In mid-November 2016, we reported on Copenhagen’s Palatium Books, created to place authors’ self-published ebooks into international subscription services. For more than a year now, the program has paid authors modest advances and royalties.
However, things haven’t gone as planned, and 2017 will be the last year Palatium offers indie authors access to subscription services. Palatium’s co-founder, Rie Rosenkilde, tells us that language limitations are to blame. She says the core of Palatium’s aggregated offerings in ebooks comprises more than 2,000 mostly English-language titles. “Many of the larger countries in Europe and the world are not yet ready for second-language books in big numbers,” she says.
For subscription services such as Spain’s 24symbols, Germany’s Skoobe, and Russia’s Bookmate, Palatium will continue supplying Spanish, German, and Russian texts, respectively. But they will now focus on publishing books (both digital and print) in first languages, leading with romance. They’ll start in Denmark, where the founders have a background in trade publishing. “We’re also working with a publishing house in Russia. Hopefully, more countries will follow. We see great potential in romance books in Germany,” Rosenkilde says.
Meanwhile, Jonas Tellander, chief of the wide-reaching audiobook subscription service Storytel, tells us he leads with the language of the locals—something of an affirmation of the experience Palatium has had. Storytel’s offer is always for unlimited use of the program’s content, which is something that Amazon’s Audible has matched only in its recently launched romance subscription, which we covered recently.
Tellander has not confirmed commentary from Mark Williams on Storytel’s pending launches in Italy and the United Arab Emirates; he says he prefers not to comment on markets he’s not yet serving. Currently, Storytel serves Sweden, which is its home base, and eight other markets: Finland, Denmark, Norway, Poland, the Netherlands, Russia, India, and Spain.
Bottom line: Authors’ rights are reverting from Palatium by the end of the year, and no one is being asked to hand back an advance. “The final royalty reports for 2017 will be ready in February 2018, when we’ll send them out to the authors,” Rosenkilde says. A new site, palatium.dk, will be merged with the previous Palatium Books in 2018. The takeaway here is that, however much the world may seem to be speaking English, skipping translation into the local language is an idea that appears, as Rosenkilde puts it, premature.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
