{"id":307896,"date":"2018-03-06T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-06T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2018\/03\/06\/context-is-everything\/"},"modified":"2018-07-21T10:47:11","modified_gmt":"2018-07-21T14:47:11","slug":"context-is-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2018\/03\/06\/context-is-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Context Is Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given the length of yesterday\u2019s post,<\/a> I\u2019m just going to jump right into things, starting with this handmade Excel spreadsheet showing the three-year rolling average of the total number of translations published in the first quarter (January-March) of every year since 2008.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the most illuminating line graph the world has seen, but it should put things into perspective. For months I\u2019ve been pointing out that the number of translations coming out in 2018 is way<\/em> down from past years. For 2018, we have logged in 104 titles for January through March, whereas we had info on 153 titles in 2017 and 149 in 2016.<\/p>\n

That said, when you look at this over a three-year period to give the numbers a bit of perspective, we\u2019re at the same level that we were at in 2016, which is higher than every year prior.<\/em> In other words, we\u2019re coming off of two years with historically high output (well, \u201chistorically,\u201d given that we only have eleven years of data) of literature in translation, so there\u2019s bound to be a bit of regression. I\u2019m still concerned, but not alarmed. Maybe. At least not tonight. Not about that, anyway.<\/p>\n

Instead, let\u2019s look at another chart. This one is a chart of the LTD<\/span> (life-to-date) Nielsen BookScan numbers for all twenty-four works of fiction in translation that came out in January 2018. (We\u2019ll get into the accuracy of BookScan numbers below, but this visual is pretty striking regardless.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(The x-axis is for each title published in January 2018.)<\/p>\n

Anyone want to guess which title is way over there at the left, screwing up all the optics? Anyone? The Perfect Nanny<\/em>! It has 27,399 scanned copies as of the time of writing. For the moment, I\u2019ll eliminate this book just so that this graph is actually useful to look at.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There we go! There\u2019s a chart that\u2019s somewhat legible! Again, any guesses as to what\u2019s over at the far left? Pyramid of Mud<\/em> by Andrea Camilleri (4,461) followed by Frankenstein in Baghdad<\/em> by Ahmed Saadawi (2,689).<\/p>\n

Worth noting: All three of the top-selling books are published by Penguin. In fourth place is Beneath the Mountain<\/em> by Luca D\u2019Andrea, published by HarperCollins, and the only other<\/em> book to scan over 1,000.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s dig deeper into that for a minute. Here\u2019s a pie chart of the number of translations that came out in January from the Big Five and their subsidiaries (Penguin, HarperCollins, FSG<\/span>, Atria) compared to those from everyone else (including Europa, Archipelago, NYRB<\/span>, Dalkey Archive, Open Letter, New Vessel, etc.):<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And here\u2019s a chart with the breakdown of sales between Big Five and the others:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Well that\u2019s . . . something. Huh. Shit. How about if we remove sales of The Perfect Nanny<\/em>?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That looks slightly more hopeful for those of us not working in corporate publishing? Maybe?<\/p>\n

This data is by no means surprising. Corporate publishers have much better representation in bookstores, dedicated sales reps, legit marketing budgets, so many employees working on any given book, more respect from reviewers, etc. I know some editors from these presses love to say that their books sell better because \u201cwe don\u2019t market these books as translations!\u201d or \u201cwe just focus on readers and good books!\u201d and a dozen other trite statements that are half-true and half-based in a dismissal of the economic disparities in the publishing world.<\/p>\n

So, there are two ways forward with the data for the next part of this post, and I\u2019m going to do both and then work it all out at the end. The numbers might get a bit messy here, but bear with me\u2014it\u2019s not like we\u2019re talking about tOPS+ or z-swing% or anything like that.<\/p>\n

First off, BookScan. These numbers are for physical books only<\/em> and are collected from about 75% of bookselling outlets. This includes B&N and Amazon, but a lot of smaller stores aren\u2019t signed up for the program. And it doesn\u2019t include in-house sales. I feel like it captures more sales for commercial titles than for small press ones, since we rely on individual subscriptions and sales through small, quirky locations. Regardless, for the sake of this piece, I\u2019m going to assume these numbers are 75% of all print sales.<\/p>\n

Then, to make the rest of this work, I\u2019m going to assume that every ebook sold 20% of what the hardcover did. Cool? I know this is way underestimating the ebook sales for AmazonCrossing, but it\u2019s not like this is anything more than a reasonable estimate to prove one really depressing point.<\/p>\n

