Episode 107 - The Seventh Process of Publishing: Selective Rights Licensing with Orna Ross
November 23, 2021
"Writers of all publishing models, do yourself a favour and listen to the whole interview. You’ll want a pen and notebook handy." —Valerie Francis
Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors joins me to discuss the seventh of the Seven Processes of Publishing: SELECTIVE RIGHTS LICENSING, or how you can make your hard-earned content work for you year after year across multiple markets and in multiple mediums. We discuss contract clauses that rights seekers might include in their boilerplate but which you should negotiate, and what clauses should be there that are sometimes left out … what it means to have someone option your work for TV or movies … why it’s important to fight for how you are represented in derived products (for example, the difference between “inspired by” and “based on”) … and when you need to let it go once you’ve licensed specific rights to a specific work.
Orna Ross is the founder and head of The Alliance of Independent Authors, a non-profit professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. ALLi provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.
"A contract is not set in stone and it's not written in blood. You can, post-contract, still have a conversation. And things can still happen. Always ask for what you want. Don't answer for them." —Orna Ross
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[00:00:00] Matty: Welcome back, Orna.
[00:00:03] Orna: Hi, Matty, thank you very much. Delighted to be back for our last one.
[00:00:07] Matty: Yes, we are here for the seventh in our series of the Seven Processes of Publishing, and today we're going to be talking about SELECTIVE RIGHTS. And I think that a great companion piece to this discussion is going to be Episode 70, which you appeared on, which was on copyright. I think that'll provide great background. But I think in this conversation we're going to be talking about something a little bit different. So when you talk about selective rights, Orna, just share with us what you have in mind there.
[00:00:34] Orna: Yes, selective rights licensing. So to set the context and the reason why it's called selective rights licensing, if you get a publisher, which is the way authors talk about it, so we know now because we've been through the Seven Processes of Publishing, we know that being published is not getting somebody to actually agree to put your book out. That is a different thing. And when people do it that way, when an author actually signs a publishing contract for a manuscript, a raw manuscript, then generally speaking, that contract takes most of the rights and licenses them for a period. Sometimes they take them for a long period. There's this new clause that's sneaking in that's also trying to take rights that haven't been invented yet. So a publisher's contract by definition tries to take as many rights as possible for that one publisher on an exclusive basis.
[00:01:34] As indy authors, we're doing things very differently. We're self-publishing our own books, and we bring them out as we've already discussed at length now across this series in three different formats, ebook, print, and audio. Audio traditionally was what was known as a subsidiary right. So a publisher who licenses all rights would then go on and sub-right out the audio rights to an audiobook publisher.
[00:02:02] In the old days, they were originally just buying the hardback version and putting that out themselves and selling the paperback rights to another publisher. And still there are very few publishing houses that do it that way. Most cover now print and hardback and other print editions in-house. But the point I'm making and the point that we made when we talked about copyright on your podcast before, that your book is not just an ebook, a print book, and an audiobook, which you now will harvest the rights to yourself as a self-publisher, there are lots of other rights embedded in there too. And they usually appear on the subsidiary rights section of a publishing contract. And they are things like translation rights, TV rights, radio rights, and so on, merchandising rights. There are lots of them, there's a long list and it’s not so important to talk about what they are as how do you handle them and understanding that your book is like a shopping mall, and different parts of the property are rented out to different people. That's what selective rights licensing is. You don't just think about self-publishing, you think also about the other publishing rights that are embedded in your book. ...
[00:00:03] Orna: Hi, Matty, thank you very much. Delighted to be back for our last one.
[00:00:07] Matty: Yes, we are here for the seventh in our series of the Seven Processes of Publishing, and today we're going to be talking about SELECTIVE RIGHTS. And I think that a great companion piece to this discussion is going to be Episode 70, which you appeared on, which was on copyright. I think that'll provide great background. But I think in this conversation we're going to be talking about something a little bit different. So when you talk about selective rights, Orna, just share with us what you have in mind there.
[00:00:34] Orna: Yes, selective rights licensing. So to set the context and the reason why it's called selective rights licensing, if you get a publisher, which is the way authors talk about it, so we know now because we've been through the Seven Processes of Publishing, we know that being published is not getting somebody to actually agree to put your book out. That is a different thing. And when people do it that way, when an author actually signs a publishing contract for a manuscript, a raw manuscript, then generally speaking, that contract takes most of the rights and licenses them for a period. Sometimes they take them for a long period. There's this new clause that's sneaking in that's also trying to take rights that haven't been invented yet. So a publisher's contract by definition tries to take as many rights as possible for that one publisher on an exclusive basis.
[00:01:34] As indy authors, we're doing things very differently. We're self-publishing our own books, and we bring them out as we've already discussed at length now across this series in three different formats, ebook, print, and audio. Audio traditionally was what was known as a subsidiary right. So a publisher who licenses all rights would then go on and sub-right out the audio rights to an audiobook publisher.
