What could your book earn in another language?
Small numbers count. A book that made $100 last year is buried under 3.5 million new English releases. On a German or Polish shelf it may have a few hundred rivals. Start with what you actually earned, even if it’s tiny.
Three steps: your earnings, your genre, then tick the countries you’d publish in. The numbers move as you go.
$200
Under $100? Still worth checking. Foreign shelves are far less crowded, so small English sellers often do proportionally better abroad.
What the 3 editions could earn, first two years
$50 – $120
You’d pay $1,647 once, up front — $549 per language at our Reviewed tier. No royalties, no ongoing fee.
| Country / language | Readers | How crowded the shelves are | Possible earnings, 2 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| GermanEurope's largest book market, fourth largest on earth at roughly $11.3B. Fixed-price law doesn't apply to indie ebooks or POD, so you price freely against traditional publishers. Crime and mystery is the biggest segment in the country. | 95M | Low | $24 – $58 |
| SpanishSpain plus Latin America in one edition. Lower price points, enormous readership, and Mexico grew 7% in the last full year of trade data. | 490M | Moderate | $17 – $38 |
| FrenchConservative buyers, strong print culture, and readerships that stay with a series for its whole run. | 80M | Moderate | $14 – $34 |
| Portuguese (Brazil)Brazilian trade revenue grew 11.2% while the US grew about 1%. Bookstagram and BookTok are unusually strong sales channels there. | 210M | Low | $12 – $31 |
| ItalianCrime fiction over-indexes dramatically. A thriller that does modest numbers in English can chart in Italy. | 65M | Low | $12 – $29 |
| PolishNo free machine route into this market. Fantasy and science fiction punch far above the market size. | 40M | Very low | $10 – $24 |
These ranges come from how big each book market is and how translated editions typically sell there. They’re a planning tool, not a guarantee — a book that struggles at home usually struggles abroad too.