One easy way to promote your books

I'm lazy, I know.

Putting that aside, ever since I created a mailing list, I am quite surprised that I have subscribers in some rather unusual countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia, The Phillipines and even Botswana of all places!

Everytime I send a letter to my growing list, at least one of the South African subscribers find the time to read them.

Now, I seldom sell books outside of the US but I do have some Latin American readers that oddly enough prefer to read the original English version of my novel. I still don't regret spending a grueling month translating my own novel to Spanish. Getting a 97,000 word novel translated to another language costs quite a lot of money (it's a tiresome task) and then the translator rightfully has a voice in the royalty rights. Either you pay them a hefty sum for a one time offer or enter a multi year contract where the translator gets a cut of the royalties and then after the set amount of years, the royalties fully return to you. I also like the fact that the translated book was also copyrighted in Mexico. Better safe than sorry.

Believe it or not, I have the second novel with a rough translation, but I haven't finished that task so therefore it isn't copyrighted and much less published. I haven't really gotten to that task mainly due to time constraints.

Now, indie authors don't typically have a huge budget and you usually learn as you go while you stumble... a lot.

One thing that many indie authors don't know when they publish on Kindle Amazon is that they can get an Author webpage that shows a kitchy photo, a short bio and at least the US site allowed you to sync your blog. You can then glue all of your books in one place and make it easier for customers to locate you. The process only takes a few minutes and even if you don't know how many readers you'll reach with it, it doesn't hurt to do so either.

One thing I have been stalling for a long time and I have *finally* done is to open an Author Central for the other Amazon country stores that include the service: UK, Germany, France and Japan. I have some experience editing web search databases and being requested to help with foreign language categories so I didn't find the task of setting up my bio, books and photo on the German and French sites to be hard at all.

Amazon Japan asked me to create a new Amazon account. I had a few extra hurdles to jump, but at the end my novels finally have a little bit of a Japanese presence. I always find it curious that I don't have Japanese fans despite the fact that I initially got a lot of the ideas of my book when I visited Nara which is a 40 minute train trip from Osaka. Maybe pasting a face next to the novels will change that.

My Amazon Author Central site in Japanese

Now, I know that China is the second largest reading market in the world after the US. At 1 billion citizens, that's a huge untouched market. The issue of course is that most Chinese don't speak English and I don't speak Mandarin.

There is an interesting website that skips the book agent madia called Fiberead that offers a translation of your novel and pitches it to Chinese publishers. They retain 70% of the royalties but in exhcnage, they pitch your book to a market that more than likely you wouldn't have even bothered to tap anyways due to the cultural and language barrier. I haven't requested them to check my books to see if they are willing to give it a go (mainly because of the scant amount of Amazon reviews. If I had at least 20 reviews, that would give me some serious street cred to give this a shot).

However, if you are already an author that is starting to have a real following, you should give this website a shot. I haven't checked their site for over a year, but they commented once that they were thinking about offering someday a similar service for the Japanese market. Now, the idea of having my novels in Japanese sould sound really slick and definitely sweet.

If you are curious, just check the website below and give it a shot!

Click here to visit Fiberread

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Before I leave, I wonder if there is a similar service for other major languages such as German, French or Hindi...