On May 24, 2019 Amazon announced the news that authors can now self-publish traditional Chinese books via Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publish) platform. This is good news to many Hong Kong and Taiwanese independent authors who would like to self-publish their books without going through a traditional book publisher, and this makes their publishing dream become more reachable. For many Chinese entrepreneurs and professionals who want to build a professional image for themselves, their services and products, Amazon provides a way to self-publish their books for brand building.
However, many bilingual authors may struggle in choosing in between Chinese and English as the language of their books. In this article we list out 6 factors for you to consider which language you should publish in.
目錄
1. Market size
Out of 7.5 billion total world population, approximately 1.5 billion are English speakers. Although there are around 1.3 billion Chinese speakers in this world, only around 32 million people use traditional Chinese (predominantly in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, while some of them are from South East Asia countries such as Malaysia and Singapore), and the rest of the Chinese speakers use simplified Chinese. Therefore, the number of potential readers you can reach by writing in English significantly outnumbers that by writing in Traditional Chinese.
2. Competition
But the larger market size of English books comes with fiercer competition. Unfortunately Amazon no longer offers any official statistics of book on its platform, but according to the data in 2014(1):
Total number of books on Amazon: 32.8 million books
English 17.1m
Chinese 518 k
German 2.0m
French 2.0m
Spanish 1.0m
Italian 739k
Russian 839k
If you are publishing in English, you are competing with millions of fellow English authors, while you are only (!) competing with thousands of fellow Chinese authors by publishing in Traditional Chinese.
3. Support
Self-publishing in English on Amazon has been established for many years, there is a sea of resources and support such as books, youtube videos, blogs, discussion forums and Facebook groups for authors. However, Self-publishing in Chinese on Amazon is still a relatively new area and comparatively not that much of online resources are available.
4. Your client’s language
Which language do your clients speak? One critical consideration is the language spoken by your clients, and you should aim to publish in the native language of your target clients as much as possible. Many Chinese entrepreneurs or professionals may want to expand into the global market by publishing in English, but they would need to prepare themselves to serve English speaking clients if the clients find them via their books.
5. Writing effort
When it comes to writing, which language feels more natural to you? While many Chinese authors are bilinguals, rarely they’d find it easy to write in both languages. Pick one language that feels the most natural to you would not only make the writing easier and take less time, but also make your voice and message more authentic, which is essential for building trust with your readers and turning them into your clients.
6. Do you need to sell your book(s) in paperback?
While you can publish both English kindle ebook and paperback on Amazon, publishing of traditional Chinese books are limited to kindle ebook only. The print-on-demand paperback service, which allows you or your readers to order one paperback at a time, is not available for traditional Chinese authors, and they would need to arrange printing of their books with their local printing house.
Hope this blog would help you to decide which language to publish in. Happy self-publishing!
Reference:
(1)https://www.quora.com/How-many-books-does-Amazon-have-for-sale