By Edward Nawotka, Editor-in-Chief
We write often about developing markets here at Publishing Perspectives. It’s one of our top priorities. It has emerged after several years of reporting that one of the obstacles authors face in developing markets is a dearth of literary agents to handle their business.
This is particularly urgent when it comes to books in translation.
Today’s feature story “Literary Asia on the Rise and Translators Are Key, Says Agent” tackles this point head on. In summary, Asia is a diverse, complex place with a wide variety of languages and cultures. If Western publishers ever hope to publish a broad range of books, and not just bestsellers, they will need to nurture translators. Unfortunately, points out the author, Kelly Falconer, translators don’t necessarily have the time or will, nor likely the skills or clout, to be as effective advocates within the publishing business as a good agent or scout.
And this just limited to Asia.
At a publishing conference in Colombia last week focusing on children’s books found Spanish-language authors citing the dearth of literary agents in Brazil as one of the main reasons so few Spanish-language children’s books have been translated and published in Brazil.
Scouts have served as a stop-gap, but they tend to work with publishers directly. And we know all know that there is often a limited number of editors on any given publisher’s staff who is capable of reading books in multiple languages.
So tell us, do you think that that a growing cadre of skilled, knowledgable agents — not those merely trying to take advantage of the naive — might foster more translation and publishing in developing markets?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
5 Comments
Lets be straight, everybody is trying to find excuses for the 3% phenomenon in the English speaking world: there is a lack of qualified translators (nonsense, they are just underpaid…), the public doesn’t buy translations (they just buy good books…)…Many excuses…One more here with agents… Reality is that publishers don’t do their job which is publishing books and making money but also taking risks as all entrepreneurs are supposed to do !
As a budding literary agent for the East African Market, I can attest that there is a severe shortage of agents on the continent. However it’s also true that the majority of large publishing houses who can offer significant revenue do not pick up MS proposals from agents they don’t already know, as a fiction editor at Faber recently confessed to me, so it’s a hard market to break into unless you want to publish with ‘specialist’ or niche publishers.
Surely some of the failings are alluded to unconsciously in the article. To refer to Asia as ‘a diverse, complex place’ does not begin to even cover it – Asia is a continent, one full of countries whose own cultures are at times radically diverse. To refer to it merely as a single place shows how little regard and investment we actually out into thinking about emerging markets. Investment of time is what is needed and money into a broader translation base.
@mialaret: Obviously this isn’t a comprehensive article on the state of translation — PP tracks this issue regularly and has done for the last four years. You can find much discussion of it in some of the posts linked to in the piece and in our archives, which I encourage you to explore. It’s an addendum. Nevertheless, I think it’s a legitimate question. China has only a handful of major agents, same for India, Brazil has just one or two…even France, which is accustomed to working directly with publishers, has only a handful. You have to wonder about cause and effect.
@will: Yes, you are right. The terms Asia (48 countries) and Africa (54 or 56, depending on who is counting) are imprecise. I hope you understand the need to make that compromise in this context.
@Edward Nawotka, it’s true that Brazil doesn’t have many literary agencies, but the situation is changing fast. About half a dozen agencies have appeared in the scene in the last 2 years. It remains to be seen how all of them fare, but at least our agency, Vikings of Brazil (www.vikingsbr.com.br/en/), has been warmly welcomed by the publishing establishment and we’ve beaten our own sales targets ten fold.