A Smart but Difficult Path to More Author Profits: Selling Rights

One of the best services provided by the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) is the explication for writers of business factors once understood only by publishers and agencies. One of the campaigns of the alliance (based in the UK, with close to 50 percent of its membership stateside) is called Going Global and relates to authors grappling with issues of selling foreign and other rights. ALLi’s fourth guidebook, How Authors Sell Publishing Rights, by ALLi founder Orna Ross and attorney Helen Sedwick, looks at the topic comprehensively.

In a podcast with Joanna Penn, Ross raises points important for many authors just coming to terms with something that trade publishing has known for decades: the “exploitation of rights” may be the best and fastest route to revenue gains, especially in today’s content-saturated market. This is because, in selling rights, you don’t have to sell copies of your book. You’re selling someone else permission to “produce (and sell) some kind of format of your work,” as Ross puts it.

Here are some of the fundamental points that Ross makes in her conversation with Penn:

• When a trade publisher decides whether to buy an author’s manuscript, the rights department might be asked for its assessment of a rights plan—indicating how important the industry can see the exploitation of rights. Publishers often start with a contract that, as Ross puts it, “tries to hoover up as many rights as possible” for the house to sell and benefit from, thus generating some of the tension that exists today between publishers and authors. The US Authors Guild, the Society of Authors in the UK, and many other author-advocacy organizations are working to address these rights grabs.
• A publishing house’s contractual right to exploit world rights may not mean that the book is headed for huge numbers of territories, and yet many standard contracts will attempt to lock down those rights. “The truth is,” Ross tells Penn, “there are only five publishing companies that have the wherewithal to actually get you in [to international territories and distribution channels] through their own auspices and on their own imprints. They are the Big Five.”
• Where rights-selling becomes most difficult for independent authors, Ross says, is in print. The traditional model is that the original publisher, say in the States, will sell a book’s German rights (for example) to a German publisher, who will handle translation and production of a book and distribute that title in Germany through its normal in-country channels. The indie author has no such apparatus in place, and Ross talks with Penn about some of the difficulties in trying to replicate the rights negotiation process as a lone author. (Even ALLi has a dedicated literary agent, Ross notes, to help members with rights sales.)

Bottom line: Rights negotiations and sales may be the hardest thing for independent authors to do on their own. Ross says that, for industry trade shows such as London Book Fair, BookExpo America, and Frankfurt Book Fair, authors who might want to meet with potential rights buyers need to work six or more months ahead and arrange meetings in advance. As trade authors struggle to hang on to rights in contracts (or get their rights reverted to them), indie authors can be staggered simply by trying to find and reach the right people for rights sales. Questions to ask as you research, per Ross: “What are the current trends [in the target country]? Who are the publishers who actually publish books like yours? Who are the agents who deal with those publishers? What is topping the charts at the moment?” Ross says an author needs two years to understand the landscape of rights management. “There’s nothing easy about this. It’s not for the faint-hearted.”