In this episode we’re digging into translation and how you can convert your stories into multiple languages. We talk about what’s involved in translating yourself, hiring a translator, and what opportunities exist for you to sell foreign translation rights to a 3rd party.

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Complete Episode Transcripts

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 026: Translating Your Stories

Crystal: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele: And I’m Michele Amitrani, we’re here to help you save time, money and energy as you level up your writing career.

Crystal: Welcome to episode 26 of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. Today, we’re digging into translating your stories into multiple languages and some of the upsides, downsides, and roadblocks or speed bumps that might come along with that process.

But first, what have we been up to this week?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele: Reading is always something that challenges me and today before saying anything, I’m going to show you this Create Story Conflict by Eileen Cook. And this is actually a book that was released not too long ago, Crystal, and I’m enjoying it very, very much. I’m on this path where I want to really try to dig into the craft of writing and one of the things that I always think it’s important for a writer to know it’s conflict and now you build up that thing on your book, and this really It’s a title that gives a lot of interesting chunks and suggestions on how to basically level up that side of things. So what I like are all the examples that the book gives you, the exercise that you can do. It’s really, really a great reading and I’m very happy that I started reading it.

I basically put down another couple of books that I was reading because I’ve already read stuff by Eileen and I really liked it. So really recommended if you want to pump up that story conflict go definitely buy Create Story Conflict. And it’s one of the new releases of the Creative Academy.

Should we, should we say that that’s something that is important? That’s something that we’re proud of? That’s actually the fourth book of the series. I had the luck and the fortune to read all the previous books: The one about book series by Crystal, Scrappy Rough Draft by Donna Barker and Create Better Characters by the same Eileen, and really they’re all great. This one is really recommended. And what I’ve been up to in the last a week? Actually, there is something that we discussed recently, me and Crystal. We are trying to really focus on the next year, even though like, we are not yet there, but I’ve asked Crystal if I could bounce off some ideas.

And she gave me her opinion and those ideas are basically based on what’s going to happen to my authorpreneur journey in 2021. Now that I have a few products out there I basically asked her what you think I should do with these assets, because we call them assets now. We are fancy that way, the assets that I have story-wise and, and she gave me some really great suggestions. I’m thinking of actually going the extra mile and I will try to not only release in English, but also in Italian, but that’s going to require a lot of things that needs to fit together. So I really needed her help and to figure out stuff and she was really useful in that regard.

That’s, between parentheses, one of the reasons why you need an accountability buddy/coach/friend. And I happy again that I was able to find her now a year and three months ago. I remember the day, even when I bothered her at the Creative Ink Festival. But anyways, that’s what I’ve been up to.

And I want to know what happened in your writerly world.

Crystal: Well, someone not mentioning any names has been pestering me for the next magic story so I have been working away on that and by the time this episode comes out, the story should be very nearly out which is exciting. So Luna is the one that we are talking about, and it is the Rivers End romance with a touch of magic in it.

So I am excited to have that it’s been a long time since I released a book I’ve been in stockpiling mode. So I’ve been writing and writing and writing and sitting on all of those pieces and not releasing them because I have a very clearly defined strategy for the fall and how I want to roll out a whole bunch of things in a short period of time.

But the anticipation is brutal when you’ve written all this stuff and you just are not releasing it to the world. It’s an interesting experiment so I’m practicing being patient, which is one of main things I’m doing. The other thing is I just ordered The Occupation Thesaurus. I ordered a hard copy. So it’s in the mail on its way to me now, but it’s by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

And the Emotional Wounds Thesaurus that I love so much and I’m always talking about, there’s a whole series of these Thesaurus guides for writers. But the job one I think is going to be really helpful because when you write a lot of short stories, you need to create so many different characters and you don’t want to keep reusing the same career over and over again.

So I’m excited to flip through. There’s a lot of, kind of unusual jobs in there as well as some of the more usual assessments. So I’m keen to poke around and see what this guide includes. And I will definitely tell you more about it on a future episode after I’ve had a chance to really dig into it.

But if there’s anybody out there who’s struggling with jobs for characters, this is now a resource that’s available. So I would recommend checking it out. I’ve never been disappointed with one of those guides, so it’s always a pretty safe bet. But today we are going to dig into talking about translating your stories into multiple languages.

