Digital, printed or narrated: where to start in a new language

There are three ways to sell a book: a file people read on a screen, a book on paper, and a voice reading aloud. You do not need all three, and certainly not at the same time. When the book is one you have just translated into a new language, it is almost always right to start with the digital edition and decide about the rest later.

The reason is simple. You do not yet know whether there are readers for this book in this language. The digital edition is the cheap way to find out.

What separates the three formats

Digital is a file. It has no fixed pages, the reader enlarges the letters at will, and it reaches the buyer in a second. If you find a mistake after publishing, you correct it and re-upload, and the next copy sold is the corrected one.

Printed is an object. It has pages, margins, and a page count that decides what printing costs. Correcting a mistake after publication is possible, but it means typesetting again and sometimes a new cover.

Narrated is a production. Somebody sits and reads the whole book aloud, hour after hour, and afterwards the recording is reviewed and fixed. It is the most expensive format and the slowest to change.

Why digital first

Because it makes a mistake cheap.

Translating a whole book is something of a bet even when it is done well. The book may work beautifully in the new language, or it may turn out to lean on local context that does not travel. The digital edition answers that question for you without committing to typesetting, a printed cover and a recording.

There is a second, less obvious advantage: it is the only format you can correct easily. If a reader in the new language writes to tell you there is an odd sentence in chapter seven, you fix it that same week.

When a printed book earns the trouble

When there is already a sign the book works. Dozens of digital sales, a review or two, questions from readers — all of these say there is an audience.

And also: if your book is the kind people buy as a gift — a children's book, a cookbook, a professional book that lives on an office shelf — the printed edition is not an extra but the main event, and it may be worth bringing forward.

Note one technical point. A printed book needs typesetting in the target language, and not every language takes the same number of pages. Text translated into German or Spanish tends to run longer than the original, the page count changes, and that affects printing cost too.

And what about a narrated book

This is the format easiest to fall in love with and hardest to judge in a language you do not speak.

If you do not speak it, you cannot really tell whether the narrator sounds natural, whether they pronounce your heroine's name correctly, or whether the tone suits the book. You will need someone to listen for you — and not someone who listens for five minutes, but to a whole chapter.

That is why it is nearly always the last format. Not because it is not worth it, but because it asks you to trust somebody else more than any other format does.

What this looks like in practice

The sequence that works for most authors goes like this. Release digital, give it a few months, look at whether anything is moving. If it is, add print. If print sells, consider narration.

Before any of that there is one step easy to skip and worth keeping: making sure the translation itself is good. If you do not read the target language, we wrote separately about how to review a translation you cannot read, and also how to explain how your book should sound before work begins.

The rest of the questions that come up at this stage are collected in our frequently asked questions.