OK, so in my little spreadsheet, I divided the BookScan numbers by .75 to get them to \u201cmore accurate\u201d levels, multiplied that by .2 to get an ebook sales estimate, and multiplied each by the appropriate price to get an estimate of total sales revenue. Then I multiplied that number by 50% to account for the average discount to booksellers\/Amazon\/Costco\/B&N\/individual web sales. Now I have a fairly reasonable idea of how much these January 2018 titles have generated so far.<\/p>\n

Before I get into these numbers\u2014including mean, median, standard deviation, and more!\u2014I want to point out that I know<\/em> these books will sell more copies over the ensuing months. And every so often we\u2019ll check in with them and see what\u2019s changed. By the end of the year, we should have a decent sense of how these particular editions did. We\u2019ll probably be able to pick out some sleeper hits, some titles that will crush in backlist, and some total flops. But aside from The Perfect Nanny<\/em>, Frankenstein in Baghdad<\/em>, and that Camilleri book (someone I\u2019ve never read, never will), I doubt these numbers will dramatically<\/em> change. Books that don\u2019t take off in the first month or so, usually don\u2019t do so well in the long run. Unless you do something special for them to try and get things moving (see the Two Month Review<\/em>, special discounts, etc.).<\/p>\n

At this moment, here are the numbers I came up with for BookScan+ (using reported numbers as 75% of total) plus estimated ebook sales (20% of BookScan+) :<\/p>\n

Average Sales for a Jan 2018 Translation: 2,560<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not bad! But that includes two outliers\u2014The Perfect Nanny<\/i> at 43,838 and Congo Inc.<\/em> at 0. Let\u2019s cut them because that\u2019s skewing our already very small sample:<\/p>\n

Average Sales w\/o Top and Bottom: 800<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh fuck.<\/p>\n

Average Sales for Big Five Title: 7,404
\nAverage Sales for Other Title: 147<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, OK then. But mean is boring. If these were all from the same press, then maybe it would make sense, but it\u2019s probably smarter to look at the median and the standard deviation from the mean. (In other words, what book is in the middle, away from the extremely good and extremely bad; and how much variation does there tend to be with these sales, are you likely to sell somewhere between 500-5,000 or 500-600?)<\/p>\n

Median for All Books: 210
\nMedian for Big Five: 1,629
\nMedian for Others: 46<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ouch.<\/p>\n

Standard Deviation for All Books: 8,945 (Which is nonsense. It\u2019s 1,714 when you get rid of The Perfect Nanny<\/em>.)
\nStandard Deviation for Big Five: 14,919
\nStandard Deviation for Others: 189<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, in other words, if this data is representative of the whole (spoiler: still a small sample, although the general trends are probably true), then 67% of Big Five translations will sell between 5,775 and 9,033 copies. And for the translations coming from smaller presses? Most will sell between 0 and 193. That\u2019s really bad.<\/p>\n

Just to back this up, here are some non-AmazonCrossing books that scanned less than 150 physical copies: Theory of Shadows<\/em> (FSG<\/span>), Temple of the Scapegoat<\/em> (ND), Mademoiselle Bambu<\/em> (Wakefield), The Same Night Awaits Us All<\/em> (Open Letter), Animal Gazer<\/em> (New Vessel), Transit Comet Eclipse<\/em> (Dalkey Archive), and Sonka<\/em> (Dalkey Archive).<\/p>\n

Again, these books will sell more copies going forward, but how many exactly? Three times the numbers we have right now? So, like 400? Does that make you feel better?<\/p>\n

Before I just puddle out in a mess of anxiety and despair, let\u2019s get some cash numbers out there and try and make this as positive as possible and see what happens. (Again, I\u2019ll be coming back to these January books every few months\u2014and maybe some others\u2014in hopes of getting a clear picture of the revenue side of publishing translations. Which will probably explain why the number of translations being published is bottoming out. But by the end of 2018, we\u2019ll have some new strategies? Hope for the future? A list of suicide cults to join?) Let\u2019s take the revenue numbers I came up with and multiply them by six<\/em>. I don\u2019t know that the estimated sales I\u2019ve come up with tonight will go up by 600% over the next ten months, but I don\u2019t know that they won\u2019t.<\/em> So let\u2019s all dream!<\/p>\n

So, multiplying these sales figures by six<\/em> and then by 50% to account for discounts to booksellers (I\u2019m sure most everyone knows this, but we don\u2019t get the full list price when we sell a book, the bookstore needs to get their cut as well), we get these figures:<\/p>\n

