Missed Our Webinar? Watch "Foreign Rights 101"

Missed our live webinar? No worries! Watch this recording of Foreign Rights 101 to learn how indie authors can expand their audience and revenue by selling their book rights internationally.

This transcript has been auto-generated and lightly edited for readability. Some errors or minor inaccuracies may still be present.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our webinar, Getting Started with Foreign Rights. I'm Lindsay Jones. I'm the CEO and co-founder of DropCap. I just want to take a moment before I start to let you know to feel free as we go along to drop any questions in the chat. I'll save time at the end to answer as many questions as I possibly can, try to keep the presentation to about twenty minutes so that we have some time for questions and we can all get out of here during our lunch break after thirty minutes. 

So without further ado, I will go ahead and get started. First off, I just want to give you some background on who we are at DropCap. I know some people attending may already work with us. For some of you, you may have just heard about us, so I'd like to give you some background. We started life as a tech-enabled rights agency. So our rights agents, Allison Olson and Monica Meehan, have been licensing rights to books for over thirty years. 

We grew the agency into a marketplace as a way to bring more independent authors into the fold. My background personally is in self-publishing, so I've really seen firsthand the types of barriers to entry that independent authors have, especially with regard to rights licensing. So we really created DropCap Marketplace as a way to give authors better access to licensing opportunities. But I'll talk more about what licensing opportunities actually means since this is our 101 session. 

So what are subsidiary rights? Essentially, subsidiary rights are a bundle of rights that you as a copyright holder of your book own and can control and can monetize. So one of the types of rights that we work with a lot are international rights. These are your translation rights, sometimes also called foreign rights. When a publisher in Japan, for example, sees a book that's been published in the US, they can go to the author or publisher or whoever owns the rights to that book and say, I'd like to license it. There's typically a term for the license, which I'll get into in a little bit. And the Japanese publisher does all of the work to translate the book, produce it, and print a Japanese edition that they then market and sell in their territory. So that's what we mean when we talk about translation rights licensing or foreign rights licensing. 

Translated titles make up, we estimate, about thirty five percent of global book revenue. And most of those translations are going from English to other languages. So here in the US, we have a really robust publishing market, as I'm sure you all know. Other markets around the world are not as mature. So we see a lot of translations flowing from the US to China, for example, or the US to Indonesia or India, where there's a lot of population growth and a big demand for books. But they haven't had as much time as we have here in the US to grow their own author base in their country. That's why there's a lot of translations happening from here to other parts of the world. And independent authors can definitely take advantage of that. 

Another type of subsidiary right that we see very commonly licensed is audio books. Audio books have been growing dramatically year over year. And we are now seeing a lot of audio book companies are coming to us or coming to other agents and saying, we're going into new markets, we're releasing a lot of new books show me what you have. So there's a huge demand for audio. And that would be an instance where maybe you've published your book in print. Maybe you've published it in a digital format and an audio book publisher comes along and says, I'd like to license this to create the audio version. And in that instance, the audio book publisher is going to pay for the creation of the audio, and they're going to pay for everything that goes into marketing it and selling it. And then you as the author don't have any upfront costs, but you will get an advance on future royalties. And then you get a percentage of future sales. So it's very much like a traditional publishing contract, but your book already exists in one format. And these companies are looking to license it and create different formats or different languages or different editions.

Now, of course, there's TV and film licensing. This is kind of the dream come true for most authors, and it doesn't happen for very many people, but I like to talk about it. One of my favorite examples is the book The Martian, which I know a lot of people have heard of. That was a really popular movie a few years ago, the one where Matt Damon gets stuck on Mars. I like to mention this one because that movie started life as a self-published book. The author originally published the book on his website as a serial. And from his website postings, that content was licensed for an audiobook version from Podium, which is now a huge audiobook company. I think at the time they were smaller. So, that was just a really wonderful success story for that author where he got picked up from his website into audio. Then he, on his own, published it on Amazon. And then, of course, we know it blew up. It got a deal from, I think it was Penguin Random House. And then obviously it was optioned for film and turned into a movie. So that type of success story is out there and it is coming from independent authors because we know that you don't need to go through a major publishing house to have an amazing book that has a lot of potential to be licensed into other formats. 

And then real quick, we have other types of subsidiary rights like book club edition, serials, large print formats. These, in my experience, are typically sub rights that are being added on to other deals. So if we, for example, we could do a license where we're licensing the book into French. And then they're adding French audio on top of that. And then they might say, well, we want the option to do these other subsidiary formats in French. So we want to be able to do a French book club edition. And that would all be part of one contract. 

How do rights agents work. I'm going to talk about how a traditional agent works and then towards the end we'll get into more how DropCap specifically works but I like to give you a good overview of just kind of what the industry is like. 

