- the editor: if a good traditional editor gets involved in your project they can make a huge difference in the quality of your books. Many people seem to think editors are just marking up your punctuation. In reality they are more akin to product managers in software. They help set the tone of the books and ensure that the vision is adhered to.
- which leads me to copy editors. The traditional publishers employ all the best ones. You can hire independent copy editors but their quality is a crapshoot. And you don’t find out until it’s too late.
- the sales rep network. If reps like your book they will get it in front of people. Independent of marketing the boots on the ground factor can make a huge difference.
Now, you won’t necessarily get any of these benefits going with a publisher but you can’t get any of them self publishing.
I've also heard about mediocre editors that waste a lot of author time, and bad editors that ruin the project.
Overall I can’t really complain about the editing but I think the benefits were relatively modest.
Do you know a good place to get to know them or start out building some connections?
I have been doing it in the past (mostly for ads and other marketing content) but it paid very little (was working freelance for an agency) but I enjoyed it a lot.
(Tangentially, I think Germany has some special laws that you as the translator would need to be familiar with. For example I think the translator needs to grant rights to the original author to republish the work. Not 100% sure on this, but worth checking!)
I would prefer working directly with an independent author - when I have a bit more time I’ll check out how to best get in contact with them.
Not sure about the legal side of it, but I have a friend who works in German copyright and who could probably help figure that part out.
They are author as opposed to translator-focused, but maybe reaching out to them can be a first step in getting the lay of the land? They might have some information about how their authors tend to use translation services. Although I'm sure there must be some translator communities out there that could provide even more focused info.
To be specific, between $200 and $300 per finished hour, and a finished hour is about 9,000 words. It can cost more if you want two or more narrators to handle male/female parts (there's a lot more editing involved).
I know at least one self-published author who does create audiobooks for some of their works, but does so at a loss. Even at $15 per audiobook sale (through bookfunnel, so there's little overhead), making back the $3k they pay for the narration is a pretty high bar for a relatively niche market.
I think it's a validation thing, largely. If you get trad-published but the book does poorly—well, at least you got trad-published, so you must not be too awful (although... if you're in certain "hot" niches, there's some real crap put out, that looks like it was barely even edited), but your book just didn't land well. It happens. But you're an author, for sure.
If you self-publish and your book doesn't do well—did you market poorly? Would it have done better with a trad publisher? Are you... in fact so terrible at writing you shouldn't call yourself an author, and it didn't sell because it's total crap? You may never know!
Since there's not real, real money in it unless your book's such a hit you get movie deals and such (with rare outliers who make it big-enough purely on book sales but don't get adaptation interest) it's largely about being an author, so having that validation up-front has real appeal.
I can't speak for all writers, but here are a few reasons I have seen some authors going with a trad publisher:
* Reputation. It can just feel cool to say "Oh yeah I have a book published by Tor" (or whatever). This one is pretty weak for me. Trad publishers don't hold that much special prestige anymore.
* Translations. There are some great untapped translation markets out there (like Germany). Some authors self-publish the English version of their books and sell translation rights to a publisher. The publisher then does the work of translating and republishing in the target countries, taking that effort off the author. The royalties are lower, but funding high-quality translations can cost a fortune and for many authors offloading that cost and effort can be worth it.
* Audiobooks. Similar to translations. Author may publish the ebook themselves and sell audio rights. Good narrators can cost a fortune, and many authors can't justify that outlay themselves. A trad audiobook publisher can get access to the best narrators and fund the entire production if the author doesn't have the means or desire to do it themselves.