Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum

Author:Courtney Maum
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948226417
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Understanding foreign rights

If you sold world rights to your publisher, your publisher will handle foreign sales. If you didn’t, the rights holder might be your agent. If you self-published, the lucky foreign-rights holder is you.

If your first book is a buzzy one, you might start selling translation rights before your book even publishes—for other people, rights might sell if the book starts picking up momentum once it’s out. Regardless, the process starts with book scouts, who are skilled at determining (or rather, forecasting) what upcoming projects could hold commercial or literary appeal for the imprints that they scout for. When scouts are interested in a project, they’ll try to get it into editors’ hands before the competition so that the publisher can make an offer on the foreign rights. The film-scouting process is different, because these readers will be judging whether or not the material can be adapted for the silver screen, but the end game is the same: identify projects that have potential and move to acquire them quickly, before the competition does.

Foreign-rights sales are brokered by foreign-rights agents who try to play matchmaker between a book and a foreign publisher. There are exceptions, of course, but deals are commonly brokered with the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Scandinavia, and the Baltic countries. Because of the time it takes to translate them—except for the U.K. when the original work is in English—simultaneous publications are rare. Most translations come out within a year or two of your book’s publication, and in addition to the money you received for the sale, you will usually get a few copies of the translated book.

Foreign-rights sales vary wildly, from a few thousand dollars to forty thousand or more, based either on how well the foreign publisher thinks the book will do, or how much competition there is to acquire the rights. Rights are often acquired during big foreign fairs that lots of American publishers and agencies attend, such as Frankfurt or London.

“Often there is a big book of the fair,” says book scout Cathrin Wirtz. “You have certain territories picking it up very quickly—the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, France.” Although the race to acquire rights to “It books” is exciting, there can be a price tag for the frenzy. Not only will foreign publishers frequently end up overpaying for a buzzy book, the noise around such acquisitions distracts buyers from acquiring other books that might actually perform better in their markets. “It’s an iceberg situation,” continues Cathrin. “We hear about the books that sold to a number of territories overnight or within a matter of days. But there are all these people writing beautiful books—we need to take the time to pay attention to overlooked books, the ones you fall in love with regardless of how ‘hot’ they are. There is only so much time during a book fair.”

If your book’s rights don’t sell abroad, don’t take this as a reflection of how your book will perform in the United States. There are books that do enormously well in the U.

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