[00:02:02] In the old days, they were originally just buying the hardback version and putting that out themselves and selling the paperback rights to another publisher. And still there are very few publishing houses that do it that way. Most cover now print and hardback and other print editions in-house. But the point I'm making and the point that we made when we talked about copyright on your podcast before, that your book is not just an ebook, a print book, and an audiobook, which you now will harvest the rights to yourself as a self-publisher, there are lots of other rights embedded in there too. And they usually appear on the subsidiary rights section of a publishing contract. And they are things like translation rights, TV rights, radio rights, and so on, merchandising rights. There are lots of them, there's a long list and it’s not so important to talk about what they are as how do you handle them and understanding that your book is like a shopping mall, and different parts of the property are rented out to different people. That's what selective rights licensing is. You don't just think about self-publishing, you think also about the other publishing rights that are embedded in your book. ...
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[00:03:28] I will say this is not for beginners. So the time to start thinking about licensing your rights is when you've already had some success in selling your book in ebook, print and/or audio, because most rights buyers won't be interested until that point anyway. So it's not something to be thinking about at the beginning, except to think about it in these terms, to understand that's what you've got. You are the rights holder, that's a huge privilege and there are lots and lots of ways in which you can take advantage of that.
[00:04:02] Matty: I know one thing that is sort of the first thing that people leap to if they're talking with you about your book and they'll always say, when is the TV series going to come out? That seems like the first step that people's minds go to. So is that an example of one of these selective rights categories that you would include in this topic?
[00:04:24] Orna: Yes, exactly. So TV rights are becoming more and more popular. I mean, we're living in a great time as writers. In one sense, there's a lot more content out there, there are a lot more books being produced, but also, there are a lot more outlets out there. So the new digital streaming services like Netflix and Amazon and so on, they're content hungry. And one of the first things they do, rather than make a new story is they turn to the world of books, and we can see this with classics. They make them over and over and over again. But they're always looking for new stuff. So the world of book scouting and searching out good content for TV and other outlets is on the increase.
[00:05:09] I mean, that's not to say it's easy. And it's not to say it's straightforward either, because the first thing that happens, if you are approached by the TV or film or radio, those broadcasting rights, the first thing that happens is they will ask to put an option on your book. So every single week we get members of ALLi, and they write to us, and they say, I've just been asked for an option on my book by a TV company or a TV producer, a film producer or a radio producer. And they're super excited, naturally, and we have to say, calm down, dear, because options don't get made, far more options are actually sought. “Being greenlit" is the term that's used in the industry. And the gap or the amount of time it can take between an option being signed and the green light on a project is a very long time.
[00:06:08] But just to talk a little bit about the option, because we get a lot of questions about that. An option is essentially a producer or somebody else, an investor, somebody who hopes to make money out of a broadcasting rights project, they ask you for an option on your book, which means that you won't discuss, you won't allow anybody else the right to explore making a TV program or making a film or making a radio program or whatever it might be during the option period. So an option is all about them getting the time to go to funders and actors and directors and all of the millions of people who need to get involved in making a decision as to whether the project will go ahead or not. It gives them the time, you have exclusively optioned the work to them, so if they get all their ducks in a row, the book will go to them.
[00:07:06] For you though, as the author, while it's optioned by person A, it can't be optioned by person B, and person B might be a better option. So always with your rights, when you're licensing your rights, you want to keep the term as short as possible, and the rights buyer or the option seeker would want to make the term as long as possible, so that is the negotiation that you're going to be in.
[00:07:32] If it's a company that is hoping to produce this work at a profit, not just, say, another indy artist, producer, director that you might team up with, but if it's somebody who's actually intending to make some money from your book, then they should pay for that option. And you need to set a fee, because essentially your rights are held up for that period of time. It has a value, and if they are serious, they will have a budget for the option. A lot of authors get asked for the option and never ask how much. So asking how much is definitely part of selective rights licensing.
[00:08:12] Matty: And I always like to put a plug in for ALLi in these kinds of conversations because, can you describe a little bit what sort of support ALLi provides to members in that kind of scenario?
[00:08:22] Orna: Yes, so you just would need to write to us and tell us what's going on and we will advise you accordingly. It depends, as we've talked before about how "it depends" is the answer to so many publishing questions, but it's very particular, depending on who is the person who has approached you, what are the plans, all of that kind of thing, the size of the option will vary around that.
[00:08:45] But yeah. It's actually something we do get lots of questions about, because I think all of us instantly begin to feel out of their depth in this. And the other thing I would say is, we certainly can't advise somebody on a TV contract in the way that we can advise on a publishing contract. And TV, film, radio, any kind of broadcasting rights, merchandising rights, and lots of other subsidiary rights are completely outside our arena. You do need an attorney. They're very complex, and if you get beyond the option phase and you get into the contract phase, you definitely will need support of somebody who understands the business, because it's a different business to the publishing business. So while we can give very broad guidelines, it's not our area of expertise in that sense. It never will be. It wouldn't be possible for us to be able to do that.
