Where should I pitch a book of short stories in English accompanied by French translations?
I have a collection of original short stories, all of which have been published in English in literary magazines. A French translator friend recently translated the stories into French (I speak French, so I consulted on the translation). We want to try to get the collection published as a bilingual edition: each story in English followed by its French translation, or perhaps one half of the book is the English version and the other half is the French version. Does anyone know of any publishers who produce this type of book?
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I did some googling and found a couple of publishers that are into that sort of thing. I'd just send them a query letter and see what happens. You could always just self publish on Amazon and see how that goes.
http://eastwestdiscovery.com/ http://www.schoenhofs.com/
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To answer any "where should I pitch" question, you should ask yourself the following questions:
Who would want to read this? What is its market niche, and how big is it?.
What are the other notable works that people in this niche read?
Which publishers serve that niche?
Publishers build their business around serving specific niche markets because those are the markets they know how to sell to, and they have a way to estimate how many copies they can hope to sell in that market. Publishers will very seldom accept anything outside their niche no matter how good they think it is.
If you have answered the second question, the third is pretty easy. You just look at the people publishing the notable works in that niche already.
Obviously in your case the niche is very small, so if there is a publisher that serves that niche, they are likely to be very small as well, and probably subsidized in some way. University presses are one place to look.
Your best bet would probably be in a country that prides itself on English/French bilingualism. Canada is one such country, and this project might appeal to publishers here more so than many other places. The catch is, subsidized publishing in Canada almost always requires the the writer be Canadian, so if you are not, this probably won't help.
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