 The other one had a very strict agenda and very helpful. But we have less of an agenda than some very reasonably bright people. And we're going to speak very good experience. I will speak for myself. My name is Jason Grunewam, no relation. I'm a translator from Hindi and a fiction writer and I teach at the University of Chicago. My name is tragically not Jason, but Antonia Lloyd-Jones. And I'm a translator of Polish literature full-time based in London. And that's all I do. I'm John Masjak. I work for a commissioned sales rep group. We represent publishers to bookstores. I have about, depending on how you count them, somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 200 presses that I represent. Probably more, but it's hard to count at that upper level. I'm Jeff Waxman. And I work for other press. I see at least one other publication. That's nice. But I've also worked in marketing for the University of Chicago press. And there I worked a lot with Siegel books. So between the three of them, a fair amount of translations across my desk. Before that, I was a bookseller at the Seminary Co-op, where I kind of specialized in translation if in fact that is a drama, which it's not. But it is as far as anyone else is concerned. And kind of how we're going to be treating it today. Because you all write in very different languages. We're reading them. But if I were to guess why you showed up, it's because you're looking for a readership. For yourself or for your author. And there's no good answer for those of you. They're hard to find. There isn't a readership for books in translation purely outside of the people in this room at this conference. Not even kidding. But when I saw Scott Estetito here, I was like, oh, that was it. But what we do have are some guidelines that we can help provide. I'm going to be speaking on behalf of publishers. But I can tell you that I spoke to a couple of different publishers that I don't work for about this panel. And I got some extremely contradictory advice. Which is funny. You're screwed, all of you. Some publishers are going to want your undying devotion to your book and to your author. And it's going to go on for years after you turned in your final manuscript with every correction. And others will want to hear from you again. They said this is our book now. And let us sell it the way we think best. To represent these competing ideas, we actually have these translators who, between the two of them, kind of represent, more or less, I think, the spectrum of what a translator can have. We've got UK and US publications in India, for that matter. And Australia. The books in Australia. New Zealand. I've had New Zealand publications. New Zealand. We've got Jason teaches as well as translates. Antonia only translates, which is a rare breed. Very hungry. They're rare because they don't get enough to eat. And between the two of them, they've also published with some of my favorite publishers that I don't work for. Melville House. And Seven Stories. And also a couple of university presses. Yale and Northwestern. And you've also published, I think, some YA as well. They've been marketed as YA, but that's more my problem. I did a book with a very small publisher who essentially based in Israel, actually. But had an American imprint. And that was YA. Come again? No, called Pen Light or something like that. It's a tiny thing. But anyhow, to start with, I'm going to say that what I look for from a translator is a level of engagement. When the book gets to me, it's already been bought. And I had no say in that. That's what the acquiring editors are for. They're very interested in the literary merits of the book. The marketing often with small assets will come second. And so when I say this, it's already mine. And I have to kind of find something to do with it. The questions I'll ask will be about who you all know. And that's what it comes down to in a lot of cases. Who will review your book? And sometimes it's your friends. And whose books have you reviewed? What are your thoughts on writing about other people's work? Everything is a two-way street. We need to be involved with other translators and other people writing about translation to have your work be seen by them. So after I ask all these questions and answer them without asking you, I'll Google you. It kind of ends up in your court. I'm going to ask Antonia if she wants to tell us a little bit about her experience. I think as a translator, I'm not just a surrogate mother. Those are my children. And I'm going to have some say in how they're brought up. So once I've produced a book, I do a great deal to help with the promotion. And I try to work, first of all, obviously, if your publisher has a publicist or a publicity department. It makes a great deal of sense to offer your services to them. And if they say, oh no, no, we don't want your involvement. You can make them want your involvement by having some very good and creative ideas to help them. And one of the first things to do, if you have a nice live author, which is a great thing to have. Well, it has its pluses and its minuses. But obviously it's nice if you can have book events where the author comes over to your country and you promote the book. And that costs money. So what you can do is you can help the publisher by telling them where there is money available for that. And for instance, in my case, I'm translating Polish. There are Polish cultural institutes in New York. The representative is sitting over there. And in London. So I will, I make sure I am in touch with the people working in those institutes on the literature side all the time. Telling them what I'm doing. Not much in their interest to know what I'm doing. And then I also tell the publisher, so I tell the publisher that there's this source of money. But I also tell them about things like, for instance, in Britain, English Penn has a promotion fund. And publishers can apply for funding for promotion. And it's very generous. And obviously that's more competitive than the cultural institute funding. But there are these sources available. So I help the publisher to know, first of all, where they can get some money. And then I start to have ideas for them. I will start suggesting literary festivals that might suit the writer. And try and place the writer at particular events. And keep feeding these ideas through to the publisher. And then I will also help the publisher by giving them a list of potential reviewers that I know about. Because often I know far more about who's interested in Polish literature than that publisher can possibly know. Because they don't publish Polish literature every day of the week. And also, and sometimes there are reviewers who I know personally, but not always. Sometimes I just know they've given a favorable review to something else. So I keep lists