So Michele earlier was mentioning assets and your intellectual property, your stories are an asset, and there are lots of different ways to turn those assets into multiple products. And one of those is utilizing the opportunity that comes from translating your stories into different languages. Now, both of us have experience with doing this, but in very, very different ways.

So we’re going to give you a couple of different perspectives on how this can work, and then talk about some of the things that we found challenging as well, so that you know what to watch out for if you were thinking you’re going to dive into this, and there are three ways that you can really handle translations as an approach to multiplying your products. One is translating it yourself. One is hiring a translator and then producing the translated version yourself. And the third one is actually selling translation rights to another company who then handled everything and actually does the production printing distribution in their country in it and so that’s more like selling foreign language edition rights. And so that’s the third way that most people would use one of those three. Now Michele, let’s talk at first about doing it yourself because you are multilingual, which is very, very handy when it comes to doing those translations. So can you tell us a little bit about the process of translating your own stories and what you’ve done with that so far?

Translating your own stories

Michele: Absolutely. One thing that I want to state clearly is that I had completely no idea what I was doing when I started these projects. And hopefully what I’m going to tell you now, is going to save up some big, majestical mistake that I made while doing my translations project. So there are a few things that I would like you to be aware, if you want to translate your own book.

So that means that requires that you have a solid understanding of both languages. Now, in my case, which I always say, I’m not sure of my English, and I’m, completely every single time I’m aware of my deficiency. I was able to power through that project because I had time and I used it to really sit down and translate my things.

But what I’m saying is if you really have time to do one thing is make sure that you really have that level of proficiency in that language. Because if not, it’s going to require you, I would say three to four more times that you’d actually need. Now that being said, you absolutely don’t have to be mother tongue, or even near that level.

[I found out that you don’t really need that to be an advanced level, but you do have to be, I would say between the 70, 75% in order to do this in a timely manner. And in my case, what I did was translating a 90,000 words, science fiction book. And he took me around one year and a half, which is a very long because I used every single day that I had basically not for writing my stuff, but for translating. So I basically, I don’t like to think of it this way, so I’m not going to say I lost the one year of my life, but I would just say that it wasn’t part of a strategy. I didn’t have the book two, three or four release of that book. I just translated it because I thought, if I translate this in the English market, which is like, I don’t know, 100 times bigger than the Italian market, I’m going to sell more books.

Very wrong. I’m not going to go into the details on that. I didn’t have a platform. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but the important thing for you is that having a solid understanding of that language. So you might have a study French, for example, in school or Spanish, knowing how to speak and how understand is different than the writing world.

There are so many nuances and grammar and stuff. Just make sure that you know, the basic, and if you don’t know what’s your level, just give them 1000 words of the translation of your work to a mother tongue and ask this person: What do you think? Like, can you even understand what I’m saying? And let that inform your process.

That’s something I did not do. Which I regret because that would have informed me on what to do next, how to approach the project. So for example, in my case, I’m doing now in 2020 something that should have been doing in 2014, when I did this project, of translation.

I should have been writing in English instead of just translating, because so that your understanding of the language and the grammar is better and it’s more refined and you understand that the, how it works, grammatically, under the syntax and all these kind of things. So I would, I would say, make sure what’s your level and then try not necessarily to translate, but really write directly in that language.

Once that you have assessed the, your level of proficiency. I want you to take a vision and the time to really flesh out a plan on what are you going to do? Because goes again another thing I did not have was a plan. So I was just basically looking at this 90,000 words novel and really having no idea how to translate it.

So I had to figure out several software and resources along the way. So again, research, I would say it’s one of the key words here. So first thing, a better than average understanding on the language that you want to translate into and then rely on some tools. So you don’t have to go fancy on the tool side.

My opinion again, because everything that I used to translate, and now there are way more fancy things, but I used Google translate and Word Reference. That’s for the first draft. And that I can assure you goes a long way compared to five years ago, with Google translate before, you could have like a chunk of 10,000 words or 20,000 words and Google Translate will translate it for you.