[00:09:37] Matty: It seems as if the earlier in the process a contract would come up, the more standardized it probably is because if they're offering options to many authors, they're probably not modifying them author by author. And so, the earlier it is, probably the easier it would be for a novice to at least understand at a high level what's going on. So that idea, I think you and I have talked about the idea of using text-to-speech to help you work through a manuscript to make sure you're catching all the errors. I would use text-to-speech to have it read you contracts so that you're not skipping over anything. And I would think early on, anybody could understand like 90% of it, and then you'd still maybe want to check in with somebody to understand the 10% or to make sure you really did accurately understand the 90% that you thought, and then the further along the process that goes, the more specialized advice you would need in order to understand all the nuances. Does that seem sensible?
[00:10:33] Orna: Yes, very much. So I mean, the option is fairly straightforward. The option is literally just an agreement letter with a term and an amount of money granted, and that's fine, you're fine with that. It's when it gets to the contract, to the actual purchase of the content, because again, even when you get to that point and they bought and they paid, there is no guarantee that it will be made. It's notoriously difficult to get these projects through the gates. And even if they are made, it can take a very long time. But also, they can be really quite ruthless around rights. They can slip in little bits and pieces that make all the difference.
[00:11:14] It's the same as with publishing. Some contracts are fine, they're very straightforward, and some are not, and yeah, it's tricky. So it's definitely advisable at that point to get some help. But I mean, once you're at that point of actually looking at a contract, there will be a fee in there for the work and the fee should be reasonable. And so there should be room in there for you to hire some help to actually get it looked over.
[00:11:42] Matty: I think the importance of getting expert advice, even on those simpler ones. My two concerns with contracts are always, that I think I understand something, and I don't. There's a nuance to a word that has a legal meaning that I'm not thinking of as someone who's not familiar with the legal terminology. And then the other one is just, what is reasonable? What is average? If they're offering me a contract that has an option for, I don't know, five years, is that normal or is that outside of normal parameters? And so, yeah, it's great to have a resource like ALLi that you can run those kinds of very basic questions by.
[00:12:15] Orna: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the third thing is, is there something that should be there that isn't? Very often one like that catches people out. So for example, if you're selling your publishing rights as opposed to broadcasting rights or merchandising rights, with your publishing rights, translation, or supposing you get a publisher, which some of our members have done, who is just going to do your print for you. You carry on with your ebook and audio, but they will look after print. Make sure there's a right to reversion clause so that when the book goes out of print, that the rights revert to you. That's missing on lots of contracts on the publisher side, surprise, surprise, and should be there. But if you're not aware that that ought to be there and you're not going to notice that it's not. So yeah, these are the kinds of things that can catch you out.
[00:13:06] Matty: We've been talking, I think, I've been thinking in terms of TV, but movies, any differences between TV and movies in terms of what authors should keep in mind?
[00:13:15] Orna: Yeah, film and TV are similar and different. So I think of it in terms, very often with the TV, it's going to be a series of books that you're dealing with out there for the amount of content that people are getting. And TV tends to be built around pilots, and then if the pilot takes off then the rest happen. Or they might have invested in one, the first series, which might be your first book say, but if that doesn't go well, then books two to eight will no longer be required. What happens in those instances is something you need to think about. So TV is, generally speaking, unless it's a one-off TV special, it's generally long form and therefore needs even more attention.
[00:14:05] But the distinction is not so much between TV, as it is between different production companies and what they put into their contracts. So, the contracts can be quite different. Overall it's generally governed by the same principles because they're turning your text into video, which is what it comes down to. The new streaming services have slightly different approaches as well. And then the traditional Hollywood machine, which has its own particular way of behaving, and then there are all, I mean there are so many of them, independent production companies, some of whom are making both film and TV. So it really is quite difficult to generalize. But I think the big distinction between film and TV is the length of time, the amount of content you're actually licensing. And obviously, it should be obvious, the more content that's being licensed, the more money you should be getting.
[00:15:09] Matty: So I think another interesting consideration for TV and movie is that oftentimes even when they get made, they look really different than they originally did in your book. So the example I was thinking of is in Episode 89, THE BOTHNESS OF COMPELLING CHARACTERS, I talked with Ben Winters, who is the author of one of my favorite series, which is THE LAST POLICEMAN, and that just got made into, or it's going to be made into a movie or a series called THE LAST POLICE, because they decided that they were going to replace the male protagonist with a woman. And similarly, John Dixon is an author I met through our local writers' group, the Brandywine Valley Writers' Group, and he had a book called, PHOENIX ISLAND that got picked up and turned into INTELLIGENCE. John's book was about a teenager. By the time it reached the film, it was an adult, it was a totally different thing, but you know, John was still getting some remuneration for his contribution, his inspiration. So totally aside from the legal considerations, do you have any advice about how authors should approach the releasing of that sense of ownership about their material, if it gets pursued in that way?
[00:16:22] Orna: Yeah. So there is a kind of a practical thing to say, and then there's a more general thing to say. At the practical level, and this will come up in the contract negotiation, there's a difference, you used the word inspiration there. There's a difference between a broadcasting work that uses the term "inspired by" your book title and your author name, hopefully in the credits, and one that is "based on" is different again. And then there are a few other terms that are sometimes used, but those are the two big ones. So, you want to be negotiating that in the contract. You want it to be "based on," because that's better in every way, in terms of the flat fee that you get or the royalties that you get. But also, and this is a really important thing when it comes to broadcasting, is it's a fantastic marketing vehicle. And so if the name of the book gets changed too radically and it becomes not recognizable, or if it's not put on the cover, it's shoved down in the acknowledgement somewhere, things are really important for the value that would accrue to you for those rights. And so you need to be cognizant of them. That's at that level.