going. I make sure I keep track of who's done what so that I can then refer to these for the next book. And then also I can suggest presenters for events. Once you start to get some events in place, I'm often suggesting who can present the person. So an example is I had a book out with Melville House in May in New York. And I've been working closely with the editor all along to think about what readership this book should be reaching. And we work together with Sean from the Polish Cultural Institute to set up events for this author. And then Alex Zucker, who probably a lot of you know, who's the co-chair of the Pan American Translators Committee. The book happened to be about the Czechs. Alex translates Czech, so we brought him in as a presenter. So it's all about putting together the jigsaw pieces. And then the other thing is that this particular author doesn't speak English. So I offer my services as an interpreter. And I very often, if the author does speak English, I will offer to be the reader. Because there's nothing worse than listening to your translation being read by somebody in a very strong accent who really is struggling with the English. So you can be part of that event. And my involvement comes right down to picking the author up from the airport and having them stay on my couch and taking them to the events in my car. And I have now had to institute at home the terrible bottle of wine, the alcohol I leave out because when Polish writers are staying, the level's on the whiskey bottle. So seriously go down in the tunnel. And I have this as my vengeance on me. And then another tactic that I have is obviously once you've got events set up, you're Facebooking, you're using Twitter, there's all the social media stuff that you can use and get other people to spread the word. And then another thing that I've been trying lately which is being quite successful is I identify people who might be interested in this book who are well placed to say something about it. And for instance, this author of the book we were promoting in May mentioned that he has a favourite very famous writer and he buys ten copies of this man's book at a time. So I thought, right, famous writer, you're going to help us here. And with a bit of magic, I got the guy's poem address. I wrote him a personal letter and sent the book. Of course these people are bombarded all the time, usually via their own publisher with requests for blurbs and so on. But I did it privately. And he wrote back very enthusiastically about the book. Could I send it to famous writer number two, please, who'd been telling all about it. And this book, Being About the Checks, I also had my friend happen to be going to an alumni event for her college. And Madeline Albright happened to have been at that college so she was given a copy of this thing and wrote his personal letters back about the book. But I can't quote those people because there's a personal, private contact. However, one of them's made it a book of the year in those newspaper lists. So that's a pretty nice piece of publicity. And that's all just thinking about, now what can I do with this? Who might be interested? What might I do? And keeping the publisher, obviously, informed the whole time of what I'm doing so that it's always done jointly and with full knowledge. So you're probably sick of my voice by now. So you should say something. Are you sure you're not at a book publicist conference? Because everything you're doing is what publicity departments used to do when they had staff. That's more or less true. To speak to some of the points and Tony made, it is often a very good idea to push back and somebody pushes you out. If you feel like you can do, and if you want to do work for your book, you should. And on the other side of that, you mentioned having an author and how great it can be. Some of the most successful events I've been involved with have been for dead authors. Yes. And when you have a dead author, some of you might. Or anyone who doesn't speak English and will not travel, which is basically dead as far as the American readers. That's why you're here. You can still have an event. And the translator, and Tony has great examples, this can be the best proxy for an author. And I've seen this with dozens of translators, but there are, again, the ones who do it well, the Susan Bernofsky's out there, Natasha Wimmer, they are unusually good at speaking for their authors. Another thing is that if you were saying that's what the publicity department would do if they had the staff. It is, but a translator can do more because you have a much more personal connection as the translator. And you know that culture that you're trying to sell. And you understand far better what this product is. I mean, it's your product. You wrote that book. So you're always going to be able to talk about it better than the best publicist, actually. That's true. And it is complicated in that there are a great many venues for reviews, for events that don't want to hear necessarily directly from an author or a translator because they're too close to it. And you should let the publicity and the marketing department do their job. On the other hand, those personal connections, the people that you've known for years who are in your line of work and are thinking about what you do. Those are connections that being approached by me doesn't make any sense at all. I look like a weird page show. And when somebody has enough passion and a personal connection to it, that can make all the difference. Jason, did you want to tell us about your five books of the one? Right. So I'm going to, I mean, Antonio was talking more about general things that people can do, that translators can do. I'm going to speak about one author, two books, and five different publications of these two books. So the author is Uday Prakash, a Hindi author, contemporary living, very good friends, has slept on my couch many times as well in his, I think, four trips to the U.S. And we've collaborated on two books. One is The Girl with Gold Carousel, which was first published in 2007 with Penguin India. So this is book one, publication one. And Penguin India at the time was just starting a Hindi list. They hadn't, they'd been exclusively, more or less publishing in English, and they were starting to publish Indian languages for the first time. Uday was one of the first Hindi authors who they signed up. So that's how the translation of The Girl with Gold Carousel was accepted with them. There, so this is, this first story is a story of things that didn't go as well as they could have gone. The editor who was assigned for the project had never worked with translations before. I think I was quite a young, quite a young editor. We got into, you know, a sort of disagreement. And when I say disagreement, you know, I mean that, you know, she