Читать книгу The Three Percent Problem - Chad W. Post - Страница 14

So where do translations fit into this? Well, basically they don’t. The famous translator Esther Allen once turned me on to the term “economic censorship” to help explain the financial reasons for why big publishers shy away from doing books in translation.

First off, in deciding to do a translation, a publisher is assuming the cost of paying a translator in addition to all normal expenses.

The current going rate for a translation is $125/1000 words, so, for a 70,000 word novel, a translator should get paid $8,750. That’s not a huge amount—especially compared to Dewey’s $1.25 million—and frequently at least part of this is offset by grants from foreign governments. But on a profit and loss statement, it is an additional cost that doesn’t exist for books originally written in English.

Still, that doesn’t explain why big publishers shy away from translations. They have the money to spend, and if they thought a book would sell hundreds of thousands of copies, $10,000 is really just pocket change. But how many translations sell hundreds of thousands of copies? Answer: almost none. Over the past week, in early November 2008, articles have appeared in both the New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street Journal pointing out just how few translations make the best seller lists. In fact, Roberto Bolaño—currently the hottest author in translation, considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time, and the one foreign author everyone seems to be talking about—has yet to crack the Times Best Seller list.

To be quite frank, with the exception of certain breakouts like Bolaño, Per Petterson, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon (whose books aren’t of the same caliber as the first two), literary fiction in translation sells poorly in the States. I’ve heard that even Saramago was selling in the low thousands (or high hundreds) before winning the Nobel Prize. It’s in no way unusual for a literary translation to sell in the 2,000-copy range. And publishers who sell 4-5,000 copies of a translation feel like they did an excellent job.

Dismal sales figures, along with the additional cost of translation helps make foreign books unappealing to corporate publishers. Sure, you can get the rights on a dime (most advances for literary translations are under $10,000), and you have an almost unlimited number of authors to choose from (rarely do foreign books go to auction), but if you’re only spending a few thousand dollars, your sales and marketing department isn’t going to do much to help this book find its audience. They have to spend their time and energy on the million-dollar advance books—the ones that really matter.

Sales, marketing, and publicity departments at big presses generally treat literary translations as redheaded stepchildren that they have to live with, but really don’t love. Advance sales to bookstores are paltry, not much effort goes into getting coverage for these books, and as a result, sales are wretched, the publisher loses $15-$20,000 on the book, and, in a world where profits have to keep increasing year in and out, the desire to publish more works in translation is quashed. Going back to the horse race metaphor, sure, occasionally a Bolaño comes along and a publisher can cash in, but most translated titles are like a horse with a bum leg. It’s much more profitable to get world rights to a mediocre American author and sell rights to a couple dozen countries. Now that’s a horse that can “win” in a major, global way.

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Obviously there’s more that goes into the resistance of commercial publishers to translations—such as the fact that most editors are monolingual, that without investing a lot of time in international literature it’s hard to know which titles and authors are the most important, that there aren’t as many agents for international works as for American and British writers, that only select editors attend the Frankfurt book fair (it’s all about selling, not buying)—but it all adds up to a situation in which America is “too isolated, too insular,” where we “don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” which is how Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, recently categorized it.

Prejudices, financial losses, and bum legs aside, a number of translations are published in the U.S. every year. In January 2008, I started keeping track of all original translations of fiction and poetry published or released in America for the year. (In part because nobody else was. Bowker—the company that keeps track of all statistics about American publishing eliminated “translation” as a category years ago.) I didn’t count children’s books, or graphic novels, or retranslations of classics, or paperback versions of previously published titles. Instead, I focused on works of adult fiction and poetry that had never before been published in English.

According to my records, all of 340 translations were published in 2008. Of those translations, 269 are works of fiction, 71 of poetry. More relevant to this presentation, the six big houses—Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, and Simon & Schuster—and all their various subsidiaries, published a total of 69 works in translation, or 20% of the total. Most of these 69 books are from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (10), Penguin (9), FSG (9), Knopf (8), and HarperCollins (6), five of the one hundred and thirty presses and imprints that published a translation this year.

In the same way that poetry has fallen to the shoulders of the independent press, approx. 80% of all works of literary translation are now being published by independent, nonprofit, and university presses, which generally don’t operate on the “big advance-big return” model described above.

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There are a few key differences between the commercial houses and the independents that are worth pointing out aside from the discrepancy in the number of employees and the amount of money each publisher tends to have.

Independents rarely do their own distribution. The lion’s share is distributed by a handful of companies: Independent Publishers Group, Consortium, Publishers Group West, and Perseus. And to complicate things (more on this in a minute), Consortium and PGW are both owned by Perseus. This means that sales reps selling the press’s books into stores work for the distributor not the press itself. And a press looking to sell its books across the country has very few choices on how to go about doing this.

On the plus side, nonprofits are able to receive grants and donations, including money from the state and federal government, a huge benefit that will be touched on below. Donated income makes up a significant part of a nonprofit’s budget, and supports all publishing activities, from paying authors and translators to printing and promoting books.

Just because of the scale, indie presses don’t have quite the same pressure to hit sales goals as commercial houses do. Expectations are more modest, as are advances and marketing budgets. Rarely do you read of an independent spending millions of dollars on a particular book. At the same time, there isn’t as much money available for marketing and publicity, and as a result, overall sales levels tend to be lower at an indie press . . . except when it comes to literature in translation.

It’s worth dwelling on sales expectations for a moment, since it creates such a radical difference between commercial houses and nonprofits. At your typical nonprofit, employees are involved in all aspects of the business. An editor can also be the publicity person, the marketing director might also be in charge of grants. Salaries are slightly lower than at the big houses, but in terms of total cost per book, nonprofits tend to get a lot of bang for their buck. In other words, the average operating expenses—rent, utilities, salaries, benefits, etc.—for a book published by a nonprofit are considerably lower than those of a big house. Obvious, I know, but this means that a press might only need to sell 5,000 copies of a title to breakeven, instead of the 15-20,000 needed at a commercial publisher. Suddenly, the pressures of finding a best seller evaporate . . .

This isn’t even looking at a situation like the one for Open Letter. As a trade-oriented house that’s part of a university, we don’t pay rent, yet have access to certain things other nonprofits don’t, such as a funding base (alumni) and an endless supply of interns. The stakes are automatically a bit lower, which allows a press to focus more on its mission while expanding the possibilities of what it can publish.

With a smaller staff, a more manageable list, and reasonable sales expectations, independents are in a better position to invest a lot of time and effort into promoting the literary fiction and books in translation it is publishing. The stereotypical image of an independent (or even better, a nonprofit) publisher as someone who is extremely passionate about the books they’re publishing, someone who spends all his/her time obsessing and worrying about the press, about reaching readers, about finding ways to keep the press afloat, really isn’t that far off. And this contributes to the overall marketing of a press’s books.

Indie presses tend to have a stronger editorial identity than commercial houses, and cultivate a sense of customer loyalty that doesn’t exist for Random House or Simon & Schuster, or others. Soft Skull, Archipelago, New Directions, these are presses that are clearly branded, that readers trust in, and that fans are willing to take chances with. An obscure Finnish author published by Archipelago means something entirely different than one published by S&S. Although indies and nonprofits have fewer resources, there are some advantages to being small, nimble, and focused.