Average Income for Non-Big Five Presses: $7,881.53
\nMedian Income for Non-Big Five Presses: $1,849.97
\nStandard Deviation for Non-Big Five Presses: $10,628.76<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well that\u2019s not as hopeful as I was hoping it would be. And that doesn\u2019t event take into account that 26%+ of this income is paid to your distributor. Include that payment, and the average translation (from Jan 2018, which, whatever, if you want to believe it\u2019s a whole lot better, than go for it\u2014delusions are nice) generates about $6,000 in income. Which has to pay for printing, book rights, design, editorial, marketing, and the translator.<\/p>\n

There are two main points to be made here:<\/p>\n

1) If you\u2019re a translation-only press and don\u2019t have other income, you are fucked. New Directions has a massive backlist and a lot of American writers (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams) to both balance out the sales of these books, and to give them the credibility to help their translations get more traction than those from other presses. No one else can be New Directions. And Europa has Ferrante. And crime books, which are at the higher end of this sales spectrum. (There\u2019s a future article to be written about overall publishing strategies. Tip #1: Only publish translations that UK presses have successfully published. See: A lot of Archipelago, New Directions, and Transit Books books.) As optimistic as I used to be about a revolution of international literature and how small presses can make it work (that was back when people actually liked me, not like how it is today, when life is so lonely and filled with defensive despair), I don\u2019t think you can just do only translations and get by\u2014unless you have significant nonprofit support. Duh and or obviously, I know, but still, it sucks that the boom of presses opening up the American literary scene to international literature lasted about a decade. Mostly because the economics of publishing are fucked and the audiences just aren\u2019t there. (Will Evans of Deep Vellum and I went through about a million BookScan data points one afternoon and came up with a lot of sticky facts that I\u2019ll share in another post. They\u2019re not that encouraging.)<\/p>\n

2) Translators deserve more money; yet translators getting more money will kill all translations. On some level this is all a zero-sum game. I sympathize with translators treating every job equally\u2014it takes the same amount of time to translate a 300-page book for a small press as it does for a commercial house\u2014but that doesn\u2019t change the fact that the small presses are at a severe sales disadvantage. What\u2019s likely to happen over the next five years\u2014if we don\u2019t have an open and honest conversation about money and strategy\u2014is that most of these smaller presses doing a lot of translations will go away. The New Directions and Europas and Graywolfs of the world will survive\u2014they have money from a lot of other books and donors\u2014but the next rung down will have to either replace some translations with money-making titles (re: commercial titles written by American authors) or go out of business. The more professionalized the industry becomes, the fewer jobs there will be for translators. Or, there will be well-paid translators working for Penguin Random House, and the publishers who want to do great books but can\u2019t pay translators $200\/1,000 words (~$18,750 for a 300-page title) will find young, uninformed, inexperienced translators to do the work for them. (Another article idea! How strong of a correlation is there between translator reputation and sales, especially if you account for brand strength and author reputation? As much as the translation community talks about \u201creading every book translated by X,\u201d once you take away the editorial strength of the publisher choosing to publish X\u2019s translations, this impact is probably pretty low.)<\/p>\n

Are you depressed? I\u2019m bummed AF. And this is another article that\u2019s too long to read. So let\u2019s leave my other calculations and apocalyptic prognostications for future (equally depressing) posts, and let\u2019s make some comments about some of the interesting books that are coming out this month, but which I probably won\u2019t have time to read. (For now I\u2019ll skip the four I\u2019m planning on reading, since they\u2019ll get their own posts.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Encircling 2: Origins<\/em><\/a> by Carl Frode Tiller, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland (Graywolf)<\/b><\/p>\n

I was hoping to read Encircling 1<\/em> and this sequel this month, but that\u2019s not going to happen. Maybe for Encircling 3: Carl Frode in New York<\/em>. I\u2019ve actually read a huge chunk of the first volume of this when a different translator had been commissioned to translate it for the UK press that originally published these books. (See above note about doing translations that having already been published in the UK.) Why do Norwegians love their Identity Trilogies? This isn\u2019t that far removed from the Jan Kj\u00e6rstad books that Overlook and Open Letter published: The Seducer<\/em>, The Conquerer<\/em>, and The Discoverer.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Neapolitan Chronicles<\/em><\/a> by Anna Maria Ortese, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (New Vessel)<\/b><\/p>\n