would, she would say, do this, do this, do this. And I would say, you know, emails, 50 pages long explaining, walking her through all the choices that I had made. Stop me if this sounds familiar to anybody. So I think this sounds like a pretty fascinating text anyway. I haven't looked at those emails in a while. Anyway, to make that part of the story a little bit short, she had a particular relationship with the publisher and that sort of poisoned the well a little bit for that project. So not a lot of publicity was put into it from the Penguin India side. We did get some nice reviews in some Indian newspapers. It was a little bit before social media had kind of taken off in the way that it is now. So our sort of options that way were limited. So what we did was a kind of a DIY tour bringing Uday over here for the first time. Luckily I had some photographs of the dean of my university in a compromising position in somewhere in a safety deposit box. I'm joking. But for various reasons I was able to squeeze out some money from the dean at the University of Chicago to bring Uday over. Even though the book wasn't technically available here we did some events there. We coordinated with some colleagues in other South Asian departments and did what we could, you know, given the fact that there's no equivalent of an Indian cultural funding institute, you know, institute, anything like that. That just simply doesn't exist and unfortunately probably will never exist, you know, for India in the same sort of ways. Although there's a private foundation now that I'm hoping will fulfill some of the role of like the German book office and putting together a calendar. Anyway, so that was experience number one. Experience number two is the second book that we did called The Balls of Delhi, which was, it's three novellas and that book came to be because I was cold contacted by an editor at the University of Western Australian Press and something about Australians because they're so maybe lost, I don't know, in this very remote part of the world they just kind of know everything that's going on in literature and the arts. It's true. And I pitched her this idea for a book of three novellas, which you know, if you're an editor in general you have, you wake up in the middle of the night with sort of cold sweats having a nightmare saying, oh my God, someone tried to pitch me a volume of three novellas. But it was a great book and she was a great editor and she said, let's do it and we did it and you know, I thought, okay, University of Western Australia Press, you know, small university press, you know, I had certain stereotypes in my mind from university presses in the US and my goodness, so they hired like a Sydney PR firm, you know, it's getting emails from people with a name like, you know, Benyathon Oldfield, you know, and things like that. They were setting up interviews on ABC Radio and we were getting reviews and I mean, probably one of the reasons because Australia is such a small, you know, market and everybody knows everybody, but that was a great experience in what a publisher and a publicist can really do. And then from there, she sold the rights to Hatched India and then Seven Stories Press. Right, and Seven Stories Press, I'm skipping one other, Seven Stories Press has just been sort of an ideal relationship to exactly the kind of receptiveness to all the different creative ideas that Antonia was talking about, pitching them ideas about different events that we can do here and there and so we cooked up some very interesting stuff with them. So I think I'll stop there. That seems reasonable. I'm sorry? That seems very reasonable. Okay. In the course of this little chain, after kind of while these translators are doing their additional work, we've got some other people at work and one of the first people that I talk to after I get the book is our sales reps. John is not one of mine. John is a... We're legally obligated not to work together now. Yeah. We really shouldn't even be in the same room. But it's a closed door. Oh, there's a guy. But John sold to my store when I was a bookseller and he was one of my favorite reps to come through the doors. He was one of the best read and a former bookseller himself so he knew exactly what we needed to hear. He also is a commission rep for the Abraham Associates which reps a large number of university presses and trade publishers. Go ahead. Wow. The good news is I don't have any particular specialty in selling translated works. I sell a lot of different kinds of things. Got many books. Yeah. Good books. I sell Grumpy Cat. I sell pens. I sell journals. I sell fiction. So what I do bring to my job is curiosity. As a former bookseller, I'm always looking for something great to read. So when the marketing people and the editors come to a various sales conference meetings and present the upcoming season of books, I'm looking for something good to read. I'm looking for something new because I started out as a bookseller. I started out trying to convince actual paying customers why they should read a book when they walked in the store. And when I became a sales rep, I kind of kept that job. I just walk in the store and I sell it to booksellers who then have to take what I tell them and sell it to their customers. So I do a lot of reading of manuscripts. I do a lot of reading of marketing sheets. I do a lot of reading of finished books after the fact. I'm often playing catch-up because there's just so many books you guys are making. It's crazy. But the good news is I'm an interested outside observer. I don't have any specialty. I don't speak any other language. I don't even know what it's like to have another language in my head like you guys do. It's very impressive. But what I do know is bookstores and I do know how to talk to booksellers. And so when marketing people, like Jeff, come to sales conference and they start telling us that they've got this new book or a new wave of books coming for the season and they start telling us about a book like a project that something that Antonia's done and she's already got lined up a festival or a reading in New York and that's the cornerstone of somebody coming to the United States and then they're hoping to scrape together a tour and maybe send them to Chicago or send her to Los Angeles or she has a cousin who's come to the United States and she's in North Dakota and we don't know, is there a bookstore there? All of these things make me prick up my ears because all right, we've got some things to talk about now beyond just here's a book that we're publishing, it's been translated, the cover is so-so, the author says it's really good, the translator says it's really good, the editor is fairly convinced about it, good luck with it. Actually having a person in the United States for us, whether it be the translator