Pedro Fernández
Professional Translator from Valencia, Spain
Translation
Professional Translator from Valencia, Spain
Translation
Pedro was a professional translator working with traditional publishers and self-published authors. He could translate 200+ books per year, but managing contracts, different file formats, and royalty agreements across multiple projects was chaotic. He used email, spreadsheets, and manual file transfers. Scaling the business meant adding team members, but coordination became impossible.
An author client mentioned that Publisheds had integrated translation tools. Pedro explored and found the platform supported his entire workflow.
"With Publisheds, I can scale my translation team from 1 to 10 people without drowning in project management. Everything is organized."
Pedro uses Publisheds as his translation management hub. Authors upload manuscripts, Publisheds handles format normalization, and Pedro's team works on translations within the platform. Built-in quality control tools help manage consistency. Revenue tracking is automatic, and payments to his team are straightforward.
Pedro started as a freelance translator, picking up projects one at a time. He was good—really good—and word spread. Before long, he was turning down work because he didn't have capacity. The question was: how to scale?
The obvious answer was to hire other translators. But this created a management nightmare. Different translators had different processes, different tools, different quality standards. Projects arrived in Word documents, PDFs, Google Docs, sometimes even plain text files. He was constantly reformatting, checking, reviewing, coordinating.
Money was another mess. He'd negotiate different rates with different translators and different authors, track hours manually, and calculate payments in spreadsheets. With 30-40 simultaneous projects, errors were inevitable.
He tried using project management tools, but they weren't designed for translation work. He tried creating templates and process documents, but people didn't follow them consistently.
Then he discovered that Publisheds had built translation-specific tools. There was a translation manager interface where authors could upload manuscripts, and it automatically handled formatting. There was a quality control workflow. There was team collaboration built in.
Pedro was cautiously hopeful. He started with one team member to test the system.
The difference was night-and-day. Both he and his team member could see the same project, leave comments, track changes, and mark sections complete. There were no email chains, no version conflicts, no "wait, did you get the latest version?"
Quality control was also easier. Publisheds had built-in terminology management, so team members could maintain consistency across books in the same series or genre. The platform flagged potential errors and inconsistencies automatically.
Most importantly, revenue tracking was automated. Publisheds calculated what he owed his team member, what the author owed him, and handled multi-currency conversions. No more spreadsheet errors.
Emboldened by the success of his first team member, Pedro hired four more translators. Then five more. By the end of the year, he had a 10-person team working across five language pairs.
Scaling from a solo freelancer to a 10-person agency should have meant Pedro working 80-hour weeks. Instead, because Publisheds handled the operational complexity, he could focus on sales, quality standards, and team leadership. He worked 50 hours a week and slept well at night.
His business grew from €200K/year to €500K/year in 18 months.
Join Pedro Fernández and 1000+ authors growing with Publisheds.