Books Around the World
Inside publishing, the art of translation, and some recs and giving opportunities.
Worldwide Books 🌍
For the last year, I’ve been working on making my HarperCollins books available outside of North America. The short version of the update: now they are! In English, anyway. If you don’t care about the how and why of it, you can skip on past.
The longer version, if you have a personal interest in how publishing works and how and why this took the time that it did:
When I made the move from Little, Brown to HarperCollins in 2015, the deal we did gave them the rights to publish in North America only, English only. 2015 seems so long ago now. It was the Obama administration! The YA marketplace was very different, and my sales track record at the time was good enough to try to set a favorable precedent for my new contract terms. (My LBYR contracts were for world rights, which means they handled selling the foreign rights and we shared the money. My portion went against my unearned advances vs. having cash in hand.)
By the time my first Harper book came out, a lot had changed. It was 2017—the world was different, the market was different, and it had been four years since my last novel. Young readers didn’t know who I was. This is one of the tricky bits about writing for young readers. Yes, there are a lot of adult readers of YA and MG, and teachers and librarians play an important role, but fundamentally you need that base of readers in the intended audience to be open to and aware of your books, and that base churns constantly.
If you aren’t writing a series or writing quickly or hitting a commercial target, it can be very difficult to sustain that audience over more than a couple of books. (When you see writers for young readers burning out or trying to make moves toward the adult market, this is likely part of the picture.)
That gap between books along with the change in the market was working against me, as was the fact that 2/4 of those books were affected by pandemic-related things (total shutdowns for my April 2020 book; printing and shipping delays for my spring 2022 release). My sales have not been where they need to be to help spur the demand from the international market. Not that that’s ever guaranteed, but nothing was happening to help me on that front.
Meanwhile, because of the way publishing distribution works, there wasn’t even a way to buy my North American books if you didn’t live in North America. Not hard copies, not ebooks. That potential was legally all blocked off. I don’t think I completely realized that until adult readers would message me to say, hey I can’t get your new book! So I started working on a solution.
One option was “wait and see,” which I went with for a while. With each new release, we (my agency and I) waited to get the temperature of the reception—would this be the one that would inspire international interest? I also talked to my people about the possibility of putting out books myself in those markets via the various ebook publishing options since I still held those rights. That would be doable, but would also require designing new covers (because I don’t have the rights to the cover art) and doing any additional preparation of the manuscripts myself, then putting them out under my own little operation without the imprimatur of a known publisher.
This year, with my pivot to day jobs and whatever else is next, I did not have time to invest and just wanted to get it taken care of so readers anywhere in the world could at least get the English versions. My agent and editor put together contract addendums to add those rights for Harper’s distribution system. That took longer than I thought it would, like contracts always do. (I should know this by now!)
Then it was simply a matter of Harper pushing a button, really, and a couple of weeks ago that finally happened. The ebooks of all my Harper novels (Gem & Dixie, Goodbye from Nowhere, A Song Called Home, and Kyra, Just for Today) are now available worldwide. Hard copies of these books will become available internationally in January.
Translations into other languages are a different matter entirely. Which brings me to…
The Art of Translation
In my “learn everything about self-publishing” pandemic adventure, I learned how translation in that world often works. There are all these companies that work with self-published authors to do translations using AI (Google Translate, basically, but in the hands of speakers of the language you’re translating to) to translate the text, then they deploy real humans with those language skills to clean it up and make sure it flows, et voila, you have a translated book. Of course, not all indie-published translations are done this way. But many many are, especially in popular genres like, oh you know, monster erotica and shifter romance and reverse-reverse-historical-harem.
For genres where the point is often the tropes and hitting the beats, that’s probably not completely terrible. It’s efficient and profitable for authors, and readers in those categories are content. But I think about my trip to Italy in 2018 when the Italian publisher of The Lucy Variations brought me out for Festivaletteratura and some other events. The translator, Aurelia Martelli, was with us for the entire trip and roster of events. Her work on the translation made her as intimately familiar with the story as I was, and I was keenly aware that it was her work that Italian readers were directly experiencing. She could talk about the story as well as I could.
