alas, that was clearly not the case. I
had already sunk $30,000 into translations when I pulled all of the
books down. Talk about a massive blow! As I have said many times at
conferences when I talk about how to self-publishing translations, “I
lost $30k so that you can learn from my mistakes and don’t have to
lose a ton of money like I did.”
The thing is, even though I was
bummed at how my first swing out of the translation gate had gone, I
vowed that I would try again…but I also promised myself that I
wouldn’t jump back in until I knew exactly what I was doing.
It took three years for me to gather
all the info—and the confidence—to step back into translations. You
won’t be surprised to hear that the second time around I made sure to
hire the best of the best translators. What’s more, I decided I would
do only one language to start, rather than spreading my energy and
time too thin by simultaneously jumping into a bunch of languages
while I was still learning the translations ropes.
I chose to start with German, because
one of my friends had started self-publishing in Germany the year
before and was doing really well. I remember getting a quote from the
excellent translator I had chosen for the cost of translating the
first 8 Sullivans into German. It was $69,000. I immediately sent the
quote to my friend and said, “Should I do this? Will I actually make
that money back?” Because even though I was making fantastic money in
English, it was still a massive amount of money to spend on something
that not only had no guarantees attached to it, but that I had
already lost thirty grand doing a few years earlier! My friend,
however, wasn’t the least bit concerned that I’d lose the money. In
fact, her reaction was just the opposite. She immediately wrote back
with a “YES! You’ll not only make the money back, but you’re going to
make a ton of profit.” So with a big, deep breath, I signed that
first translations contract and then began self-publishing
translations in earnest.
I’ll be sending you another note
tomorrow where I’ll go into more detail about the money part, which
I’m pretty sure we all agree is the most important part of the indie
translations equation. But for today, I’ll just leave you with this:
Since I first began self-publishing
in Germany, I have made over a million dollars in profit. Not gross
income, but net income. So even when you take into account my
translation and advertising expenses, I’m still a million dollars
richer because of my German readers than I would have been if I had
decided to pass on trying translations again after my first bad
experience.
Thanks so much for taking the time to
read this email today. I hope at least part of what I’ve had to say
has inspired you to take a look at what I believe is still a very
untapped market, particularly with languages like Spanish, Italian,
French and Portuguese. I’ll be back tomorrow with more information
about how you can make great money with translations.
Until then, happy writing!
All my best,
Bella
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