or the author or above is amazing. It's like, okay, this is something I can hang a story online, talk to my booksellers because it usually means that there's going to be something written up in The New York Times or The New Yorker or some newspapers that still exist, whatever. Yeah. It just, it bubbles that book up to the top of what I'm going to be looking at to read and hopefully it has been well translated. Hopefully I do find something else that I can talk about as a reader who's talking to other booksellers. I don't know what else to add. I was going to say, this is a kind of a mutual circumstances right now that these people are almost never in the same room. The translators and the sales rep have layers of buffers between them. And some of the publishers that Jason and Antonia have worked with are very, very much like the one I work for. I work for other press. Like Melville House N7 Stories, they're distributed by Random House, which means they have the best distribution network in the country, in the world, actually. And so the books are widely available if the buyer, Jason, buys them. That said, those layers also act as a sort of dampening effect. A translator's passion for their project has to pass through the editors, to the marketing people, then on to the sales reps, sometimes through a few different layers, because as a distributed press, I don't get to talk directly to the sales reps. I do, because I'm kind of a curator. But I'm supposed to go through like two or three layers at Random House. And my bullet points will get whittled down to like three or four of the most salient points according to somebody. And I'm inferred that it's sometimes before it gets to a rep. And sometimes there are, you were on a conference call earlier today with Princeton University, yes? Right. And he was listening in, but you probably weren't speaking, yeah? Well, I was talking on your cell phone in public as a sure way to be rude. But a lot of times these are blind, or like one-way blind calls. Yeah. We were listening to people to describe books. Right. I mean, we were listening to our sales director at the press, and we were listening to some of the other marketing folks who were there, each presenting their books and talking through the key points. So there's, I mean, there's room for questioning, of course, when something comes up, and sometimes they'll seek out feedback, especially if there's something regional. The group that I work for represents my many, many, many body publishers to 12 states of bookstores here in the Middle League country. So, you know, there's often questions about regional, you know, if somebody's coming to one of the cities here in the Midwest, okay, is there a bookstore we can tie this to, or is there, you know, what do you know, or who do you know? But most of these sales conference presentations are, you know, like this, kind of a one-way street. And I said, you represent many presses, but how many titles might that be that you're representing in a sales? The large scary number is I travel around my territory twice a year. So there's two seasons. Books are published in one of those seasons. And in the aggregate, there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 books that I'm selling each season. So that's your book, sitting with 4,999, that's being presented in one or two different meetings. Which is one rep. And that's just one rep. Random House has two reps for every, at least two, because they also have children's. But, you know, that's what I said. For every store, and each of them will be presenting like 1,500 to 2,000 titles. So it's easy to get lost. Most of what my job is, is making sure that our books at least aren't getting lost. Other press, that's 25 titles a year. And out of those 1,500, that go out, you know, like 10 or so, we'll be with nine. And I actually spend about half of every month visiting bookstores to make sure that they've gotten copies that they've read them, that they've heard about them appropriately. It's kind of a mop up job. But, those people that I'm always mopping up with are represented today. Because you're the problem. You have Conrad. One of Jason's colleagues is a man named Conrad who has read just about every book and loved just about every book that I've sent him. I do make an effort to only send the books to the right bookseller. I think on a first name basis with about 5,000 booksellers. That's important. It's disturbing. I see them in my sleeve. You too, buddy. But the last link in this chain from translator to publisher to sales rep is Jason before it gets to the buyer. And you want to tell them a little bit about the reader. He is the buyer. What Jeff was saying earlier about translation being a genre, when I get presented books I don't think of books as being in a genre. I am sitting there trying to get the rep to relate to me why this book should be in the store why I should be stocking it. How are my customers going to find out about it? What's the importance of the book? And a lot of times it's people like Jeff that does hound me constantly. Call me. Emails. Call me. Who really makes me take notice of certain books. We get into the right booksellers' hands. We get the reads. And that's really important. Is having your publisher make sure that there's available early reading copies of the book out. The sales on the book will just change if I start off with display quantity in the store compared to you just representing it as a single copy. But I do sit through a lot of appointments when Mesjak comes through. It's a long day. There's drinks. There's beer. That is the thing about publishing. It's always drinks. We have finished off at my house over a case of beer at times. And so it's all about the rep's enthusiasm over the book that he gets from the editors that hopefully come down from marketing different layers that I don't have to deal with. And he's going to bring me all the information the promotions, the possible reviews and his enthusiasm and I would say John is probably one of the best. If he's really enthusiastic about a book he would bring his accounts, his key accounts copies of the book to be read and to pass around. And his enthusiasm in fact he dropped a book off yesterday I don't think it was a book in translation. But he was talking to my book sellers as he was walking through the store and he remarked to me today because I wasn't there. He remarked to me this morning that he'd be shocked if the book was still on my desk. It was, but I could tell I had been thrown around. It had been handled. My desk is fair game. And so that's kind of how I look at translation. I do care about who the translator is personally for what I read. You know, like the what did I say, Jenny or Fendak? Her end of days. This is the first time I saw a galley of her book, a galley of one of her early