I legitimately feel that Le Variazioni Lucy is as much Aurelia’s book as it is mine, and yet unless I spend the next decade learning Italian, I will never know how that book reads. I just trust from the time spent with her and the interactions I had with readers on that trip that she got it.
There are no translations of my Harper books on the horizon (though you can get Gem & Dixie in Russian!) and that is not something I would ever take on myself. Publishers and editors have relationships with trusted translators that I don’t think the AI + a human guardrail model can ever replicate. Translating literature is an art unto itself, which is why they give out awards for that. Yet I suspect that many regular publishers are also starting to use some version of this model because of the cost efficiencies and the idea of “good enough” that Alissa Wilkinson wrote about last year during the writer’s strike.
Recommendations 📺 📚🎵
I haven’t listened to a ton of new music lately, but of what I have, Johnny Blue Skies (AKA Sturgill Simpson) gets the most replays. “Scooter Blues” is the song of a restless summer and also for when you need to check out of the pending election doom and fantasize about escape.
I am very late to The Bear, because there was this stretch of time when it was all anyone was talking about and I was like ENOUGH ALREADY and dug my heels in about watching. Joke’s on me because I was missing out on a conversation that has likely peaked. That’s okay! Anyway, if you’ve been resisting as I have, let me just tell you it’s probably not what you think it is.
Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is a very Sofia Coppola movie, and for me that’s a good thing. Quiet, underexplained, attentive. As someone who married my own 9-years-older boyfriend (now husband of 34 years!), while I was still technically a teenager, I could easily grasp how this relationship made some sense to the people in it while also understanding the YIKES aspects of it all. Knowing that the late Lisa Marie hated this movie and didn’t find it reflected reality, I also listened to Elvis and Me, the Priscilla Presley memoir it was based on (with Priscilla’s participation). She reads the audiobook herself and it’s a good counterbalance to the movie, highlighting a bit more of the sweetness of their story without being overly rosy.
My only complaint is that both the book and the movie give short shrift to the end of the relationship and the aftermath of Elvis’s sudden death. I’m of the age where Elvis himself was not so much a cultural force but his death, which happened when I was about 6, definitely was—and it echoed for years and years, so I was curious. The book is free in the Audible library if you subscribe to that. The movie is streaming on Max and also rentable.I’ve been listening to tons of music from my youth lately, and every time a Pointer Sisters song comes up, I think about how many massive hits they had. Such an impact. I found myself wondering why I don’t know more about them. Someone directed me to this piece by Tammy Kernodle from a couple of years ago that gets into their legacy. Of note: they won a Grammy for Best Country & Western Performance in 1974. 50 years ago! Here’s Ruth Pointer talking about that experience and also what happened when they performed at the Grand Ole Opry:
(And here’s a link to a great performance of the song, which they wrote. It gets more and more melodically complicated as it goes. I never knew this side of the Pointer Sisters but it’s also consistent with the vocal quality and harmonies they had in every hit in the 80s when they broke out so big.)
Giving Opportunities 🆘
I turned 54 a couple of days ago and not that you need an excuse to give, but since we’re here would you consider taking a moment before you close this email or window to give $54 or more to one of the following organizations?
International: UN Crisis Relief for the people of Gaza
National: American Red Cross for victims of Hurricane Helene
Local: Utah Food Bank or Salt Lake City IRC for our local households and refugees (FYI if you are actually in SLC, I know the IRC is also taking donations of new and gently used winter coats and sweaters).
The Inbox Variations is the quarterly-ish newsletter of author Sara Zarr. Find out more about Sara and her books at www.sarazarr.com.
Really appreciate this insight into your experience with book rights, Sara! Sounds like a fascinating and frustrating journey, and I'm glad the Ebooks are now out there, with the hardcopy versions to come.
Also, that description of how lots of books are translated with Google AI is incredibly depressing. "Good enough" is truly going to eliminate so many opportunities for so many artists.