You have written your eBook and you have promoted it in English. Since sales are good, you are interested in having your work in other languages; perhaps Spanish. But when you look at different prices, you get discouraged because you are not ready to make the investment. But, maybe you don’t need to translate all of your book at once: you can translate your eBook as a serial in Spanish.

I am not talking here about the Kindle Serials Program that Amazon announced some time ago, since I understand that Amazon is not taking new entries anymore.

Although Amazon is not publishing anything new in their “serial” format, nothing prevents you from breaking your eBook in installments and sell them in Amazon, or any other portal, separately.

Advantages if you publish your eBook as a serial

• The main advantage of this approach will be, of course, that you can break the cost of your translation over the course of many months. Because translations are priced depending on the number of source words of the original piece in English, the price of the translations of your installments will depend on how many you have and how big they are.
• You can use this format to grow expectations and build a fan base. This trick was tried by Daniel Handler, of “Lemony Snicket”  fame, for his book “Why We Broke Up,” and was done again for the Spanish version of the book, “Y por eso rompimos.” The serials in Spanish are published by Editorial Alfaguara, a very prestigious publisher in Latin America. Part of the marketing campaign included a tumblr site where people could tell why they broke up. Some reasons are rather stupid such as “we broke up because you never held my hand as tight as i (sic) held yours.”
• If, after some installments, you find out that your eBook is not going anywhere, you can stop the publication (and the investments in the translation) for some time, until you find out how to approach the market better.

Some other considerations

• If you want to translate your eBook as a serial in Spanish, evaluate if you need to change the text a little bit; tweak it so that you have the proper cliff hangers or anything else that this particular style may need. According to C. R. Myers  and this book “How to Write Serial Fiction & Be Ready to Publish In Less Than 24 Hours”, serial fiction is not simply cutting up your book, but a different style that requires serious consideration.
• Finally, keep in mind that Amazon may not be the only place in cyberspace to translate your eBook as a serial. There may be many other portals to explore in this adventure.

Have you ever published a fiction eBook in small pieces? Was it a good or a bad experience? If you can, please share your experience with us!

Best,

Joe

My mission is to help English writing authors reach the Latino Market by translating their eBooks to Spanish. Contact me at http://www.publicatuebook.ca or at joe@publicatuebook.ca