translations by Susan Bernofsky. And when I finally saw it, I've never seen an arc of any of her translations early. And we had three people read the book ahead of time and we're selling it really nicely. It's at the front of the store. It'll be there through the holidays. And I think that's new direction. It is. New direction. And it's, you know, it means so much to get that early read out there. It's good for the rest. It's good for us. And we really rely on that early kind of read to know who to sell it to. As soon as I finished that book, I knew six customers that I just talked the book up to and handed the book when it came in to the customer. So it's very important. And that's how books are sold. It's pretty much one by one for the last part. I know that I can visit a store in Richmond, Virginia. I get little lists of where our books are selling. And so I can track by city and based on that I can actually break it down by account by which bookstores are selling our books. And if I show up at a store in Richmond, Virginia and I sell 40 copies over the next three weeks, I mean that puts them over most metropolitan areas of any size. And this is how it's done. We need the most information, the most opportunities and the translators are really the people who I was best suited to get it to us. For most translators, speaking specifically what Antonia was recommending, when you finish your book, when you finish the productions, that's when you really have to start working. It's a lot of work. You don't always get paid for it, but if they do sleep on your couch sometimes there's extra money to pay you out of the cultural institute funding, for instance. And there are other things you can do to help the publicity persons such as translate interviews with the writer that exists in the original language, because they don't have access to that stuff. You do. You can be that middleman and you cannot know what prizes they should be putting the book in for. You can place pieces of the book with literary journals online in advance. That's another good way of getting people knowing about the book. All the time you're helping the publicist who's trying to sell 50 different books that week. This also speaks to what marketing is. You keep talking about really great publicity ideas. What marketing tends to be is the thing that aids discovery. That brings the book to the reader somehow. It's the thing that links together publicity and sales. It's kind of an overarching strategy. It's what makes what you do into an actual commodity. Which doesn't sound beautiful, I know. It's funny you said the word discovery, Jeff. I noticed there's, I don't know how many independent bookstores there are left in the country. They're growing now. There's more bookstores around the country in the United States now than there were last year. This is the third at least year in a row that we've seen this trend increasing. So that's good. A number of the, most of the independent bookstores belong to regional bookselling associations around the country. There's about 10 or 12 of them. A number of them this year started referring to their annual trade show as a show of discovery. For a long time the buzzword among independence was curation. We were looking down the collection into just the stuff that belongs which is a good way of thinking about it because it was a good response to their online competition which can theoretically stock everything that they're contractually working with. But then it also casts a bookstore as a museum. Right, exactly. And I don't know if the discovery thing came about as an intentional response to that. I think it's sort of trickle down from marketing terminology to discovery and awareness being the key ideas. But really everything we've talked about is just different ways of approaching helping the next level discover these books and the magic within them. I'm looking for some sort of hint, some sort of glow that I can then share. But if the marketer doesn't know about it then I don't know about it to pass it on. The phrase that you used earlier, a hook to hang it on, the most apt because that's what everybody's looking for. I mean that's what you're looking for when you're selling it to an editor and that's what they're looking for when they pitch it to me and we all need to find that right hook which is a boxing term, unrelated. One thing I was very impressed in this country I was at Book Expo America this year with an author and it's the first time I've been there for that and they had a day before the actual book fair opened when there were just booksellers admitted which I've never seen that before we don't have that with the London book fair and that was wonderful and these booksellers were really enthusiastic and they were queuing to talk to my writer and everything, it was a really really good feeling and then after everything was over I went off to the small town in Massachusetts where my stepmother lives and there in the bookshop was my book small place and I said to the guy who owns the bookstore who's a friend because I go there quite often I said how come you've already got this and he said our person was there at BA saw this, oh it's yours oh you know, he didn't realise it was mine so thank you Book Expo America He's the only person I think who's ever thanked Yeah I know Don't knock it It was her first trip there It was her first time Was it those green pills they handed me at the door? Oh I see But if anyone has any questions I think we can probably move on to that Yeah Yeah I'm wondering if they said right off the bat they can put up a website and talk to a couple people but the promotion is really on me and so I'm sort of flying on this human hand but I'm wondering if you can show me what I shouldn't do and also another question I would be judicious with the books I hand out so like when is it better to hand out a hard copy instead of the like Ask the person you're about to give it to if they read electronically because if they don't you're wasting that tiny little bit of electrons but then if they don't if they say I don't read ebooks then it's probably a better use of your time to publish books What language is it from? I'm just wondering if there's things that I might What you want to make use of I think is that there's an enormous Russian population in this country and if you think about large parts of New York Boston area there's a great Russian population and one of the things we looked at with this Polish book I translated about the Czechs was where are the Czechs in America or something like that but they're all sitting there more but you can use that because you can bet for instance with Polish books there's a lot of polls who live in Green Point in New York so there's a wonderful Polish library and there's a wonderful lady who runs the library who is more than keen