Joy,
Re your comments below:
> 1. We USians are at fault for being English-only.
If
> I weren't
> linguistically incompetent, I could go to
amazon.de,
> etc., the way I go to
> amazon.uk (although I encountered some
language
> barriers there, too).
> 2. From what I've heard novelist acquaintances
say,
> the income they get from
> their books is peanuts. Translating isn't cheap,
and
> you probably couldn't
> get a good (above Babelfish level) translator
to
> work on a possible
> percentage sometime in the future, the way
writers
> do.
Jeremiah Healy, who's a wheel with International Association
of Crime Writers, spoke of this at MWA's Of Dark and Stormy
Nights symposium in June. His points coincided with your
almost exactly.
Most European editors are multi-lingual, so if an British or
American mystery is submitted to them, they can read it in
the original language, decide if they want to publish, THEN
pay for a translation.
By contrast, most American editors are uniligual, and must
pay to have to expensive translation done before they can
even CONSIDER publishing the book. The inevitable economic
consequence is that many European mysteries end up not
getting published here.
JIM DOHERTY
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