Book Publishing

Self-publishing a single book is not likely to provide an income to most writers. As noted in another article here on Publish-Yourself though, it does provide a way of earning some money for your time, as well as getting word out about your work to the big whigs in the publishing industry - it certainly worked well for me. Beyond those advantages though, there are other ways of building up your income in self-publishing. One, obviously, is to increase your catalogue of books offered. The other is to sell foreign language rights to your book.

I'm hardly a veteran of publishing. However, I have been lucky enough to see my first book get sold to over ten foreign publishers, in languages ranging from Hebrew and Russian to Portugese and Korean. As such, I think it would be worthwhile to note the opportunities that foreign rights can offer to the self-publisher.

The first thing to note is that most foreign publishers are not going to offer a deal that will make you rich, although it depends in large part on the power of the currency you work with and how strong the currency of the foreign publisher is. However, if you can manage to attract a number of foreign publishers, the aggregate may well be something that allows your book to be legitimately called a financial success.  read more »