Now I tried that and I don’t know just for that day, but it didn’t allow me to do that. So you can just translate like 2000 words or 3000 words, there is a limit. So, but except for that, the tool is that, and it has been refined with the years. So definitely I would suggest you to use that if you want to have like a bedrock of your work.

But, and I don’t know, Crystal, if you want to add something on that, but, there is really one thing that I want to say before even going forward to all this translation do-it-yourself project thing, you absolutely, and I’m saying this stressing as much as I can, you absolutely need a native language person to at least beta read everything that you translate.

And I used the six of these people, every single one of them made the manuscript better so that I could give this relatively typos-free version of the translation of my book to three editors. So you see, it’s not only one, but it’s two or three different people. So the process is more difficult because I really had no understanding on the grammar side of things.

So I needed more point and I needed to rely on more people to help me on that side. Is there anything that I said so far that is interesting Crystal, that you want to stop me and ask me stuff?

Crystal: I think, yeah, you’re, you’re on the right track with all of it. The key that you cannot express enough is that you cannot edit your own translations even more so than not editing your own your own language is work. You have to have other people looking through it and you are not in a position to double-check any of that work. And so I think just being aware of what that really means it is a time commitment to find those people. And you also need to think, think about the budget of, are you going to be able to pay them for their time?

Are you trading for time? How are you compensating the people who are helping you with these? You may have friends who are in those languages asking for those translations and they are willing to help you, which is fine, but also be aware if you’re not paying your helpers, then you also are not quality checking in the same way because you are taking whoever has volunteers.

So you just need to be aware of the time commitment, the extra energy and the budget. That’s going to be required to pull that off. Even if you are doing it yourself in quotations, it’s not quite the same as a lot of other DIY parts.

The cost of hiring someone to translate vs doing it yourself

Michele: Yeah, absolutely. And when you mentioned about the cost, I want to share like basically how much I paid for the editing thing, because if you ask somebody to translate for you 90,000 words, probably Crystal is going to tell you a bit more, but I need a few research and at least for my case, for that genre and that kind of things they asked me several thousand dollars. So and that’s like, because sometimes people will charge you by the word, sometimes by the time it depends on the translator. But you have to be willing to sacrifice a chunk of money for the translation. But even with the edit increased, I needed to pay a sum of money.

So even though I did it for a fraction of the cost this book in English, which I’m just going to tell the name because, we want to also kind of promote ourselves. The name of the book is Omnilogos, so you can even check what the book is about. And if there is like the ‘professionality’ that I wanted to convey, but basically it’s this science fiction book.

And it really was a coordinated effort from my part and three different editors. The first person that checked the work was a teacher who lived in Rome, but was born in New York and spoke, English fluently. She was actually, she was a teacher of English in Italy.

And I had to pay her of course. Then the second one was a lady in the UK. And of course I had to specify this book for the American market. And then it was a gentleman from South Carolina that went over that, and again, had to pay him, after that first two readings, he found a lot of mistakes and again, that’s because the product you’re starting from is fundamentally more… I hesitate to use the word, but it’s more deficient. There are many more things that you have to consider are going to be faulty and are going, not work. Because again, it’s something that you translated in a language, from another language, and there are concepts that are different from yours. And it’s super either hard to go through all of these things and catch everything in the first or at the second editing. And so I, I actually needed not only one round of editing, but I need three.

And of course I had to pay the price for that. So I would say I paid around 800 to 900 Canadian dollars, if not more for these three round of editing and then after that, imagine that I gave, the book that I was proofreading to a the gentleman, a writer, a Canadian writer and he still found something to go fix.

So, we know that typos are immortal; that’s 10 times more true when you are actually translating your own stuff. So this is not to demotivate you in any possible way, shape or form. I am very proud of what I did with Omnilogos for all those. I learn a lot of things how not to do things actually.

But really, the thing to understand is: is this really worth your time and money? Or there are projects that could have a more immediate benefit if you are looking for visibility or the cash as, as they would say. So evaluated that that’s very important. And the last thing that I would like to say is there are some resources out there that can help you.

If you have no idea where to find somebody to proofread or an editor, there are like platform like Upwork to hire freelance, and we’ll wind up with the show note. There are so many other things like another platform called Babelcube that actually will help you translate with other translator your book, but you have to share the royalties.

