David Viergutz
The independent publishing market is known for its ability to adapt to the market quickly, implementing the advice of various author circles to feed an audience of readers. Regardless of publishing strategy or medium, or how you prefer to market, publishing tactics and strategies are endlessly available.
But what if the market is a foreign market? Is marketing a translation different from marketing the original book? And how do you know if you’ll have an audience in another language to sell your translation to? In this article, IAM explores some ready-to-implement techniques and proven methods for approaching new foreign markets to sell your books.
Your Audience May Be Waiting
Determining whether an audience is waiting for you is the easiest way to decide how well the market might bear a translation of your books. Consider the first place you might find your readers: your network. This means looking in places where they hang out and asking them if there is a specific language they would like to see one of your books translated into. Facebook Pages, Groups, and your author newsletter are great places to poll an audience who is already used to seeing your name. Although this is not an exact judge of how many readers are in a potential market, it gives you an indication of how well your book might sell in a foreign market upon release. Furthermore, recruiting those who are already looking for your book in a foreign language can create advocates for your book within that network, building the buzz for its release.
Amazon itself is also a wealth of information, able to show you your sales performance across all Amazon storefronts, such as Germany, Canada, Mexico, and more, through a single dashboard, through which you can filter results by country. To check how well your book might do in a foreign market against comparative titles, switch to the Amazon page for the language you wish to research and start searching for books in your genre using category searches and keyword searches. Then look at the books’ rankings on that market’s Amazon store to know how well a particular book is selling.
Pro Tip: Enter a book’s ranking information into a calculator such as Kindlepreneur’s free Amazon sales calculator to estimate the total sales of that book per day.
Paid Advertising
Getting your book into readers’ hands is the easy part. Convincing them they should choose your book among thousands of choices can be much harder. Paid advertising, specifically pay-per-click advertising, is a staple of most indie author businesses, and applying pay-per-click strategies to foreign markets is as simple as creating campaigns that target the foreign market. For example, Amazon allows a user to access its ads platform for each Amazon market. The setup is the same as the US market, but you will need your translated books on the Amazon market first. Then you will need ad copy to go with the ad and keywords in the foreign language.
Pro Tip: Negotiate this with the translator ahead of time. Provide them with a document of translated ad copy, phrases, and keywords that you’ve seen success with in the past to save from having to ask for it later.
Another option for paid ads platforms is using Facebook’s detailed targeting ad campaigns to specifically target markets outside the US. A lot of the same suggestions for setting up Amazon ads in foreign countries apply here as well. Use ad copy in your target language and select your target country as the location to display the ad. You will need to input your translated ad copy, the correct images, and the correct storefront to send readers to. If you’re sending traffic to Amazon, you need to select the store in which your translated book is listed.
Considerations
A common question is “Will my current marketing strategies work as effectively for a translation’s audience?” The answer isn’t a simple yes or no; instead, it depends on how well you know your audience and what they are looking for in a story. When you run high-performing ads to a translation’s audience, you risk losing nuance in the text, tropes, and understanding of the story based on the ad and ad copy. To combat this potential pitfall, authors can rely on their translator to provide equivalent copy, then use vigorous testing as they would for the primary market. While it would be great to simply implement high-performing ads again, it is better to use them as a starting point for testing new iterations.
Social Media
Social media platforms outside of the paid advertising portions are the digital town square, and readers tend to be online and in circles they can relate to. Consider looking online for Facebook Groups or Pages dedicated to translated books for those who are looking to read stories in their native tongue. Be sure to check the posting rules of the Group before you start.
Pro Tip: Search within social media groups for questions related to translations and other genre-specific keywords to find readers who are looking for books in a specific language. Then, look at the answers people provide on where to locate those books. This can be a valuable tool not to hawk your books but rather to find new places to engage with a community of readers who want books in other languages.
Content Marketing
Similar to social media usage, content marketing on social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok is the process in which a user creates posts, videos, and copy to engage an audience or to build one if they don’t already have followers. Social media channels run on algorithms that excel at showing your content to people it determines will engage with it. Consider a holistic social media campaign centered on your translated text, reviews, translated covers, and more to help find new readers of foreign languages. Authors should ensure first that their target audience for the translation can be found on the social media platforms they’re using, as some countries cannot access certain sites; then, they need to be sure the platform they are using to try to reach readers is popular among their audience within that country. It’s not worth the effort to market your books on one site if all your potential readers prefer to use another.
Email List Building
Sometimes, advertising your book after it is live on retailers isn’t your only strategy. Authors may choose to build their readership before a book is even released by collecting email addresses from readers. Authors familiar with the term “reader magnet” might already know how this works. This exchange normally takes place using a loss leader, or something of value such as a sample chapter, novel, or short story, given away in exchange for a reader’s email address and permission to send them emails.
Building an email list in advance of a translated book’s release would also require you to translate your reader magnet into a foreign language, then to use Facebook ads and other platforms to advertise where readers can download the translated magnet in exchange for their email address. Keep in mind this may also require the messaging within the emails communicating with the reader to be translated.
As with your primary market, collaborating with another author in your genre who is already established in a foreign market is a great way to feed their audience with more of what they’re looking for while giving your book visibility. Reach out to other authors about swapping newsletter shout-outs in your translated language, arrange social media posts, and otherwise work collaboratively to share the news that your translated books are ready for others to enjoy.
Like any move you make in your indie author business, consider all outcomes and your expectations on how any decision may affect things moving forward. Investing in the creation and marketing of a translation has a lot in common with a traditional book launch, and authors who are looking to leap into translations need to be ready to answer the question of “Now, how do I get my book out to readers?”
David Viergutz