[00:17:34] So you fight like crazy during the negotiation and they'll know what they're prepared to do or what they're not prepared to do, and they'll have their break point, and so will you. And you can walk away, you don't have to take it. If somebody is interested, chances are somebody else will be interested and you may get a better deal somewhere else.
[00:17:52] So it's all that tricky kind of area and all the challenges that go with negotiation. One of the sections we have in our selective rights licensing guidebook is just about negotiation. So pitching and negotiation are two skills that come into properly licensing your rights and getting the best return you can for them.
[00:18:14] But back to your question, so that's the practical side of it. You fight like crazy during the contract, but then you let it go. Then just forget about it because it's going to be so different. I mean, let's take anything fictional and you've got your picture of your characters in your mind, just like a reader does, and you hear loads of readers say, oh, it wasn't half as good as the book. In fact, people nearly always say it wasn't half as good as the book, because it's very exceptional for a firm to exceed what a book can do. And particularly somebody who's read it before they see the film, because they've got the picture of the characters in their mind. But how much more so do you, as the author, who's been carrying it around for such a long time?
[00:18:57] And of course you feel like you own them because they first popped up in your imagination, but in the film, you don't own them. You've licensed them, they're gone. Licensing means that somebody has actually got the license now to do as they will. And the less involved you get, the better. I think the more you think about it, I mean, go along and do whatever they allow you to do. That would be written in the contract as well, whether you can turn up on set, you can get involved in things. Different production companies take very different kinds of approaches to that, but aside from enjoying that experience, and certainly not turning up to say no, you can't make him do that, he would never do that. You can't do that. You have to let it go completely, so only go on set if you can watch them mutilate and still be happy that it's happening.
[00:19:47] And secondly, think of it as a marketing tool, rather than anything else. And it's a completely different art form. Their constraints are much, much greater than yours. You've got the full swathe of your imagination; they've got to price that. My son works in film, so I'm really familiar with the challenges of casting and scenes, having to change the settings because they're too expensive or impossible to reproduce. There are just so many constraints in the making of a film that it's a wonder any of them are any good at all, ever. It's a really challenging art form, and it's different, so yeah, just let it go.
[00:20:27] Matty: Yeah. I think that what could be an obvious comparison would be having the author do the screenplay, which I just can imagine would almost always be a bad idea, and it's so unusual that when it does happen, it ends up making the news because people say, oh, in the circumstance so-and-so did the screenplay.
[00:20:45] Orna: Yeah. It's such a different, I have done screenplays of one or two of my novels, but I actually ended up in the end just using it as a vehicle to organize my mind. It helped me with a particularly complex novel to actually think of it as film and to write it in dialogue first. But yeah, I can attest to it being super challenging and just a very different way of writing and very different way of thinking about things.
[00:21:10] So yeah, best stick to what you're good at. It's hard enough to be a novelist or a book writer of any kind. Writing for the broadcasting media is a different skill, and there's no reason to knock yourself out getting both those skills unless you really want to.
[00:21:28] Matty: The other thing I liked about what you said is the idea of favoring or pursuing "based on" rather than "inspired by," or having your name more prominently displayed in whatever that production's public facing offering is. And I like that because I think a lot of times, if an author was considering whether or not they should pursue having their name included in the movie poster, let's say, just as an example, they might see it as like an ego thing and something that they would be willing to back off of because it was just an ego thing. But I like that approach of thinking of it as a marketing tool that you should fight to keep, not something you're using to feed your ego. You might be using it to feed your ego, but there are legitimate reasons you would want that too, legitimate business reasons you would want that.
[00:22:17] Orna: Absolutely, and you will be really letting yourself down as a publisher, you know? So again, it's about that thing we've discussed before in this series, about which hat are you wearing? As a writer, it's an ego thing, but as a publisher, it's your job.
[00:22:34] Matty: So we've spoken so far about TV and movies. The other thing I wanted to make sure we hit was translations, but are there any other subsidiary rights that you want to talk about before we go there?
[00:22:44] Orna: Merchandising is worth a little chat, because we've just seen a horrible thing happen with merchandising rights. And this really shows the importance of selective rights licensing. And this happened to an ALLi member, I won't name the person, but a children's book author who signed a contract for their books exclusively with the publisher, as you do sometimes if you're not thinking from a selective rights licensing perspective, and they have gone on to sell on the broadcasting rights, extremely lucrative attached merch. The character that this author created is now a household name in the UK. Everybody knows this wee character, and the merchandising rights have also been really successful, so they're popping up in bookshops and toy shops all over the country. The author hasn't gotten one penny, not one penny.