I got mixed reviews about this service, but there are opportunities out there. So I just want to ask Crystal if you have any other remarks or over there,

Translating fiction vs non-fiction

Crystal: I think that’s a great summing up. I think it’s very different if it’s fiction versus nonfiction. And I think the closer to the nonfiction side you are, the more the translation tools are useful in that you’re translating fact in a pretty straight forward way usually versus, you know, if you’re trying to translate poetry or, you know, a lyrical written fiction, you’re gonna really have a hard time using any of those tools to help you do that, because it’s the essence of the thing that you’re translating. It’s not the actual words.

And so that’s has definitely been the biggest challenge in translating a lot of what I have worked on is that what I have worked on and translated has not been nonfiction. It’s been children’s books and often rhyming children’s books, which is a whole nother nightmarish ball of wax to try and do. You’re basically hiring a translator to re-write your book in their own language. It’s not actually a translation project in that way. So there are a few interesting things around that. So this one is a good example. This is one of the books: Arythmètique. This is the French version, that was published by Gumboot Books, which was the children’s book company that I had, years and years ago.

And this one, we hired a translator Her name was Christine, and she was a fluent French speaker. And so she did the translation, but she did it so that it’s still retained the essence of the original story. So she basically rewrote it in French as opposed to just a direct translation. And that does have interesting implications When you think about translating picture books, because You aren’t just dealing with translating words that will reflow on the screen. If you can see I’m holding up to the camera, there’s only a certain position in each of these books that really works to put words. And if you’re translating from a Latin alphabet type book to something that uses characters, then that can be even more challenging because says they really don’t break the same way. I have a couple of BOOKS. The Safety Superheroes have been translated into a whole ton of languages to make them more accessible. It’s like a fall prevention education book that I wrote a few years ago.

And that one is in about five different languages. And it’s great for accessibility, but it is really challenging when you’re trying to do the layouts with characters and making sure you’ve got the right font and to accurately replicate those things properly and to know where the page breaks go can be really hard.

Then this one is Japanese as well. So this, we did Then it Rains version. We had an intern named Sukumi from Japan and she did a Japanese translation as part of her summer project. And so we did a dual language where it has the English and the Japanese together on each page, but it is definitely from a layout perspective, whether it’s from characters or if it’s rhyming and it’s supposed to have the brakes at certain words, that can be really hard to maintain when it goes to another language.

So if you are thinking about translating something that is very image heavy or very visual and graphically represented on the page, just be really conscious that those translations, if you’re looking for that from your translated product as well and you are working with someone you can’t just hand over the texts that you want translated.

You’re going to actually have to give them the visuals and ask them to lay it out for you on the page line by line by line. So we’ve done a lot of multilingual translations in an educational context and that’s the key pro tip that I can give you is that when you hand over, you need the English on one side and like a table in your word document, you need the English on one side, the translated version on the other, and you need it to be line by line by line so that you know exactly where and how to put it on the page. And that also makes it easier if you are trying to proofread it or have somebody proofread it for you, that you can match up visually the characters, if you need to and make sure that none of that has kind of rearranged itself.

Michele: So I have a question. What was it like having to working with all these translator? Like, what was the process? What were the challenges? What were the difficult things that you would say, you have to pay attention to?

The process and challenges of translating your books

Crystal: I think they’re pretty similar to what you already talked about, which was the first one is you have to have a lot of trust in the person who is doing that translation because you can’t check their work.

You don’t know what it says when you get it back. So that is particularly challenging. I have a couple (of books) that are French. And I speak a bit of French. So I’m able to sort of muddle my way through that and at least know that if something seems horribly wrong, but the subtleties are going to be lost on me because I’m not fluent.