This book should be subtitled \u201cFerrante, Ferrante, Ferrante!\u201d Translated by Ferrante\u2019s translator, with a blurb by Ferrante, it \u201chelped inspire\u201d Ferrante\u2019s Neapolitan Quartet, and was edited by Calvino. (OK, the last part is both unrelated to Ferrante and more interesting to me.) To cut the jokes, it sounds pretty interesting, and if you\u2019re in the area, I recommend going to see Giovanna Calvino (Italo\u2019s daughter) do an event for this on 3\/14 at Hofstra University.<\/a> I was on a panel with Giovanna once and was 100% starstruck.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go<\/em><\/a> by Kazuki Kaneshiro, translated from the Japanese by Takami Nieda (AmazonCrossing)<\/b><\/p>\n

I used to love playing Go. (And loved the movie Go<\/em>. I\u2019ll bet that doesn\u2019t hold up at all.) Had a special fancy board and everything. I never played enough to cotton on to any legit strategies, but it was intriguing to me because\u2014at the time\u2014there was no way to play online against a computer. I have deep nostalgia for games that you play with your hands on a physical board.<\/p>\n

I have no idea what this book is about, but I suspect it\u2019s a love story. About two people who meet in the championship match at their local high-school Go tournament. One of them throws the game by blowing a sente<\/em> to get the other one to give eyes.<\/em> They run away together with hopes of starting a family, until one of them starts going blind. Initially they think the blindness is caused by too much Go\u2014those stone can wreck your vision\u2014but then they discover that it\u2019s cancer (always cancer) and that they\u2019re totally fucked seeing that Go professionals have pretty shitty health insurance. So they rob a bank. Using strategies from Go. J-Law plays one of the leads in the Hollywood version.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Banthology: Stories from Banned Nations<\/em><\/a> edited by Sarah Cleave, translated from the Arabic by multiple translators (Deep Vellum)<\/b><\/p>\n

Again: Comma Press, based in the UK, originated this book. (Open Letter needs to stop creating jobs and paying translators and just jumping on this bandwagon. It would make researching books so much easier, and we would be able to cut expenses by not paying translators nearly as much . . .)<\/p>\n

There was a Twitter hubbub after LiteraryHub featured this book, which will hopefully drive sales. Also, Frontier<\/em> by Can Xue made Emily Temple\u2019s annual post<\/a> of \u201cIf Books Had the National Book Awards<\/del> Oscars.\u201d That\u2019s cool! And I suspect this is 100% due to Porochista Khakpour writing the intro. Thank you, Porochista!<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, I don\u2019t care about this article at all. But I do want to point out that my analysis of one-star reviews<\/a> is way better than this.<\/a> Then again, we\u2019re up to different goals in our articles: I want to pretend I\u2019m writing interesting analysis, and The LitHub is just punching those clicks. (And tracking like 5,000 times more than I am. By my Excel calculations, they gets 400,000 visits a month, and I get 50, with a median of \u201cWhy Bother\u201d and a standard deviation of \u201cNerd.\u201d)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals<\/em><\/a> by J. R. Pick, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker (Karolinium Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

I hope this is a children\u2019s book about caring for guinea pigs.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mere Chances<\/em><\/a> by Veronika Simoniti, translated from the Slovenian by Nada Groselj (Dalkey Archive)<\/b><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve covered so many Dalkey Archive titles lately. And haven\u2019t even made fun of ______ in the most recent issue of ________! (If you\u2019ve ever worked at Barbara\u2019s you probably know what I\u2019m implying.) Dalkey has created a plethora of models for how to survive while doing new books that don\u2019t sell for shit. (They have two books on the <100 BookScan sales list above AND they don’t do ebooks, because . . . who knows why.) There are schemes legit and sketch in the Dalkey repertoire, but you kind of have to respect them regardless. John made it to the end. Top-notch writers and translators work for them. They never go to ALTA and yet everyone there would rather be published by Dalkey than Open Letter. (We always go, because . . . befriending translators is good for business? [It’s not.]) Actually, come to think of it, they don’t do any of the bullshit that other presses put themselves through. In so many ways, they won this game. Maybe I’ve been asking the wrong questions all year . . . Next month: A deep dive in to Dalkey Archive.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given the length of yesterday\u2019s post, I\u2019m just going to jump right into things, starting with this handmade Excel spreadsheet showing the three-year rolling average of the total number of translations published in the first quarter (January-March) of every year since 2008.   That\u2019s not the most illuminating line graph the world has seen, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":365006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[66836,1646],"class_list":["post-307896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","tag-2018-translations","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307896"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":331926,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307896\/revisions\/331926"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}