[00:23:44] So simply because she didn't think about it from a selective rights perspective. So if she had, she would have retained her merchandising rights and she would have retained her TV rights and not just sign them over to the publisher, which is what she did. And it was a very bad deal, some of the way in which the sub-rights was handled was a really, really bad. I mean, most reputable publishers will have a standard sort of contract for sub-rights that will give the author 50% minimum. This was one where possibly there was an awareness of the deal in advance of signing the work, I'm not sure exactly how she got to where she got to, but it's been awful for her. So yeah, I think if you're a children's book writer or if you're in computer games kind of territory or fantasy, or any of these things where a merchandising might become a thing and be aware of your merchandising rights. You might want to hold them rather than signing them over. And somebody, if you are signing a deal for say, the print rights or for the publishing rights, just be aware that merchandising can be lucrative too.
[00:24:55] Matty: If you wanted to pursue merchandising rights separate from the print or visual arts or whatever, are there places you can go that specialize in negotiating merchandising rights?
[00:25:05] Orna: Yes, there are places that specialize in licensing. So you're moving outside copyright and you're moving into trademarking and different kinds of agreements around your intellectual property. So it's all intellectual property rights, but they're handled quite differently. So copyright is one that we're very familiar with as writers, but when we get into the area of other kinds of subsidiary rights, then the types of agreements change. So yeah, there are lots of licensing companies that will actually take you on. There are kind of agencies for brand licensing, they'll take you on if they feel you've got potential. And again, successfully selling already in book form is what interests them. They won't be interested, no matter how brilliant your idea is, they're not going to be interested in that. They need proof of concept, and then you just, it's just a matter of pitching them.
[00:26:35] Matty: I did want to mention another recent episode, as long as we're talking about merch. So in Episode 99, I just talked about CONNECTING WITH FANS THROUGH MERCHANDISING with A. L. Jackson. And that was very interesting because she is not only making good money for merchandising related to her romance novels, but she's gotten to the point where she has a little production operation going on there, a production and distribution operation because it's so successful. So, if you decide to keep your merchandising rights and exploit them yourself, then that would be a good resource for people to check out for doing that.
[00:27:11] Orna: Fantastic. And I just love this, I love that as authors, we are thinking, well, I might license this right, but not going to expose this for myself. And it's a really good, it's a really good way to think about it. As an aside and not particularly an advice thing. I really wish there were more independent publishers who are already supplying bookstores who would team up with independent authors around print. I would license my print if I got somebody who was really cracking good already putting similar books into bookstores because they've got all infrastructure, they're set up for returns and they know how to deal with it all. And I would love to see that becoming more of a thing. I think it's a bit short-sighted of independent publishers not to recognize some indy authors who are doing extremely well in ebook and/or audio book could really be lucrative options for them as print publishers. But they're very loathe to split the rights. They want all rights. So that's where we are.
[00:28:16] Matty: Yeah. As a former project manager, I imagined an Excel spreadsheet. I imagine everything is an Excel spreadsheet, but I can imagine an Excel spreadsheet that would be all the territories, that you could sell into. And then all the media, those would be the two axes, and then in each of those cells, you would have what your desired or what your actual timeframe was for that. So it's print rights in Japan and, whatever the duration of that right is. And I think that's, when you think of it as those multiple chunks, I think the "selective" of selective rights becomes very clear.
[00:28:54] Orna: Yes, absolutely. That's a really good and interesting way to approach us. I should also put a mention in here for Ethan Ellenberg is an agent in New York that I worked pretty closely with him. A lot of our advisory for people who have queries around, rights that you would take to a literary agent. And he and his son Ezra actually has put together royalty reminder, which for people who are up and running and doing this successfully, as you've just suggested there with the print rights in Japan, on your something else rights on another line and something else on there coming up at different times, it can, when you start to successfully license your rights, it can actually become quite confusing, especially if you've got a loss of books. if you're in a genre where you produce lots and lots of books that can easily get confusing. So they produce a reminder for authors and some small publishers and as a way to keep track of your commission payments, your royalty payments, and when everything is due.
[00:29:58] Matty: It's an interesting thought, you mentioned about the number of books, because I would imagine that most people who would be pursuing rights, if you had a successful series, they're probably not going to want to try to contract with that on a book-by-book basis. Or a character-by-character basis, if it's merch or whatever, that they're probably looking to contract for a series or a set of characters, for example. So I don't know if there's an answer to that other than just that they should be commensurately paying a series worth of money to you.
[00:30:30] Orna: Absolutely. That's right. And this is where the negotiation comes in, and this is where it can be tricky to make sure that you're getting what you want out of it. But you're absolutely right. They're not going to say, okay, we will pay you for one and book four, while you licensed book two and book three to somebody else that just doesn't work that way.
[00:30:47] Matty: Some of the stories that I've heard that were among the things that made me decide to go indy were these scenarios where an author was with a traditional publisher of some size. And then the publisher went under or whatever circumstance arose, and they realized that it was tricky for them to continue publishing in a series if the series had been started by the publisher. So there was the whole question of trying to get back their rights on those early books in the series from the publisher who is maybe not in business anymore, but then also having the rights to continue the use of those characters, which I think is where reversion rights or reversion clause is very important.
