Day 111 of Unemployment: I Published the Chinese Version of My Book [Things I Wanted to Do After Quitting My Job Series]

Hello everyone, this is Ukigumo.

Today, I published the Chinese e-book version of 100 Days Until Resignation.

Last time, with the Japanese version, it took about two days for sales to begin, but the Chinese version went on sale just half a day after submission and application.

Chinese has both "Simplified" and "Traditional" characters.
Traditional characters are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, while Simplified characters are used in mainland China.Since Kindle does not support Simplified Chinese, I published this version in
Traditional Chinese.

The Chinese title is
“離職一百天　～一位日本資深商務人士的中年危機自我對話～”. 👉
Click here for the Amazon product page

If you have Chinese friends or acquaintances, I would be happy if you could recommend it to them.
Since I am participating in a free promotion, it can be read for free throughout this month.

By the way, the English version is here. I have also set up a free promotion for the English version.

I have achieved another thing I wanted to do after quitting my job.

I first published the Japanese version in July, the English version in early September, and today, I was able to publish the Chinese version.

"Multilingual publishing" was one of the things I wanted to do after quitting my job, and it has finally taken shape.
When I was a company employee, doing what I wanted to do was difficult; I had to create proposals, lay the groundwork, and go through approval processes. Projects that didn't seem profitable relative to the resources were rejected. Now, if I want to do something, I don't need anyone's permission or groundwork, and I can just go for it immediately, which feels great. Since it's my own life, I think this is how it should be.

Workflow for creating foreign language versions

The following is the process I used to produce the English and Chinese versions.

• I translated "100 Days Until Resignation" in batches of 10 days at a time. That said, there were days I didn't work on it, so it actually took about a month.

• I call it "localization" because it wasn't just a translation; I adjusted the expressions to fit the culture and customs.

• I utilized ChatGPT for the translation work. I set both English and Chinese to a "level understandable by a local middle school student." This makes it easier for me to check the meaning myself and prevents mistranslations.

• When I was concerned about whether the nuances were translated correctly, I used "back-translation" to check the consistency between the original text and the translated text. Especially since Japanese tends to omit subjects, there were times when the overall meaning was different.

By following this process, I felt that overseas publishing is fully possible even if you are not good at foreign languages.

Key points for overseas Kindle publishing

The differences in settings for overseas publishing are just the designation of "publishing territory" and pricing.
If you choose "All territories (worldwide)," you can sell on Amazon in each country.If you want to sell only in specific countries, you can select "Specific publishing territories" and choose the countries/regions. Prices are set in Japanese yen and automatically determined for other markets, but you can also change them individually.

Among the things I wanted to do after quitting my job, "overseas publishing" required time and energy, but thinking that my words might be read somewhere in the world makes me feel that it was definitely worth the challenge.

[How to publish on Kindle]

The method for Kindle publishing is summarized very clearly in Yona-san's article below. I was greatly helped by this article by Yona-san when I published for the first time.

[Book Publishing Series]

Unemployed Day 104: Results one month after publishing the English version of my book
Unemployed Day 84: Can you earn money on note?
Unemployed Day 74: I published the English version of my book Unemployed Day 60: Results one month after publishing
Unemployed Day 26: I published a book!
Unemployed Day 23: Kindle publishing is just around the corner! Taking on the challenge with ChatGPT

[Things I wanted to do after quitting my job series]

Unemployed Day 74: I published the English version of my book
Unemployed Day 47: [Things I wanted to do after quitting my job] Memorial service for my cousin
Unemployed Day 16: Preparing to publish a book - Things I wanted to do after quitting my company -6 days until quitting: Things I wanted to do after quitting, but got bored of immediately
50 days until quitting: Things I wanted to do after quitting 'Super public bath from the afternoon'
47 days until quitting: Appearing in a weekday drama (Things I wanted to do after quitting series)