Steven Lewis's Blog, page 26

Amazon opens French bookshop for self-publishers. Should you care?

Wearing my beret in honour of the opening of Amazon to self-publishers in France

Last week my KDP account updated to show me that my books are now available in Amazon's French store, as well as its US, UK and German equivalents. Perhaps I should have felt a rush that a Frenchman could sit on the Champs-Elysées, order my self-guided walking tour of the Rocks and sit with a café crème dreaming of visiting Sydney as I dream of visiting France again. I didn't, however, because my books are not in French, just as they are not in German. They are in English but even so I sell a negligible amount of books through one English-language flavour of the company, Amazon.co.uk, compared to another, Amazon.com.

Amazon's global march will have sent a chill down the spines of publishers but I wonder if it causes a thrill for self-publishers outside France.

I work with self-publishing authors so I can make some generalisations with confidence:

Money is often tight, tight enough for some that the cost of a guide to formatting for the Kindle can be a barrier to beginning to self-publish
Few of us are full-time authors, which means that the time to self-publish is in short supply, too. The business of self-publishing has to be fitted in around a job, kids and other responsibilities
Most of us are in the indie author business for the author part, not the publishing part. We want to write so we would like to spend a generous portion of what time we do have available to write, not market and promote our books

I have yet to sell a book in the German store. There are a number of possible reasons for this. I choose to think it's because my books are in English rather than that they are no good. The solution, therefore, would be to translate my books but this would be ruinously expensive, although I know some self-publishers are offering royalty-sharing arrangements with translators. You would have to have phenomenal sales by publishing standards to make that an attractive offer to a translator based on the hourly rates I have seen for translation.

I could also attempt to ratchet up my marketing in those countries, knowing that many Frenchmen and Germans would have no trouble reading my books in English. I could, for instance, create author central pages on those two sites. Yes, that's right:

Self-publishing a book with Amazon now requires, if you wish it, two more accounts: Author Central France and Author Central Germany. That's a total of five, including your KDP account and your accounts with Author Central at the .com and .co.uk sites.

It also, for me at least, means getting paid in yet another currency by cheque. Amazon.com sends me paper cheques in USD; Amazon.co.uk another cheque in GBP; and Amazon.de would send me another in Euros. So little does Amazon care about this mess for its "overseas" authors, it hasn't even updated the  "getting paid" section of the KDP to cover the French deal. Will it be a Euro cheque but at least combined with German earnings or a separate, fourth cheque for an Australian bank to take a greedy bite from?

For me to do any of this — translation, foreign language marketing — I'd have to see a sign that it was going to pay off. As it stands, I believe I'll get a better return for time spent marketing my books for the English-language sites. I would, however, love to hear from you on the subject. Have you had sales in Germany or France? Are you getting your books translated? Will you? Have you set up in Author Central on those sites? And, more generally, what do you think?

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