So you really do need a huge amount of trust in whoever is doing the translation. And as Michele said earlier, you have to have a couple of editors who are willing to look at it. You also, I think, have to be really aware of your market because languages are regionally specific. You can translate something into French, but if you are targeting people in France versus people in Quebec, it’s going to be very different things, aren’t the same phrases are not used even though on paper, it looks like the same language. It’s not really, they’ve branched quite distinctly over time. So same with Spanish people speak Spanish all over the world, but it’s very different depending on which geographic regions you’re in. So I think you really have to make sure that if you are doing a single Spanish translation, but you’re targeting several different countries, then you need an editor or a mother tongue speaker from each of those regions to review your product and point out areas where it’s going to feel not right to them or not accurate. And that’s really important to be aware of. I think also, you know, whoever is doing the layouts of that book or. You know, if it’s you, who is traditionally done the layouts for your book, and you’ve used something like Vellum to do that, you may not be able to do that if you’re now using a language that has characters instead of the Latin alphabet. So you, before you commit to all of this, you need to do a little practice run where you figure out how are you going to produce the actual files and which tool are you going to use? And you know, are you set up for that? InDesign can do just about anything and you can install fonts from all over the world, which is very cool, but that only works if you know how to use that tool, or if you’re using Photoshop to do your page layouts or whatever it is, you need to make sure that you have the option to actually do what needs doing.

And you need to get the font information from your translator, because there are lots of, one of the things I found when we were dealing with Mandarin is that there are different fonts and variations and dialect of that visually. And so if your translator, created that digital file for you using one type of font and your computer opens it in a different kind of character based font you may find yourself in trouble because those don’t mean, I mean, what they meant when the translator put them in, when you take the modes and put them in your book. So just be really careful that you have installed the correct version of the same font your translator was using and that the files you have are an accurate representation of what that person sent to you.

Again, a proofreader would probably know that, but not necessarily. So you may also need to send your proofreaders the original translation file and your laid out book file. Now, obviously some of these things are going to be not so bad if you’re dealing with a picture book because you maybe are only dealing with a couple thousand words, but when it comes to translating a full length novel, or a nonfiction book, there’s a lot more work involved in those bigger projects.

So I think we did talk about budget earlier, I think it’s really important to make sure that you are very much budgeting for assistance on this. It is not a true DIY kind of process, even when you are handling the bulk of those responsibilities yourself. So what … do you have anything that you would leave people with as far as if they’re going to try and do it themselves or hire somebody? What are like, two or three mistakes you made that you can share with us about what went wrong that you’ve now learned from and will do differently next time?

Michele: Yeah, absolutely. There are a couple of things that I can … a couple of epic fails as they would say, that I can share. Again, the first thing is I didn’t sit down and do my research, both on the market that I was trying to sell my book in, but also researches on the actual moment when I sat down and translated my thing. If you skip that, if you don’t do your homework on that side, you’re going to lose time, over periods of time.

And what I mean by that is that I would have saved up so much time if at the beginning of the process, I would have known that there were other people that could have helped me in the process. So for example, I thought I would do everything by myself when actually giving the first three or four chapters, not translating the whole thing, but giving the first couple of chapters to a mother tongue and telling him and asking him or her, what do you think? What’s the level here? What should I look for? There are some mistakes that I do and remake and remake. If I had done that, I will not have lost that much time that the proofreader and the editors then had to fix.

So it pays up so much for you to do that research, to give, I would say a chapter or a couple of chapters, depending on what kind of books that you are translating and have it’s sampled. That’s what I’m hinting at. Have it sampled, it doesn’t have to be an editor, it can be just a person that reads on that genre so that he, or she can tell you what’s wrong, right of the bat.

That’s suggestion number one. Suggestion number two I would say it is very important for you not only to realize that this is something you can do by yourself, and it doesn’t matter how high is your proficiency in that language. It is important that you surround yourself of people that actually know what they’re doing when it comes to re-reading your craft.

So that is one of the reasons that I actually, one of the things that I need that right, the first time, the first draft, I gave it to a person that can speak both Italian and English. That’s fundamental. It is something that I did just because I thought it was a good idea. It actually was. Because she could see what were the mistakes that I made and all the kinds of thought-processing that went into translating the concept, not the words, the concept from the Italian into English, she was like, I think you mean this when you are saying that, and that is something, a proofreader and an editor cannot give you. So if you really can invest a bit more, find a translator that can speak your language can be Spanish or Portuguese, but that will save you a lot of time.