[00:31:22] Orna: Really important to, honestly, we have one of these a week, at least, crosses our desk. This is just more and more common as publishers are acquired and merge, imprints go out and are taken over by somebody else. The rights position become very complex. And this is another thing that you always need to look out for when you're signing your original contract, but the term is kept to a minimum. So at least if you do end up in a very kind of complex scenario, you have your original contract with the original publisher that carries some weight because you can find that publisher A sells to publisher B. so you can have all the rights, indefinitely forever, but actually they didn't have the right to sell that, they just did to do between them. So yeah, it can all get pretty tricky.
[00:32:14] But I will say that in most cases, and we see a lot of them, we are successful in getting those rights back for the author. Sometimes it takes some time, there’s sometimes kinks to straighten out, but generally speaking, particularly if they're not selling well, if they are selling well, they also should be doing well. If they aren't, then that's a different question entirely. Something's going wrong somewhere. But if they're not selling that well, you will usually get your rights back. Just ask. Sometimes the authors assume, oh, I signed something that I didn't put a term in. And I, that's it forever. Those books are gone.
[00:32:49] You know, a contract is not set in stone, and it's not written in blood. You can, post-contract, still have a conversation. And things can still happen. Always ask for what you want. Don't answer for them. Don't assume if you change your mind or things changed for you over time, which is really common, then ask. And sometimes the answer will be yes, because maybe they want to simplify and it's not worth their one and I'm making enough and they're decent people and they feel okay, now you can self-publish. I'm not going to hold you back. Here you go. We've seen a lot of that. And publishers, lots of publisher, are really decent people, and they're not interested in holding up your rights just for the sake of it.
[00:33:34] The other thing on that is, you will get in negotiation. Other publishers are very good negotiators and not very nice people also happens. And you will hear a sentence that will be fired to at some point in your negotiation. a rights buyer often is, oh, that's our standard contract. So just bear in mind, there is no such thing as a standard contract. There is a boiler plate that is meant to be adapted.
[00:34:02] Another thing that authors do is they get the contract may just sign. And the publishers do not expect that. And authors can feel sometimes, oh, if I ask them, they're not going to like me and they're maybe won't go through with it and I will get this nice rights deal that I'm looking for.
[00:34:20] And it doesn't work like that. It's business. They expect you to negotiate. If they have more respect for you, if you negotiate. And if you don't know what you're doing, get an agent to do the work for you. It's pretty easy to get an agent once you have a reasonable offer on the table, because it's easy work for an agent and it can be a way to get somebody to work on your behalf, not just for that particular negotiation, but also then maybe to begin to work on your rights licensing for you.
[00:34:52] Matty: Great, great advice. I'm going to clip that out and I'm going to put it on my social media once a month because it's an important reminder to people.
[00:34:59] Let's switch now to translations. The whole question of movies and TV is one that I can imagine that the author themselves has to almost by definition be actively involved in, that may or may not be true, but translations is one of those ones that I would love it if there was some kind of passive way that I could potentially take advantage of translations, find someone to just say, here, if you can find someone who wants to publish this, then I'll split the proceeds with you in some way. So, how far off am I with that as a possibility?
[00:35:33] Orna: Yeah. I mean, an agent will work on getting translation rights for you, if you have a good agent who understands the principle of selective rights licensing, who isn't expecting you to sell all your rights, who is indy friendly. And it can be hard to get agents who are indy friendly because they see indy authors as essentially part of the change in the publishing worlds that is not agent favorable and that's fair enough. But there are lots of agents now who are more far seeing than that and who understand that authors will work with agents on some projects and not on others, or who will give agents certain rights to negotiate, but want to retain others.
[00:36:16] And so any agent you work with needs to have that understanding of the indy author and how that publishing works for indy authors. So the old agent contract that's exclusive, again it's part of that ALLi we're always saying, shun exclusivity. Non-exclusive is what you want. That's your advantage. You can't do selective rights licensing if you sell your rights exclusively, or if you self-published exclusively on self-publishing platform, you're also shooting yourself in the foot. So, non-exclusive is always the way to go. So yeah, there are services as well, who will actually pitch translation rights agencies.
[00:37:01] And the other thing to be aware of is that it's generally sub agents, that your home agent will work with anyway. So say Korea, taking your country off the top of my head, and you have an agent who will essentially do the work that you'd been talking about there and go and see if they can license your Korean rights for you. So we say, "sell rights," but what we really mean is "license," and I think it's important to keep that distinction, so I tend to say license. And off they go to try and do that. They don't go to Korea. They don't write Korean publishers. They actually have already probably got the Korean sub-agents that they use.
[00:37:45] So these agencies are now becoming more widely available. People that are accessible through Writer's Market and here in the UK, the equivalent does the Writers and Artists Yearbook. You can actually research them on the internet. You can see who else has published. Authors are also sharing with each other, yes, I sold my rights to them. They were great on gosh, X months that they did well. I recommend them, or no, they were a disaster. They didn't pay me what they said they would.
