Marketing Short Stories Abroad
I was cruising the EDF forums this morning, and I found a link to this website. I didn’t know there were markets overseas that would translate English short stories and publish them (some for a nice fee). Of course, I read all the time on agent and author blogs about selling the foreign rights to novels, but the short story idea is a new one on me. I wonder if it is worth trying, or if you’d have to have big name publishing credits like Asimov’s, etc., to get in the door… Hmmm…
3 Comments so far
Leave a reply
Hmm, are any of these paying? I only glanced through - but good translators don’t come cheap. I made a lot more from translating in 6 months than I have in 6 years of published writing, I can tell you that
I can’t quite see how it could work.
It could make sense, if the magazine was really short on content and had a lot of good advertisers. It’d be worth paying the author and the translator, in that instance.
But it stops you from sending a piece out as unpublished and it wouldn’t really rank very highly as a credit so they’d have to pay decently.
The guy had an entry on his site about it. Apparently, you can still send stuff out as unpublished because English language rights are different than Japanese rights, German rights, etc.
I didn’t look at it for too long, but it looked like some of them paid and some paid in contributors copies. But apparently at least most of them accepted the stories in English and did their own translating.
I’m not sure it’s something I’ll ever pursue, but it was interesting…
Good point about language rights, I hadn’t thought that through.