to have us come and promote Polish books there so Sean will protest and I bet you there are Russian libraries Russian community and okay you're not trying to sell to Russians specifically because they can read the book in Russian however I find that people who are I suppose immigrants isn't the right word because these are people who have been here a long time but they're very very interested and often there's a whole next generation that is cut off from their own original culture and language they want to know about it so if I had a book like that with a tiny publisher and no money I would try to set up and supposing I don't know if your author can come here or but you can do this on your own you can set up library events where you read from the book and talk about him a bit and just do a little show and you can do that same thing in each place but try and make use initially of those Russian communities public libraries are very good I quite often started doing in Britain a little show where I talk about various books that I've translated and I read little bits and make it quite varied and short pieces so I don't bore people and then I have a few books to sell and it's always really really successful so that would be my advice on that The Russians, the Poles, the Chinese in any city where they have any sizable population they have they're on media and those newspapers are very well and it's a start they may not be the only people you want to sell a book to but it's a very good place and yeah I would inquire about I mean, you know, even it might not be that expensive to advertise in some of those newspapers but even if you can't do that just to make some contacts with some of the editors there to let them know about there's also, because we there's also often radio stations for those communities we have a Polish slightly public access television station and we've done your views with doctors on camera and the thing that we find is that particularly with the most established ex-backed communities and we found this with government Poles would buy a book because they read it in Polish years ago and they bought it to give to their American people they want, I get this in Britain a lot, there's a lot of Polish recent immigrants to Britain and of course all the British men see those Polish girls and you know, nature takes over but the Polish girls want their British boyfriends to know about their culture so they come and buy these books at these events but there's it really doesn't seriously, I've seen it happen with that book that's the thing they want to share with all the recent immigrants that's how we get a fourth generation of those and speaking to the idea that you might look amateurish I mean, I am anti-professional that is true there are many people who know about it for how unprofessional I can be but I don't believe sometimes that the veneer of professionalism is good for books discovery it helps that book fade away I don't know, it's easier to get lost over because everything presented the same way so your passion is more important than some publicity publishers name at the top of a piece of paper in fact, I have known publishers send out books and I've said, I'll send it to so and so he'd be really good to read it or she'd be really good and they say, oh no, it will send it you're not sending it and then there's no, it does like what the Poles say to a compote, I don't know how to say it in English but like a stone into it down a well but then I've sometimes subsequently sent that book myself with a personal note and got a response because these people are being bombarded with professional stuff and often it's your love and your passion that will actually be far more attractive than something official looking that's something I don't do anymore is I don't type letters everything I send out is handwritten interesting a personal pitch in a handwritten letter is so much more useful than anything that just looks like a press release because I've thrown away more press releases than I've read yes, no one reads them there's a question here that being said I mean is there any market in the country of the original author or an English version or for that matter what you're working on is the psychological response of a man living in Portugal fictional but under the crushing economic situation and perhaps even what would the English version do perhaps even in the European Union is a hopeful I mean definitely from the books I translated absolutely because there's a huge population of Indians who simply wouldn't read the Hindi version for any reason so I translated Will that's simply published in India in terms of the sort of ideal marketing though it's published first in the West either in the US or the UK to get that sort of glow of legitimacy and then oh yes this is something very interesting but I don't know that any of us can speak directly to how a book would be sold in Europe next year an editor on the panel well then only maybe the way translation rights are carved up like I only ever end up with at least now I mean in the past I've had stuff that had rolled in with rights but 95% of the books that I work on are either North America or the United States but uh you love it that why you got it free hi I also commented that English in China is very much a prestige language so I have a friend who is a an editor in China who agreed to sort of serve as a representative for my it's a book of translations a poetry book very long and poetic and those he managed to get it into some major bookstores in China it's actually been selling I think better than it's I was wondering is that actually could end up being the case it's just that when people in China are very interested in reading I'm like such a nice story it's like when can I get the next slide over but my question is so to the bookstore I'm going to see is my book air don't be guilty really okay thank you and if it isn't that I'm feel guilty that is my question so if you don't what do you do as the translator can you is there anything you can do to get your book in there I say hello my name is Antonia Lloyd-Jones I translate from the polish I have a very good friend named Jason Grudewald who translates from Hindi and I like to tell you about how fantastic his book is and that you should have it I do get people to go and ask for the book and then to order it oh really most of my relatives have had to do this oh you haven't got it but didn't you see this review but I was so hoping to get it but we can order it how quick can you get it the other question is when you do that's great okay I'm glad I have some friends to do that any of you do don't laugh you absolutely shouldn't and library acquisitions too educate them and if you do find your book is it useful to buy it like yourself if you have a decent contract you should be able