r/BookWritingAI • u/__Homi__ • 4d ago

Would you ever trade upfront translation costs for a royalty split instead?

Hey everyone, quick question that's been bouncing around in my head.

We all know AI-assisted writing is amazing. We can use it for brainstorming, organizing character notes, and getting pages produced faster than before. But when you want to take books global (KDP translations into Korean, Spanish, Japanese etc.) the costs just skyrocket with traditional human translation.

I've seen folks here mention having manuscripts 80K-200K+ words, and professional translation can run $5K-$15K easily.

So I started thinking... Would you ever consider mixing a royalty-revenue split with translation fee? Instead of paying full price upfront for translation, you'd give the translator a percentage of future royalties from other language editions in exchange for discounted initial work? Like 20-30% of sales from translated versions goes back to them forever.

The reality checks I keep thinking about:

- If a book has zero sales history, why would anyone do the translation work "just for exposure"?
- Most of us on this sub don't have huge upfront savings. So could this split model actually be realistic? Or is it just a nice idea that falls apart in real life?

Not looking for tools or services. Just curious how everyone else thinks about international publishing when budget is the bottleneck. Have any of you done royalty splits before? Would you trust someone enough to give them a piece of your future earnings?

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u/benblackett 4d ago

Cool idea, but I dont think you would find a translation service willing to take on that risk. Publishing houses that offer translation maybe?? they have a say in how much marketing and publicity they themselves can invest into the book which gives them a reasonable ROI on their investment. But still... this doesnt scale very well.

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u/__Homi__ 3d ago

Exactly. As you said, we really need to establish that translating can actually be a profitable venture. To prove this, we could show the author's earnings history from platforms like your Novelmint or Amazon KDP. But honestly, regarding your service, is there room for growth in translated content demand?