Even, it doesn’t have to be necessarily a person that speaks both languages that is a proofreader or professional editor. It can even be a friend that speaks both of them fluently. But the point is: it’s going to save up a lot of time when it comes to translate the concept, not the words Crystal was mentioning that there are sometimes some rhymes, some concepts that makes sense in Italian, but they don’t make absolutely any sense in English.

So for example: ‘catch two birds with the stone’, there is the equivalent in Italian, but it’s framed in a completely different way. So if I say to you there is no tripe four cats it doesn’t completely mean anything to you, but in Italian, which is, and now you’re going to listen to me speaking in Italian from the first time, so we say: ‘Non c’è trippa per gatti’ which means something for us, but has no translation whatsoever in English. So. A person that understands my language would be able to translate the concept into the English equivalent. So that would be the last bit of advice that I would like to say.

And again, please do spend that time in doing your researches and ask for help to people that can speak both languages.

Crystal: And for those of you who are out there, like, Oh, I never want to do any of this because this sounds just horrible. And like a lot of work and expensive, yeah, it can be, but there are other options.

So I think it’s important to point out that there are companies, publishing companies around the world who acquire rights to English books or other languages of books, and then do translations as part of their publishing efforts in their own country. And so there are some real advantages to this, obviously you don’t have to manage the process. Once you sign the contract with them, you hand over the English version, they have it translated, they have it laid out, they publish it. Often a book will require a very different cover. And I think there’s a couple of authors that I have worked with doing their website stuff over the years that have fantastic foreign rights versions of their covers on their websites.

And it’s really neat to see how different countries have very different conventions for cover design as well. And you know, it’s not directly translation, it’s not just the word, but seeing how that ripples out is quite fascinating. So if you take a look susannielsen.com and we’ll put the links for these in the show notes, but Susan is a primarily a YA writer and she writes all kinds of good stuff, very funny and has won a ton of awards. And so her books have been translated all over the world and they are fantastic. And she has a foreign additions covers page, which is what I will link to in the show notes that shows the covers from all over the world.

And alanstratton.com is the other one and Alan’s books they’ve also won many awards and been translated all over the world. I’m turned into films, all kinds of exciting things. So he has page as well for each of his books has a tab that shows all of the foreign edition covers for each of those. And that is very cool to take a peek at, just to get a sense of how different things really are in other countries in terms of those conventions for the artwork as well.

So, handing off those rights can be very freeing. Usually you will be written a check it will generally be nowhere near as bad as you would think given how fancy it sounds to say foreign rights to one of your novels. But it does mean you don’t have to do anything except cash the check, and then maybe hunt up a post on Instagram of someone else, holding your book in a different language, which is very cool.

The one thing to watch out for is that you, you may be as an indie publishing author approached by different companies saying they are interested in purchasing foreign rights. You do need to vet those a little bit and you need to do your research because sometimes they’re just asking for you to send them book files and, or may not be legit companies.

And so you want to make sure that you look them up, check out their business website, ask them some questions, you know, get to know who you’re dealing with. They should have someone who can negotiate with you in English. It should not be a problem to provide contracts and details of what exactly you are assigning over and make sure that that’s all very clear.

Now you may not want to do all that on your own. And so there are agents and agencies who specialize in helping with foreign rights sales. And so as an indie, that is definitely something to look into. And there are sections the Alliance for Independent Authors has a great set of information, I believe on their site around looking at rights and fails and some options for recommending that. And I know they’ve done podcast episodes on that in the past. So that’s definitely something to do some googling on is which agencies can represent you in those selling of your foreign translation rights markets. And be also very clear when you’re looking at those rights agreements, are you selling foreign rights in English or are you selling foreign translation rights to be published in whatever that language is in that country? You want to be very, very clear because you’re not just signing away your English publishing rights in those areas. Okay. So that’s probably given you enough homework and enough of a place to sit start for now.

We are going to give you one more spot of homework though, because reviews are very important in helping other authors find our podcast. So thank you to all of you who have left us reviews already. And if you are one of those people, who’ve thought about it and then hasn’t actually acted on it we will be forever grateful if you can leave a review for us, wherever it is, you’re listening to the podcast. We’d love to hear your feedback. And we have refilled our curious jar. It is full of questions again, and they have come in from all over the place. So let’s see what kind of interesting torture is in store for us today.

