non-English language translations?

A few people have asked this week if I plan to do non-English language translations of my books.

I’m not opposed to the idea, but probably not, mostly because it would be too expensive and too impractical. The Trackerbox software program lets me track my ebook sales very closely, and typically 80 to 90% of my book sales are in the biggest four Anglosphere countries – the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. Of the remaining 10 to 20%, most of that is in various European Union countries where English is a pretty common second language. So, generally speaking, I don’t think there’s enough demand to make a non-English language translation practical.

Additionally, translations are seriously expensive. A good translation can wind up costing over $10,000 USD, and sometimes quite a bit more. That is a lot of money to spend on spec.

Finally, I only have so much discretionary budget to go around, and I think English-language audiobooks are a better bet than non-English language translations. The audiobook market keeps growing, and May was my best month ever for audiobooks, and June has a goodish chance of being even better. So I’d rather do more audiobooks than translations.

To sum up, I’m not opposed to non-English language translations, but I don’t think they would be practical to do at this time.

-JM