David J Peterson has an impassioned plea for authors that I thought worth passing along:

There are literally thousands [of conlangers] who are highly skilled and would take a bath in boiling hot, Texas-style ginger ale for the opportunity to see their work in print. I understand writers don’t make a lot of money, but if you can’t offer anything else, offer a percentage of royalties. Offer to share authorship. Offer to name a character after their cat (that’s how Nina Post got me to create a language for her book [and no, that won’t work again]). Give a conlanger the opportunity to improve your work and to prove themselves as conlangers. At the very least, you won’t ever get stuck coming up with names.

[To the conlangers, t]he prospect of working on a novel that may or may not ever get published may not sound exciting… initially, but it’s rare that a brand-new blockbuster springs whole cloth from the mind of a writer/director/producer. Adaptation is much more common nowadays, and both fantasy and sci-fi are hot. A small percentage of novels by fantasy and sci-fi authors will get published. Of those, a small percentage will sell well and become popular. Of those, a small percentage will get optioned. If those works have languages attached to them created by conlangers, those conlangers will get work over those who have more experience in the industry—after all, it’s their work.[1]

Most authors can’t afford to pay a conlanger to flesh out a language for them (or simply translate some text from English into that language). And, personally, I cringe at the idea of offering someone even a minor percentage of my writing royalties (as small as they already are), so I don’t think that’s the solution for me. But if you’d rather spend the time to network and cut deals rather than write your own language sketch (or expand your language sketch into a full grammar), you might find partnering with a conlanger (someone who invents languages for fun) a valuable endeavor. Conlangers-for-hire can be found at the website I shared previously, ConLang.org.

I share this primarily for anyone that has considered making use of an invented language but never had any interest in writing one. If you have any interest in making an invented language for your story, please consider just giving it a try. You may or may not like the results, or may or may not ultimately decide to either scrap the effort or hire someone to help you, but you won’t know if you can make something special, a language that’s uniquely yours, without at least making an attempt.

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[1] The Art of Language Invention, page 262.

_{Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow}