Do you need a foreign publisher to come out in another language?

No, you do not. You can bring a book out in another language entirely on your own, and you can also sell the rights to a local publisher who will do it for you. Both routes are real, and they differ on almost every axis: who pays, who decides, and how long it takes.

The right question is not which route is better, but which one is open to you right now.

What a foreign publisher actually does

A publisher in another country buys a licence from you to bring the book out in their language. They pay for the translation, design a new cover, print, distribute to shops, and try to get reviews.

In return they take most of the income and you get a percentage. Sometimes there is an advance up front.

What you are buying in that deal is not mainly money — it is local presence. A bookshop in Berlin will not order a book by an author it has never heard of, but it will order a book from a publisher it has worked with for twenty years.

Why this is not really open to everyone

Because a foreign publisher has to hear about you.

In practice they reach a book in one of three ways: a literary agent who represents you and pitches it, a book fair where rights are traded, or a striking success in the original language that reached their ears.

If you have no agent, if the book did not sell unusual numbers in the language it was written in, and if nobody is presenting it at fairs — this route simply will not open by itself. That is not a judgement on the book. It is how this world works.

What the second route involves

On the independent route you pay for the translation, decide on the cover and the price, and publish in the online stores yourself.

The advantage is obvious: nobody has to approve it, and the income is all yours. You also keep the rights, and can sell them later if the book takes off.

The disadvantage is just as obvious: you have no presence in physical shops in that country, nobody to talk to the local press, and the marketing is all yours. A good book in a new language with nobody who knows it is a book readers will not find on their own.

How to choose between them

Ask yourself three questions.

Does anybody have a reason to want this particular book in that country? A book about a very local subject rarely interests a foreign publisher; a book in a popular genre interests them more.

How much time do you have? Selling rights is a process of months to years, including the search, the negotiation and the publisher's own schedule. The independent route moves at your pace.

And what are you willing to manage? On the independent route you are the publisher, with everything that involves.

What is worth doing either way

Before any decision, check that the rights really are yours and that you are free to bring the book out in another language. If you signed a contract in the past, the answer is in it. We wrote about that in who owns the translation rights.

And check whether there are readers for your book at all in the language you are considering, before you invest in it. We went into that choice in which language to translate into, and the rest of the questions are collected in our frequently asked questions.