[00:38:13] Because translation right, copyrights itself is well embedded in certain territories. It's not very well embedded in others and it's contested in others. So in Europe, for example, there could be quite a bit of contesting between the UK edition of the work, the US edition of the work, the self-published edition of the work. And there's a lot of plagiarism. There's a lot of just taking a book and ripping it off in certain places and just selling the book in a cheap and nasty cover, but it works for that territory and somebody's making money out of that. And we often never even knowing, or the publisher or anybody agent, nobody knows it just happened. And there's not lot we can do about that. But it is worth knowing which territories are good to sell into and which are best to just not even bother because copyright is such a loose concept there that the money you get wouldn't be worthwhile.
[00:39:10] The other thing, speaking about money, is you don't get a lot of money for translation rights deal, generally speaking, unless you're a very desirable property. It's going to be somewhere in the region of about, five or 6,000 dollars, maybe a bit more, but that will be a good average benchmark. And your agent will take their percentage of that, and they will usually be 20 to 25% because there'll be their cost and they'll be the sub-agent cost. So it's not a lot of money. But once you've sold into one territory, it becomes much easier for yourself, for your agent, to go to another territory and say, I sold the Korean rights and I just thought I'd mention the Japanese rights, and they're available and you can set your price even if you want to and top it up.
[00:40:00] And when you add them up, then it gets easier. Every time you sell one, it gets easier to sell the next one. And then, over time it can just make a nice difference to your bottom line. So, yeah, that's, I think it's a whole area that needs its own set of administration. It's a wing, in publishing houses, there is the rights department and that's all they do. They just do the rights and it's kind of like the dark arts of publishing. Nobody else knows what goes on over there. It's a whole different way. So one is selling books to readers and the other is selling rights to rights buyers. It's a completely different thing.
[00:40:43] Matty: Yeah. When I think about my own books and I think about the amount of study I would have to do to feel even passively competent to make those kinds of assessments, it's just way down on my list. And another episode I can point people to is Episode 23, which is REACHING NEW READERS THROUGH TRANSLATIONS, that was with Emma Prince, who was doing very well with Scottish medieval romance in Germany. Who knew?
[00:41:06] And so I'm sure that the people who work in those areas could look at a book and say, oh yeah, that's going to do great in Germany. It's not going to do so great in Korea or vice versa. And I do think that there are plenty of authors who would say, here are my books. And if you give me a reasonable contract, I'll split it with you. Even if the split is wildly favorable to the person who's helping you do it because you figure everything you're getting is just an extra. And I'd be willing to split whatever I'm getting pretty generously with someone else if I was getting a percentage of it.
[00:41:40] Orna: Yeah. And I mean, another way to do it is this is expertise that's built up over time, and it is possible to get people who have been doing this for publishers and for others and hire them and pay them a fee to do it. And then whatever money they make is yours. So there are various ways that you can go about it. But as you said, as you rightly said, where is it on your list of priorities? For a lot of authors, it's not. That's why I say it's not something to be thinking about at the beginning because rights buyers won't be interested anyway, but also because it is time consuming. You will, you need to have your equivalent of the rights department, be that an agent working on your behalf or a rights assistant, who does the pitching and stuff like that, who builds up their expertise over time. However you decide to do this, you have to allocate time, you have like everything else, time and budget to it in order for it to work.
[00:42:39] Matty: Yeah, this is one where I just want to exchange time for money. And I want it to be a percentage because I don't want to commit the money. I would rather find out that I was wildly popular in Germany, and I’ve made a million dollars and give half of the million dollars to somebody else to have found that opportunity for me than to either not pursue that opportunity or to take the chance that I'm going to pay someone whatever it would be to potentially realize there was no opportunity. It's just very, it's very tricky
[00:43:06] Orna: Absolutely. I've been trying for 10 years to find an enterprising individual who sees the opportunity here with indy authors. Because there's a major opportunity as you just said, you'd give away a lot of rights capital there in order to make that happen because you'll never get to it otherwise. And so anything is better than then that. So yeah, there is an opportunity there definitely for an enterprising individual, but it is a complex area. And even those who have been working in the rights arena for a very long time, it never gets easy. It never gets easy to sell rights. Unless you get something like the Harry Potter phenomenon, when everything gets easy. Unless you've got that going on, it's always a challenging arena. But a very interesting one, culturally and in lots of other ways. So if there's any enterprising person listening, if they want to contact ALLi, I've got a lot of ideas about how you could make money doing this.
[00:44:05] Matty: And I'll volunteer to be the beta author for trying your new service out.
[00:44:11] Another thing I think is interesting about translations is honestly, because translations is way down on my list, I'm waiting for AI translation to get good enough that it's feasible. So, in a year, three years, five years, 10 years, whatever it is, if I could just plug my book in and I could have a native speaker tell me, that's like a pretty decent thing. Maybe I would sell it for a discount because over time I'm guessing that AI generated content is going to be expected to be discounted from the human generated content, at least for a bit. Do you have any sense of like where that's going, at what point that might be realistic?
[00:44:47] Orna: I don't. It would be a brave person who would actually put a date on this one, particularly if your translation is complex. But I mean, it's coming. It's definitely coming. It will be here and, I expect it to be here when my business is still here. So, that sort of timeframe. Years rather than decades, let's put it that way. Already, I think, you get a fair translation. And that's the other option is that you retain your rights and that you work with a translator who now gets a fair copy from an auto translate, though sometimes they say, no, they'd rather work from scratch, that actually inking up the one that the AI translator gave you is harder than just translating from scratch. I don't know, I'm a bit dubious about that. But it is an option. And we have a number of big indies who are selling their own German rights particularly, but we're also seeing them sell into all the territories as well.