When an author has published a book or they're looking to, they have a manuscript and they're looking to get the book published, they may seek out an agent and the agent has to agree to represent the author and will sign a representation agreement with that author. Now agents also sign agreements with publishers as well to represent their lists. So these agents are sometimes part of a larger company. They're sometimes working on their own, but essentially they create a list of books or authors or publishers that they represent. And they will then go out to their network of other agents and other publishers, and they will pitch those books to those other agents and publishers. 

A lot of that pitching takes place at the international book fairs that occur throughout the year. So there's a major one in Frankfurt in October, there's a major book fair in London next week, actually. It usually takes place in March or April. There's book fairs in Bologna, Shanghai, Beijing. And this is where the publishing community meets throughout the year to really conduct a lot of business. You'd think that in this day and age, more of it would take place online and a lot of it does, but there's really no substitute for being able to maintain relationships face to face and to even be able to pick up books and feel them and see them and make your acquisitions decisions in that way. 

Agents are going to these fairs, connecting, pitching the books that they represent. And after all of that effort, they hopefully negotiate some contracts. In my experience, when we go to book fairs, you're typically meeting with someone and they're saying which books they're interested in seeing more about. We all go home, we send out copies of the PDFs for those agents or editors to review, and if it's something that they're interested in they'll come back to us and say yes I'd like to make an offer to license this book. That's when the agent who's representing the author comes in and says “okay, well, we want to negotiate on these terms we like,” and eventually an agreement is reached. The contract is signed and an advance is paid. 

So on that note, I like to talk a little bit about what goes into a foreign rights contract. Now I've had authors come to me that have received an offer from a publisher, and they never even thought about licensing their rights at all. They just kind of receive an offer out of the blue and then they start researching agencies because they want to make sure that, you know, this is a good offer for them. It's a good contract. So I like to give a bit of, you know, what you should look for in a contract in case that situation occurs for you.

The main parts are the terms, the payment, and then the logistics around how the book is going to be published. So things to think about, how long is the license valid? For us, it's typically five years. Some publishers may want seven to ten. We like to keep it shorter because then that gives you the opportunity to hopefully renew the license and get another advance against royalties. What are the languages and territories? So this is a great thing to keep in mind. In some cases, it's really cut and dry. If it's a license for Korea, the rights are typically going to be sold in South Korea. They could be sold worldwide, which means that that Korean publisher could technically sell a Korean edition in the US, but usually it's going to be confined to the country that speaks the language. 

That's a little different if the language is Spanish, for example. That's where you want to really pay attention to what territories you are giving them permission to publish into. If it's a Spanish publisher, are you giving them permission just to distribute the book in Spain? Are you giving them worldwide permission? If the publisher is in Mexico, are you giving them permission to publish throughout all of Latin America, throughout all of the world? 

So these are the kind of details that we work through when we do a contract. And then which formats is the book being licensed into? So a lot of times it's print, digital, sometimes audio. That's all going to be outlined in the contract. 

Payment, very important. What is the advance in royalty rate? That's one of the major negotiating points that we do when we get an offer from a potential licensee. Almost always they give us an offer, and we come back with something else because we want to raise the amount that you're going to be making on that license. 

When are reports and payments due? Typically, that's annually. So this is very different. If you're used to Amazon and seeing your book sales in real time, in the rest of the world, the rest of the industry, it's much, much slower. We're getting our royalty reports yearly, and they're showing sales for the prior year. I believe our deadline right now is March, end of March, to get royalty reports for 2024. And we will see those reports trickle in throughout the first half of the year. It's a lot slower moving than a lot of independent authors are used to. So I like to kind of give fair warning about that. 

And then logistics. What is the publication timeline? A lot of times we're seeing twelve to eighteen months. Again, very different if you're used to things moving more quickly as an independently published author. If it's a foreign publisher and they're adhering to spring and fall releases and they acquire your book in the fall, they may want to release it the next fall. Obviously, it needs to have time to be translated and all of that, but they're also going to be positioning it for a specific release date. So publication timeline can take up to a year or more at times. We see it happen quicker, but that's something to be aware of. 

I like to mention this one too. What happens if sales thresholds are not met? This is a really big sticking point for me because I often don't see this clause in contracts that are sent directly to an author, but it's a clause that an agent will make sure is in your contract if you have an agent. So what this means is if your book is licensed to a foreign publisher and they don't obtain a certain number of sales, those rights revert back to you. So you don't want to license to a publisher and then they don't sell any of your book, but then you're still tied up with them for five years. You want to make sure those rights go back to you if your book is not selling with them. And with us in particular, we have a few other instances in our contracts where we say when and how rights revert to the author if the foreign publisher isn't performing. 