to buy it from the publisher to discount it oh we sold a copy of it kind of priming the pumper that's what relatives are for is there anything your relatives don't do even poorer than she is they didn't have to read they didn't have to read the famous you get one some questions so many book reviewers and review editors read bloggers to know what to look for and book sellers read them and book sellers very frequently argue so if you can get away with distributing electronic copies assuming of course that your publisher doesn't have the budget to distribute to every blogger there are not people that I don't send books to because I don't know what's going to work sometimes there are people that I'll send them faster but a book blogger is depending on the size of the blog the readership almost always not a bad idea there's a very good blog called Pen Atlas if anyone's interested which exists promote translated books so take a look at Pen Atlas on the English Pen website and you may, there's a possibility that you can offer them something maybe write something yourself or have something by the author so they're always looking for good ideas I always thought for the next book I'd translate what I'd like to do sort of keep an ongoing blog-ish diary of the different translation choices I made and kind of allowing people to peek behind the scenes and maybe packaging that as sort of a deluxe edition box set type of thing or if not that then at least have the link there maybe in the book where people who are curious about that sort of thing could go and that's also serves various purposes too helping to educate people about translation and the process people love those things and you write about what you're doing or you write about from the translation point of view about your experience of a book and you can write a nice blog and there are various places to put them on the internet lots of good places and some of those people those editors who publish things like that are here can't see any of that isn't there a session on online journals maybe it's on right now but those people they're helpful in that way and one of the things I do is I spend a lot of time soliciting recommendations from booksellers and once I have them I find something that's spectacularly well written I say hey do you want to meet a review editor because I think you should be a reviewer too and building an additional extra reviewing like core reviewers for books seems to be one of the most important things to be doing so whenever I find anybody he has even a glimmer of intelligence and it says something that I haven't heard before about a book that I've been pitching to people I'll say I want to put you in touch with other people I want you to be writing about books and even if they're not mine because building up that kind of a culture where everyone is interested in everything that they could be writing about it I mean a book that's unreviewed never happened even a bad review which publicists will say sometimes there's no such thing as a bad review I mean I'm with them I don't use it as part of a conversation that's happening like somebody criticizing your book is an opportunity for somebody else to defend it not you don't ever don't engage but uh and I get a lot of translations people send me their translations publishers, translators and I'm starting to write more about what I read in translation because I'm getting all these books and I feel terrible that I don't read enough translations and I want the publishers to be recognized and I want the translators to be recognized and so my point to you after the vloggers don't just look at book vloggers per se but but look at people who might write about translation look at people who write about the culture but look at people who write about that and to follow up on what Jeff said about books that don't get reviewed I don't necessarily write about every book that I talk about I may not write about a book on my vlog but if the library asks about something you can mention this book a book that is undiscussed right because there is a lot of discussion that goes on online people email me all the time I get lots of things what do you remember from the year would you recommend a book from the old cut to me but if somebody has specific criteria I'm looking for a book about world war 2 that wrote about translation and I haven't read a book but I might still recommend it there's a lot of odd ways that I try to make people read books even if I haven't read them but I've heard about them so cast the blind net there's actually a subset of book bloggers there's a whole cadre of book bloggers who seem to exist just to echo their own echoes and they self-identify as book bloggers but the larger community I think is what I was thinking about while you were talking I mean I belong to a certain other communities you guys have a really solid community here of translators and world literature experts reaching outside of that thinking a slightly broader about the publication of the things that you're working on getting to know booksellers there's a very diverse and active group on Twitter Tumblr of booksellers and publishing people there's nothing stopping you from engaging them talking about your books genuinely, excited that's right but like you say, you're a person who blogs about words and books not a book blogger and people like you everywhere are probably going to be interested in your books how big are we talking? well I think one thing the book I cast I did was one of the lucky ones that's nice but then other ones including whoever that's on the phone had not been chosen it was one of the ones where they said well we'll publish this but we're not going to sell any it's an indictment it was too late by the time I figure out that they're not doing anything it's the sort of yeah I wouldn't take no for an answer on that even if some of the books are getting wonderful marketing budget and they're really putting 50 grand into selling it which is very nice I would still try to get to know the people in the publicity department at some level it may not be very easy but it's worth trying and try just write to them just write to them saying oh I'm so thrilled with what you did with such and such a book for me it's really nice and I'm very grateful and I particularly like this or by the way did you know this and this and I've got this coming up and it will be so nice to meet you I hope we'll have a chance one day just write a kind of friendly letter like that appreciate what they're doing and be a human being and address them as one and see where you get see where you get to and that must be very annoying because I mean oddly enough as a translator of Polish I have really worked with very big major publishers who have loads of money and they've built things I'm about to have this experience