If you could have lunch with one writer living or dead, who would it be?

Tell me when to stop off.

Michele: Now

Crystal: There’s so many in here. Okay. It’s a blue one.

Okay. Our question for today: If you could have lunch with one writer living or dead, who would it be? And like, you don’t have to have lunch with the dead person. They can come back to life for lunch. So it’s not creepy.

Michele: Okay. Well. That’s difficult. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. Only one, right?

Crystal: Only one. You want me to go first? I know who… Okay. I would love to have lunch with Jane Austin. I think she’s up there on my favorites list. Pride and Prejudice is one of my all time favorites. And I just think it would be so interesting to talk to a woman who was writing when that was not a cool thing to do and novels were scandalous and I would love to know, like, what was the experience like for her of being someone who wrote like that and talking to her about what has happened with her books, because I have to wonder, you know, if, if she just felt like we did that, like, a handful of people, like my stories and that’s great.

And then now it’s however many years later, a lot, and her legacy is just an epic influence on our current literary society. And I think it would be so interesting to hear her thoughts on that and to find out. You know, what were her intentions? I just remember in English class, always reading poetry or reading these stories, and you have to write these essays on interpreting the deeper meaning that the writer had and like, did she really just write a romantic comedy? That’s all she meant it to be or all these deeper allegorical stories? What was going on there in her mind? What did she think she was doing once you put those out there in the world? And that would be very cool. Also, I would love to maybe go back to her time to have that lunch.

So like we’ll sneak a little bit of time travel in there because the dresses are fantastic. So I would like to get in on that action. I feel like we’ve lost the true, having tea in the parlor kind of opportunities. These days are a lot more few and far between. So I would love to have that experienced all wrapped up in there as well.

Michele: Probably if you will, they’ll ask me that question a few weeks ago I would have say either Tolkien or Isaac Asimov, because both of them had been a big influence, but I’m not going to give you those names today. I’m gonna actually give you a different name just because most of my writing as had to do with something that presumably he wrote, then I’m saying that we presume that he is author because we’re not sure.

And this author name is Homer which we think wrote the Odyssey and Iliad. Or we say Iliade and Odissea in Italian since I gave you a couple of sentences in Italian today going to be an Italian episode there. And it just because really those are the poems that at least for me, they are very important and they define the way we tell stories.

If you think about what we call Odisseo, the travel and the hero’s journey the very foundation of these things are in that tale. And even the world of Troy, also kind of related on that part at least, it is important for me, because there are so many different things that this author, if he existed, was able to convey and there was poetry in those sentences.

There is action, there is adventure. Of course, we’re talking about something that is more than 2000 years old. We don’t know exactly when it was written, the first version and how many poets re- wrote it and stuff, but there might be one person that started it all. So I would be interested in having a conversation with this author and if he thought that after 2000 or more years, we would read that same work and still it would propel the way we write and we think, and we do things. And so that will probably be my answer, a lunch with the author of the Iliad or the Odyssey, Homer.

Crystal: All right now, we would love to hear your answer to that question. So if you can share with us in the comments, either YouTube below the video, or if you visit our website, at strategycauthorpreneur.com. You can navigate to episode 26 and answer the question on that page.

Michele: For show notes, links to resources that we mentioned, and for coupons and discounts on the doors we love, please visit us@strategicorauthorepreneur.com.

Crystal: Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on our next episode where we’ll be talking about the experience of recording our first six months worth of podcasts, because we are past the halfway mark of our first year, which is crazy and fun. And we are also going to be reflecting back on what we’ve learned during that process, that things that you could put to work for you, we’re going to also be introducing a special series of four episodes on the theme of reflection, which basically means we’re going to be looking back over our indie publishing experiences and telling you all about what we did wrong and how you can avoid.

Making those same mistakes yourself in every area of the publishing process. So that’ll be a special series in the next few episodes. So join us next week and we will talk about what not to do.

Michele: Or you can do the same mistakes we did and then have a fun, lovely story to tell to other people.

Crystal: That’s true free. We believe in free will. Until next time, happy writing.

Michele: Bye see ya.