I just want to talk a minute about DropCap Marketplace before we get to questions. Like I said, the reason that we created DropCap Marketplace was because we saw how difficult it was for independent authors to gain access to the decision makers that are licensing books. If you don't have agency representation, it's very hard to get your book in front of the people that are going to license it. You kind of just, you know, you sit back and occasionally an author gets an offer from a publisher in another country. A lot of times they're like, is this a scam? Is this for real? And then they go in search of an agent. Very easy to find an agent when you already have an offer in hand.

We wanted a way for authors to be able to list their books to test the waters to see if there is going to be international interest before you spend like a lot of time and resources on on trying to promote your book on your own internationally and also give you a way to gauge that interest without having to enter into any sort of exclusivity agreement with DropCap or with an agent in general. 

DropCap, when you list your book on the marketplace, DropCap is not acting as your agent. We are giving you a way to expose your book to our network of over 2,700 rights buyers that are using our marketplace to find content. But if you get a rights inquiry, it's still up to you at that point whether you would like to use DropCap as your agent or if you want to pursue that inquiry on your own or if you have another agent that you're using. So that was really important to us to keep that platform agnostic so that authors can come in and promote their book and gain exposure, but you're not locked into using us as an agent. Though obviously many of our authors do choose to use us as their agent for the reasons that I outlined about some of those contract pitfalls earlier. 

So a few ways that our marketplace is special. We've tried to make it a really affordable way to gauge interest in your book. A question that I get a lot is, how do I know if there's going to be international interest in my book. And my answer is, I don't know. I can give you some ideas of trends that we're seeing right now. But until you actually put your book out there in front of the people who are licensing, there really isn't a way. We don't have a crystal ball. There's no way for us to know if there's going to be interest. So part of our philosophy is to make sure it's not costing an absorbent amount to be able to put your book in front of people. 

We offer options for additional promotion, and I think this is a really important one. I feel the most high value marketing opportunities for our authors is to actually have your book at one of our international book fairs so this is where we bring your book to London or Frankfurt, and we're actually able to put the physical copy of that book in front of our rights buyers. I feel like that gives you a good advantage when you're able to do that. And then we're making sure to provide some real-time engagement reporting. So when you have an account on the marketplace, you're able to run reports to see what types of interactions are going on with your book. And that can help you gauge, you know, is this working? Are there things that I could update with my listing? That type of thing so that you have an idea of what's going on. 

One of the ways that we match books with rights buyers is we have an algorithm that is looking at what type of book has been listed and then what the buying habits of the rights buyers are that are utilizing the marketplace. I think this is important because we're not just telling our rights buyers “go into this directory and find books that you like” we're really trying to use technology to only put books in front of those rights buyers that we feel are going to be of interest to them. 

On top of that we're doing a lot of social media, email campaigns, monthly newsletters, blog posts, and you can see some of the examples here. Some of that is you know more editorial where our content team is kind of picking and choosing books that they want to feature, but when you list your book on DropCap Marketplace we are going to promote it in our weekly pitch emails to buyers that match the criteria that fit your book. 

So a bit about what's included, and I want to make sure we have time for questions, so forgive me if I'm speaking a little quickly here. When you're signing up for DropCap Marketplace, you are getting a custom landing page for each of your books. This is really important because what you see on Amazon, for example, with a book listing is what readers are most interested in, not necessarily what rights buyers are most interested in. So we're making sure that awards and recognition, sales, even just the specs for the book, like the trim size and the page count, that sort of thing, are front and center, as well as information about the author. 

You're getting a custom author page. I always try to make sure that authors understand how important it is to also promote themselves as part of this process. When a publisher is licensing your book, they're investing in you as an author as well as in your book. Because they're putting the money in to publish it into their market, they want to know who's behind it. If you have any special credentials, any awards or recognition that are separate from your book, it's still important to showcase those. 

We're doing a round of pitching to relevant buyers in our network. And by relevant, I mean, like I said, it's a children's book. We're not pitching it to the business book buyers. And then we're doing continuous matching as new buyers join our network. Books are available in our advanced search engine. So this is where if a buyer is looking for a specific niche topic, they can go and search our database and pull up books that are of interest to them. 

We're also just rolling out a monthly educational course. So when you sign up for DropCap Marketplace, you're going to start getting monthly emails. I promise they're not annoying. They're meaningful. And these emails are really designed to give you an education around rights and around what you can be doing to improve your listings and improve, you know, domestically in a way that can help gain notice for your book. 

I think one of our email series is awards that you can apply for and how you can leverage those awards to attract interest. So we want you, when you join DropCap Marketplace, we want you to have your book available, obviously, but to also make sure you're learning about rights and what you can do to increase your chances of being noticed by international buyers. 

So again, thank you for taking time out of your day. I really appreciate it. I'm going to get to some of the questions that we have here.