As the previous item makes clear, sub-rights sales can be a considerable part of an author’s income. Self-publishing authors, however, have largely been unable to access meaningful international-rights-trading activity without the help of an agent.
The most effective way for any book to be sold into a new territory is for a publisher in that territory (say, an Italian one) to buy the rights to produce that book. The advantage is that the Italian publisher not only produces the translation but also sells the Italian edition of the book through its own sales and distribution channels in Italy. This is the activity happening in the major publishing trade shows’ international rights centers.
But getting that Italian publisher to buy those rights from a self-published author has been extremely difficult. There’s no effective infrastructure for representing rights-available material to foreign publishers in the indie world.
However, new technology at one of the rights platforms may eventually help with this. IPR License is a rights-trading platform owned by Frankfurt Book Fair and Copyright Clearance Center. It’s currently rolling out functionality called Instant Rights, which automates rights transactions and creates a buy button that a publisher can put on any page.
In an online catalog, for example, or in an email, a publisher can list a title with a “View/Buy Rights” button. An interested rights buyer—say, the rights director at our Italian publisher—can click that button, find out whether the appropriate rights are available, and make some selections (such as how big an initial run might be, what format is sought for publication, etc.). The program can then price what the rights would be for a desired run of, say, 3,500 copies in Italian. The system can also produce the proper contract with the rights director’s choices in place, collect payment for the rights, and even deliver the manuscript to the rights director so she can begin having it translated.
Publishers will likely use this primarily for backlist and other relatively low-revenue rights transactions, freeing staffers to focus on the more lucrative deals made for big books—or rights transactions that require negotiations.
The positive part of this for authors—both indies and traditionally published authors who’ve had their rights reverted to them—is that this buy-button capability can go anywhere: on an author’s own site, on a Goodreads listing (provided Goodreads doesn’t prohibit that), and someday perhaps even on retailers’ sales pages.
Bottom line: If authors who control their own rights can develop ways that international publishers looking for properties can find them—and then automatically “negotiate” the most straightforward types of deals online—we might then be looking at a new revenue stream for indies. IPR License tells us they’d like to spend some months getting the publishers’ use of Instant Rights on track before making it available to individual authors. Like OptiQly, which we covered in our last issue, this is a capability for authors to keep an eye on.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
