Coming down from lots of lovely feedback from the Frankfurt Book Fair last week, I’ve been thinking about why rights deals are so awesome.
There is debate over the business sense of slicing up territories and keeping translation rights separate – with the internet being so global, it can be frustrating not being able to sell a book to someone who wants it, because of where they are. But there are enormous benefits to the traditional system of selling rights separately to different territories.
The first being that any rights deals are a chunk of income that helps earn out author advances, so that we can get to paying authors royalties sooner.
The second being that local publishers will know the market much better than we do: covers, style of publishing, when to publish, etc. And, third, we don’t have to bear the cost of translating the books ourselves.
And, the last and best reason is because it means the most incredible books come into the office with new titles, new covers, new illustrations…
Ruth Logan, our Rights Director, has been busy selling our titles around the world all year long and we can’t wait for our first books in translation to come in.
But until they do (some time next year) I’ll have to show off the books I already have…
I love many things Japanese. From my time at Working Partners (and during the course of my husband’s Naruto obsession), I have amassed a collection of Japanese books… My favourites by far are these:
This is, as you might have guessed, the first Rainbow Magic book, but it is in both Japanese and English… So beautiful!
And I also have a soft spot for these, as it’s my favourite Working Partners’ series.
Lots of fun to compare it to the UK version:
And also the US version:
Sarah, another great insite of how the publishing world operates. I can see all at hkb are working hard to promote your authors.
Stan Mills
Spot on. Rights are the lifeblood of publishing (in my opinion) and with the rise in awareness of intellectual property amongst publishers, they can only become more important. Of course, that will probably lead to even more squinting at contracts for all of us in the future!