German editions: new title or the English one?

Last issue I looked at which book of a series comes out in German first. This time I looked at something every listing shows: the title. Do indie authors give German editions a German title, or keep the English one?

I took a fresh random sample of 150 authors from the ones I check for my work. On Amazon.de I searched each name, read up to three result pages and compared German listings with English ones. 56 catalogues were too big for that and stayed out. That left 91 authors with 837 German listings.

Most German editions get a new title

I compared main titles only: the part before the series bracket and before any colon. 700 of the 837 German listings have a main title I did not find among that author's English titles. 137 keep the English one.

Keeping it often comes with a German subtitle. At least 95 of those 137 add one after the colon (a floor). Only 42 kept the English title with no German subtitle detected.

9 of the titles I counted as different still look English (1.1%). Count all 9 as kept and it is 146 kept (17.4%) and 691 different (82.6%).

Most authors stick to one approach

So 27 of the 91 authors kept the English title at least once. With bigger German catalogues the pattern holds, a little weaker. Of the 57 authors with 5 or more German listings, 35 (61.4%) changed every title, 4 kept every title and 18 mixed.

If you are planning a German edition: German launch checklist and What a German transcreation includes.

How I counted. Population: 1,032 self-published English-language indie authors I check for my work whose German check showed German editions they publish themselves (or a mix). Sample: 150 at random, checked on 12 November 2026. Amazon.de Kindle search by name, up to three result pages, German rows against rows labelled Englische Ausgabe. For authors not cut off, I opened every German product page to confirm the language (850 pages). 56 authors were cut off; 91 of the other 94 had German and English listings to compare. Limits: English titles come only from the same search, so a missed English edition makes a kept title look different. Different means not found in English, not proven translated. A matching title can be a character or place name. Excluding large catalogues leans results toward smaller German catalogues. No sales data, nothing on why authors choose.