NEW YORK: Parts one, two and three of my series on scouting looked at American efforts to sell American books overseas. Today, this fourth and final installment of the series looks at the other side of the equation and brings us to a question most scouts run into sooner or later, often posed by one of their foreign publishing clients: Why is it so hard for foreign authors to get published in the US? It’s clear to anyone working in international rights that the sophisticated marketplace involving scouts, rights sellers and foreign publishers that exists to get American books out into the world does not exist to the same degree in the other direction.
The Language Barrier
That said, the issue is more complex, and in defense of the Americans, despite the cliché, I have found that we’re not the only country with language barriers. I would argue there aren’t necessarily more Dutch or Italian or Russian editors than there are in the United States who have enough of a command of, say, Spanish, to evaluate a manuscript. European countries may have old colonial connections or regional affinities that encourage some cross-pollination, but the ideal of a market that provides equal access to writers from any language or region is hard to find (France, with its strict cultural protections, might come closest).
So by what standards are Americans being judged? By the fact that a high percentage of editors in other countries do speak English well enough to read and evaluate a manuscript. In fact, for many, that’s their primary job, and one they may have been performing for decades. That, quite simply, is the difference.
There has been a hegemony for years of English-language books being translated into many other languages, a cultural phenomenon comparable (though much smaller in scale) to US dominance of the worldwide film market. Bestselling American authors like Michael Crichton and John Grisham and Danielle Steele and Stephen King have, in translation, reliably topped bestseller lists around the world. As the market for matching these authors to publishers abroad matured, it opened the door to less commercial writers and other genres (in nonfiction, for example, American business books continue to be in high demand).
Diversity as a Detriment
There is no comparably mature translation market for any one language in the English speaking world, and the fact that books coming into the American market come from many different countries and languages makes it harder for editors here to develop the expertise in what any market has to offer, and which books from that country have the best shot of appealing to American readers. The books that are sold for translation here are more likely to come through the handful of US agents with close ties to one region or another, who are themselves usually working through professional relationships with particular agents or publishers abroad. What books by foreign authors that end up crossing an American editor’s desk, then, depends in no small part on chance and good connections. Rachel Kahan, a Senior Editor at Putnam who reads fluently in Spanish, admits, “If they don’t have a US agent and they aren’t being conspicuously packaged for the US sale, which is the case a lot of the time, I tend to luck into things.”
There are some instances where the absence of an American agent offers a savvy editor the advantage of speed, but in most cases American representation makes things easier.
“Not all editors in the business have relationships with their colleagues overseas or with foreign agents, so if there’s an American on board, I think in some cases it lends the project a little more visibility,” said Kahan. “And also if there’s an American agent there’s usually a translation or a partial translation of the book itself. That [US] subagent will have packaged it in a way that’s the most accessible and maximizes its potential for the American market. Whereas when it’s been an author that I’ve discovered, then I’m doing all of that work myself. [I'm] the one saying, ‘You really have to trust me here, I think this is going to work, I’m staking my reputation on it.’”
Making Translations Work
As for what makes a translation more likely to succeed in the market, well, the factors are going to sound very familiar. First, the book’s author should be able to help the publisher promote the book, preferably in English. As an example, Weil mentions Words Without Borders: Writings from the Middle East, an anthology coming up in 2010 edited by author and television political commentator Reza Aslan. “I’m incredibly excited about that book,” says Weil, “not only is the literature gorgeous, Reza Aslan is a great promoter and he’s on television. That will be very good for this book. This is a case where we may be in great shape.”
Kahan emphatically agrees, citing authors Marek Halter, the French-speaking author of religious historical fiction whose books she acquired while working at Crown, and Luis Miguel Rocha, the Portuguese author of the thrillers The Last Pope and The Holy Bullet, which she publishes at Putnam.
“Both speak reasonably good English and are very charismatic and very interesting,” says Kahan, “and in both cases they came to New York, they met our sales people, they were involved in the publicity of the book. And, yes, that made a really big difference.”
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