but it's interesting that it's not always because they don't want people to perceive, they want people to forget that it's a translated book don't they they don't like translation they're a bit allergic to it well then they've got to be educated that's what I think it's about time they learnt and everybody can learn that translation isn't some sort of weird thing oh I've got to read the subtitles no I know people who won't watch film because it's subtitled I mean what the hell kind of nonsense is that and it's the same as I'd rather read it but anyway we have to get these people educated don't take note for a moment they can move our way and those publicists they may their boss their mandate may be to just not to worry about, don't bother the little translator, they did their work let's go they're looking for a hope too your author should be able to help you too get your author to treat you like a co-author I don't know what the author's like in this case but yeah, well the author can help you with that by making a noise yes but they are wary of it they have this thing about it yeah I'm a translator and I don't bite I don't put people off you know, perhaps I do but but it's this perception that people don't want to read translated works so the translated name is going to be tiny at the back and we're going to pretend that this was written in English I'm preoccupied I have no idea where that thinking comes from I've never met a bookstore customer who gave one any kind of a damn who wrote the book really they want to know if it's good it's one of the great myths of publishing short stories don't sell, novellas are hard maybe we should make a video all to next gear a mock horror movie of a reader discovering a book has been translated and all sorts of terrible things happen and the zombies start coming out we can send that to publishers realize how long it is the translators are coming you mean it was written in a foreign language when English was good enough for Jesus Christ read that question oh hey correct yes yes yes yes since then publishers were approaching book after book last time we translated the same also nothing other than but I enjoyed it and I don't consider like them to be better translators what they have to do also God will do himself in not even this writer about the not that sensitivity and the issues that there are especially regarding the Arab Spring so I think it's a little sad that there might be better translators out there and better writers out there will not take any problem because well you know about them because you have that language and you have access to their work so why don't you try and promote the other authors work to the publishers who are coming to you begging for you can take advantage of that sort of crack in the door that you've got and you can also recommend other translators if you know them so I would take that opportunity there are a lot of translators who do that kind of their free time but I read an Arabic blog that Marcia Qualey puts out and she's a translator she's also the only person I know who's writing thoroughly about their literature there's there's a book called Love German Books there's Translationista these are all translators driven a report does really on what's happening in this particular literature and a lot of it hasn't been made available to English readers in any way and there's a lot of favors you could be doing for people there's probably someone at this conference who would be only too happy there's someone who's looking for work we have the speed dating service out of all time it's an author intensive I've seen a sales report is there any sales rooms for booklets? does that make sense at all? ordinarily I'd say yeah but energy range that sounds fine but it also sounds like a real pain in the ass won't you fail for you drink? oh yeah here's the thing there is room but at least you have to find it in a bar honestly once there's some kind of social connection made and alcohol helps really there's room for almost anything I'd imagine well look at it this way I'll be downstairs have I mentioned that my problem with Jeff is his ulterior motives depending on who publishes you your works the secret is if you get the catalog that your book is in at the very back of the book is a list of who the sales reps are usually or at least what the companies are or what companies handling sales as Jeff said those who are distributed through the random house monolith call it that they're kept pretty remote but they exist they travel one night and get to know your local books walk into a bookstore and introduce yourself let me know what you said before we've had translators in our neighborhood we weren't carrying them but we didn't realize they lived in our neighborhood and as soon as we realized that we started stocking and making sure they had ignorance in our part not knowing who's around us just walking in and introducing yourself is huge we don't like either we're all fellow travelers if you introduce yourself friendly in a friendly way to your local booksellers they're not going to be offended the Glenn Close model of introducing yourself that usually doesn't go over well but you know from when I was a bookseller I still have a dozen customers who call me up asking for recommendation it's been a few years oh, I'm sorry this is going to be the last question we haven't really talked about online sales specifically when I talk to kind of like I feel like sort of semi lay people like people who are mostly readers but who sort of like follow what's going on in publishing and kind of read the kind of books that I'm interested in one of the things I hear us over and over is that you should get all of your family and friends to a period of time and this is like the most effective thing that you can do do you have any feedback about online sales generally? no our books sell really well on Amazon they're going to continue selling well Amazon's discovery for example is so heavily managed paid for there are not accidents on Amazon once upon a time for reasons I don't want to go into I had about 10 German speaking friends of mine bombard the German translation of the girl with golden parasol with fantastic reviews on Amazon DE well if nothing else it felt good to sort of feel like I kind of gained the system over and over I don't know I don't know that's the short answer it doesn't hurt as long probably as long as they're not obvious put-ups because sometimes I read reviews I'm like well this was the author you can see that yeah I don't like real last one it's the it's true nobody sheds out your boss but not my boss forget about that they can be great intermediaries they can be great intermediaries and have a disability worth more chuckle thanks for that thank you I was hoping you'd be able to provide we are going to have something awesome