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I’d add (for fiction the only market I have exposure to):

- the editor: if a good traditional editor gets involved in your project they can make a huge difference in the quality of your books. Many people seem to think editors are just marking up your punctuation. In reality they are more akin to product managers in software. They help set the tone of the books and ensure that the vision is adhered to.

- which leads me to copy editors. The traditional publishers employ all the best ones. You can hire independent copy editors but their quality is a crapshoot. And you don’t find out until it’s too late.

- the sales rep network. If reps like your book they will get it in front of people. Independent of marketing the boots on the ground factor can make a huge difference.

Now, you won’t necessarily get any of these benefits going with a publisher but you can’t get any of them self publishing.

The major publishers seem to have gutted their editing staff over the last decade or so, and submitted manuscripts changed little before publishing. The primary editor you get barely has time to read it, and an outsourced copy editor (who are probably the better ones, yes).

> if a good traditional editor gets involved in your project they can make a huge difference in the quality of your books

I've also heard about mediocre editors that waste a lot of author time, and bad editors that ruin the project.

My developmental editor for my semi-technical book was “fine” but he didn’t do any of the structural re-factoring I did for my second edition. The company was using a new set of copy editors for the second edition and they were much better than the first.

Overall I can’t really complain about the editing but I think the benefits were relatively modest.

> * Reputation. It can just feel cool to say "Oh yeah I have a book published by Tor" (or whatever). This one is pretty weak for me. Trad publishers don't hold that much special prestige anymore.

I think it's a validation thing, largely. If you get trad-published but the book does poorly—well, at least you got trad-published, so you must not be too awful (although... if you're in certain "hot" niches, there's some real crap put out, that looks like it was barely even edited), but your book just didn't land well. It happens. But you're an author, for sure.

If you self-publish and your book doesn't do well—did you market poorly? Would it have done better with a trad publisher? Are you... in fact so terrible at writing you shouldn't call yourself an author, and it didn't sell because it's total crap? You may never know!

Since there's not real, real money in it unless your book's such a hit you get movie deals and such (with rare outliers who make it big-enough purely on book sales but don't get adaptation interest) it's largely about being an author, so having that validation up-front has real appeal.

> Audiobooks ... Good narrators can cost a fortune

To be specific, between $200 and $300 per finished hour, and a finished hour is about 9,000 words. It can cost more if you want two or more narrators to handle male/female parts (there's a lot more editing involved).

I know at least one self-published author who does create audiobooks for some of their works, but does so at a loss. Even at $15 per audiobook sale (through bookfunnel, so there's little overhead), making back the $3k they pay for the narration is a pretty high bar for a relatively niche market.

Do you think I could offer English->German translation services to indie authors as a reasonable side income?

Do you know a good place to get to know them or start out building some connections?

I have been doing it in the past (mostly for ads and other marketing content) but it paid very little (was working freelance for an agency) but I enjoyed it a lot.

To be honest I'm not sure. It seems like _a ton_ of work to put out a high quality translation. I do not know how much time and money translators spend on each project but can imagine it being a lot. For example, some authors may expect a legit highly-paid translator to work with their own German proofreader etc to ensure quality of the output.

(Tangentially, I think Germany has some special laws that you as the translator would need to be familiar with. For example I think the translator needs to grant rights to the original author to republish the work. Not 100% sure on this, but worth checking!)

Unfortunately there is not much information for this online (atleast from a quick search I didn’t find much) Most seems to be related to working together with publishing houses (I loathe the German publishing houses so that’s definitely no option).

I would prefer working directly with an independent author - when I have a bit more time I’ll check out how to best get in contact with them.

Not sure about the legal side of it, but I have a friend who works in German copyright and who could probably help figure that part out.

One place to get started might be the Alliance of Independent Authors: https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/

They are author as opposed to translator-focused, but maybe reaching out to them can be a first step in getting the lay of the land? They might have some information about how their authors tend to use translation services. Although I'm sure there must be some translator communities out there that could provide even more focused info.

Great advice, thanks! I’ll try out some stuff let’s see how it goes.