Lingua Translations

Archive for July, 2009

In truth, that’s a lie. Every author has the option of self-publishing. However, there are advantages to writing a book proposal instead of a whole book.

One advantage is that it usually takes less time than writing a whole book. Two, it creates the possibility of getting paid to write your book, perhaps just a few thousand dollars, perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands. Three, it forces you to get clear about what you’re doing with your book, on a number of levels.

Even if you want to self-publish, a book proposal serves as a sort of business plan for your book. The time and energy spent on research, evaluation and comparison of your ideas at the outset pays off down the line many times over. After all, wouldn’t you rather find out now that someone else has said similar things more eloquently and have a chance to amend your manuscript, than publish the darn thing only to read terrible—or worse—no reviews?

Time and time again we’ve seen articles that give tips to helping self-published authors gain exposure after their book is completed. But by this time it’s way too late. Traditionally published authors have a leg up. They receive help from publishers and in-house publicists to promote their books. Self-published authors do not have this luxury. Waiting too late to promote a self-published book could lead the author to defeat before the book is even available for purchase.

Being a traditionally published author, I still do most of my own promotion. This has helped me learn a lot. Self-published authors look to me for advice and I go out of my way not to offer the generic tips for promotion. The old fashioned tips of yesterday barely work for traditional authors and they do nothing for self-published authors. Self-published authors have to put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into promotion. Not only did they write the book, but also they published it. They should begin to think of themselves as true publishers and no longer as authors. It doesn’t matter if a book is good, if no one knows it’s out there, it will not sell.

If you own a business you may be relying on an online translation form or even a personal friend to do all your translations, however, many translation forms online are not correct and your friend may not be able to translate into all the languages you need for your business to grow. You may even find a few software programs that will translate your documents; however, they are not dependable.

Any time you have the need for a document to be translated especially if the material is legal or medical you cannot trust just any translation as just one word can mean something different and could result in a major error in the translation. Even words in American English and British English are not the same, so translations can be very tricky. In order to ensure that your documents are translated perfectly so as to convey the exact meaning of the document you must have a person or company that is fluent in both languages, the one of the original document and the language in which you want it translated into.