An author who is a friend, but who I have *not* published, writes to me for advice:
“Since you are a publisher, I thought I’d check this with you. A publisher in another language has offered me a contract to translate my book but they are only offering royalties to me, no advance, as I have usually received for my works. Is this the standard procedure for other language translations?
I presume they will pay the person who translates the book or perhaps they have an employee for translations.
Would love to know your thoughts.”
My response:
“It is kind of you to think of me in this connection.
- The answer is that it depends on:
– the size of the market in that language
– the relative wealth of that market
– the state of development of publishing as an industry there (e.g. Hindi has a huge market but is hopelessly poorly developed)
and so on.
- The other thing to remember is that any “advance” is only a sort of loan against royalties. So, unless you are short of cash, an “advance” is not real money in your pocket, it is only an advance payment which will be clawed back by the payer from book sales. So, what really matters is the rate of royalty, and the key question is: what rate of royalty are they offering you? If you are happy with that, that’s fine.”
To which the author responded:
“I gave away lifetime rights to one of my books many years ago and saw next to nothing in royalties because it was a small group that did little marketing. I’m trying to be more judicious since.
Though the monies the average author receives is hardly an amount that makes their living, the advance and the terms are indication of a publisher’s interest in their work. If a publisher has offered a large advance to an author, they usually make sure that the book is marketed well.
Anyway, I’m going to sign the contract without the offer of an advance”.
The author obviously did not want to pursue the matter further. Nevertheless, I felt that I needed to follow up with two important points:
- Who pays the translation can’t be assumed. Always make sure there is clarity about that and about the financial flows that may be involved re the translation.
- The more of an advance a publisher gives you, and the more the marketing spend, the better for your book in terms of the potential visibility of your book of course. But that simply means that, in the judgement of the publisher, your book is worth that extent of risk. Some books with zero marketing budget do well, others with relatively big marketing budgets fall flat. In a sense, from the author’s point of view, accepting any advance is also a risk. It may be necessary for the author to survive, but it is nevertheless a risk – because, if your book doesn’t sell as well as expected, the publisher can ask you to return the “unearned royalty” (in other words, the money that you were overpaid). That was a bad enough risk in the days when publishers didn’t go bankrupt as often as they do nowadays. Today, if a publisher goes bankrupt, it is even more likely that bankruptcy administrators will come after you to return any advance that isn’t justified by sales.