From: spameimer@sf-boom.de

To no one's surprise, hardly any German SF/F-writers have been
translated for the English-speaking market. From my immediate knowledge,
of the current crop only three come to my mind: Andreas Eschbach, Markus
Heitz and Wolfgang Jeschke. I don't think that in general foreign
authors are translated into English a lot, so we Germans are not an
exception. It is therefore quite difficult for a German author to get
published in the US or the UK, as the "normal way" - having a manuscript
in German, finding a publisher willing to pay for translation and get a
contract accordingly - will in most of the cases not work or at least
very hard to achieve. Submission after paying for a translation in
advance by yourself is risky, not only are the costs considerable, the
chances to recuperate them are small and therefore the investment might
probably not yield any returns or if, then many years thereafter, as
manuscripts have the tendency to linger for some time.

The other, although slim chance might be that someone who, while not a
native-speaker, masters the English language to a sufficient degree,
invests time and energy in translation himself, and then invests some
money, although not as much as for paying a translator, for a
professional copy-editor to make the text readable. Again, an investment
is needed and the risk is there, but it is a bit smaller.

The subsequent question is if an American or British agent would be
willing to look at material written by a German author at all? The main
reason why American and British publishers don't really need to bother
with translations is the fact that they can lean on a multitude of
talented and busy native authors who undoubtedly write the best SF/F in
the world (I'm not kidding, I can compare). So there is no strong
motivation to look elsewhere, definitely there is no pressure or need to
get material from abroad. Of course, this is guesswork, but these
considerations alone will make any effort in this respect at least
risky, if not futile, and if not objectively so, then at least in the
mind of the prospective author who might regard the obstacles as quite
insurmountable.

Of course, I'm not writing this in order to bore you with a theoretical
treatise. As I'm one of those authors in question, I decided to put
another theory into test: if we have a more interconnected market now,
with the advent of amazon and ibooks as major distributors (I exclude
Google Books here, from the numbers I'm aware of, their impact is, so
far, negligible), why is it necessary to look for a foreign publisher at
all? And, if you don't want to go into self-publishing (because you
don't like the investment and are not too good in all technical issues
or in quality management or don't think that SP is the right way forward
in general), why not getting a German publisher to publish the
translated work himself, paying for the copy-editor etc. and using the
international opportunities to publish an ebook worldwide (and a
paperback e. g. through amazon's print-on-demand service)? Maybe even a
publisher who is willing to do some marketing, e. g. spending money on
ads in English-speaking genre-related publications?

Well, it's worth a try.

http://www.emperors-men.com/

I'll keep you posted how this works out. I don't know how it will, but
if one doesn't try, one will neither see failure nor success.

--
www.sf-boom-blog.de

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