Hello all, I'm new here... I'm in France and am a professional soap maker, soap making teacher and author of 3 books on the subject in FRENCH. After not getting anywhere with my publisher in France on selling my book rights in other languages I have recently changes my contract and now have the rights to the text of the books for English and Spanish. So now what !!!? I am motivated to find a publisher that would like to take me on to translate the book. Any tips on where to begin ? AGENT or not ? Thinking of going to the Frankfurt Book Fair this October to prospect ?? Any tips would be greatly appreciated...
Hi Leanne,
Congratulations on being a published author! Great to hear you've taken a bit of control back with your rights.
As you are the author of specialist non-fiction books, it's not always necessary to have an agent. For example, there are UK publishers like Thames & Hudson who accept direct submissions from a writer: https://thamesandhudson.com/page/getting-published
I would advise that agents usually have limited time at book fairs as they are there to mainly represent the clients that they already have! It's not normally the best time to approach an agent, however, it might be useful for you in terms of going to different publisher's stands - especially those specialist non-fiction publishers.
In terms of general advice:
1 ) Get to know the book market of the countries you'd like to publish in. For example, are there similar books to yours? Do you know which section of the bookshop your book might sit in? Getting to know the local market is really useful
2) Research non-fiction agents and publishers. This can be done by looking at Amazon pages of books publishing in the same area as you and seeing who they're published by, e.g. : https://www.amazon.co.uk/Natural-Soapmaking-Handbook-Techniques-Ingredi…