The Invisible Global English-Language Book Market Indie Authors Are Missing Out On 1: The Stockholm Writers Conference

Publishing guru Jane Friedman will be speaking at the Stockholm Writers Conference this coming May.

Sorry, it’s a pre-book-and-pay event with very few places left, and no, we’re not collecting any affiliate fees for mentioning it.

So why is StreetLib even reporting on a writers conference in Sweden? What’s that got to do with authors who don’t speak Swedish and haven’t got any Swedish translations planned?

Could this be a sneaky way of reminding everyone that last month we launched our StreetLib Sweden author and publisher portal?

Of course not. Forget we even mentioned it. :-)

And let’s not mention here that Sweden is an exciting digital market of over 9 million people and that digital books are probably more read per capita than anywhere else on the planet.

Let’s just say here that, many moon ago when I was last in Stockholm, visiting some former English-as-Second-Language (ESL) students, I passed some time by randomly asking people I’d never met if they spoke English. Not exactly a scientific survey, of course, but instructive.

The only person I found in Sweden that didn’t speak English was the person I got stuck in a hotel lift with for an hour when the doors short-circuited.

That’s not so say everyone in Sweden speaks English, but it sure felt like it. And I have to say the ESL students who I taught in the UK usually spoke better English than my regular British students.

Do they read English-language books? Many do! And many write in English too.

Which brings us neatly around to the real point of this post: that the Stockholm Writers Conference is a literary event for English-language authors, agents and publishers, despite being held in the capital of Sweden.

From the Stockholm Writers Conference website:

Join us May 3–5, 2019, for the Stockholm Writers Festival (#SWF19), an English-language gathering of writers, authors, and industry professionals. Our aim: Give writers the opportunity to hone their craft, learn the business, and join a community of established and emerging authors. Regardless of where you are in your process — just starting out or finishing your twentieth manuscript — #SWF19 helps you find your path to published.

We’re thrilled to announce industry powerhouse Jane Friedman as our keynote speaker at #SWF19. This is her first time in Stockholm. We’ve seen her at other events and she delivers unforgettable classroom and keynote experiences.

This year’s festival will have four parts:

· the Main Festival Pass

· a special workshop with Jane Friedman

· agent critique sessions

· writing craft intensive workshops

As mentioned already, this is a paid event and very unlikely there are many slots left, but if you’re within easy travelling distance you might be lucky.

But the point of this little essay is the bigger picture, which many indie authors and small publishers often lose sight of. That for those of us who write in English, English is our greatest asset.

That’s not to say English is in any way superior to any other language, but rather recognising the global reality that English is the lingua franca of the world.

Don’t waste the opportunity to build a truly global readership by focusing only on the handful of easy-access English-speaking markets like the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, labouring under the misapprehension that if a country hasn’t got English as its first or official language then it isn’t worth bothering with.

The demand for English-language books around the world is far, far greater than you might think. Far, far greater.

In follow-up posts in this series on the invisible global English-language book markets we’ll go on a tour of foreign book markets you’d probably never give a second thought to for your English-language books, and show you that the simple act of making sure your English-language titles are as widely available as possible can add some tidy new passive revenue streams that soon add up.

But to end this post, just to say that if you list your English-language titles with StreetLib then your ebooks will already be available in Sweden through our partner stores Apple, Google Play, Kobo, OverDrive and more, as well as through our StreetLib international ebook store (where you’ll earn far more per sale).

StreetLib. Your global aggregator for the 2020s.