[00:45:47] So I think it's not a bad idea at all to wait. And if that's something that appeals to you, selling it in that way, then you can. I wouldn't be discounting too much because books in other territories outside of the Anglo-American world are more expensive, considerably more expensive. So, if you've got a translated work and if it's decent and if, you do need to do and get it checked by a native speaker or a native reader, somebody who reads in your genre and in that language, some of these things are challenging, but if they've told you that you've got a good book on your hands, there's no reason just because it was generated by a AI. And because there will have been some human input as well. It's never going to be a matter of just press a button and a perfect translation pops out.
[00:46:39] Matty: That's what I'm waiting for. I'm willing to wait a long time, but that's what I want.
[00:46:45] Orna: Okay, I'm changing my date. It's just gone into decades or maybe hundreds of years. Perfection is hard.
[00:46:52] Matty: I'm seeing another business opportunity too. If people who were willing to act as, not as the expert subsidiary rights managers or agents, but as like virtual assistants in different countries. So that somebody who’s, let’s say they're an avid romance reader in Germany who could read the book for that, to ensure the translation was good. And one of the things that Emma talk about was, even if you have a human translator, it's good to have a native QA reader as well to make sure that it's coming through, but also to deal with things like social media and stuff like that. So we're just starting out all sorts of great business opportunities for people who want to forge new paths in the indy world.
[00:47:30] Orna: Absolutely. And the other one that I would add to that, and I think this is important if we're thinking about not licensing our rights, but actually exploiting them ourselves in the translation arena is just getting the book up there. As we all know, it doesn't change if it's in another territory, that's only the start, how you go to marketing. And so you need a native speaker and somebody in that territory to do your social media or whatever other ways you've decided you're going to market your books. So you've always got to think about.
[00:48:01] Matty: And I guess it's worth mentioning too, that, for people who may be just starting out, but got to the end of this, even though we gave them a warning that this was more advanced material, that all this is not to say that if you want your book in German, you can't get it out there in Germany. It's just trying to be in English. And so, if you're publishing through KDP or Draft2Digital or other platforms, I'm sure, you can make your own language book available in other countries for people who speak that language.
[00:48:28] Orna: Absolutely. So you're talking about English language books selling in Germany and Spain and so on. Is that what you mean? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just by using the services that we use, they're automatically going into those territories where those platforms have a presence. On this is where, when you start looking at the international arena, this is where you see that Amazon is not as dominant as it is in the Anglo-American world. So Amazon is in, I think, 13 territories of moment, whereas Apple is in 52 and I'm not sure how many territory Kobo is in but I'm going to shout out here for the Kobo map, which I just love, which tells you where your books have sold, and I'm heading up for a hundred now. I'm dying to get to a hundred territories. But Kobo has access where Amazon doesn't. So does Apple and then PublishDrive or StreetLib are people who can take you into countries and territories where you're just there just by using other services. So your book is selling in those countries in the English language.
[00:49:36] Matty: I think Google Play is another one based just based on the number of different currencies you can enter as a price, they're in many countries.
[00:49:43] Orna: They're all over the place. Absolutely. And I'm glad you mentioned them.
[00:49:48] Matty: So my last question is that a lot of the examples we've been using have been fiction, Harry Potter or cartoon characters that were turned into merch, things like that. Any final thoughts about if someone is a non-fiction writer, any different advice for how they can be exploiting these subsidiary rights?
[00:50:07] Orna: The only thing is it is general advice that I didn't actually say. And that applies across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, is you must approach rights buyers who have an interest in that type of material. And you need to get to know the territory and you need to get to know who are the good publishers in that area and what do they publish? And don't send them stuff that they just don't do. So if you're selling specialist nonfiction, you're probably going to be more aware of publishers in that arena. It's probably easier to pick them out. But yeah, definitely make sure that you're sending the right material. Otherwise it all happens pretty similarly. It's the same process in terms of getting the contract and negotiating the contract and all of that. Nothing changes very much if it's non-fiction or poetry.
[00:50:59] Matty: That's great. Well, if people have enjoyed this episode, I would definitely point them to your earlier episode on copyright, Episode 70 COPYRIGHT FOR AUTHORS. And I also just want to give a recommendation for the ALLi book 150 SELF-PUBLISHING QUESTIONS ANSWERED, ALLi's Writing, Publishing. and Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets by Orna Ross and ML Ronn, a.k.a. Michael La Ronn, who has also been a multiple appearance guest on the podcast.
[00:51:27] So, Orna, thank you so much for going through the Seven Processes of Publishing for us. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and ALLi online.
[00:51:36] Orna: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, I'm Orna Ross at OrnaRoss.com for my author website. And the Alliance of Independent Authors is the professional association for self-publishing authors, and you'll find it at AllianceIndependentAuthors.org.
[00:51:57] Matty: Great. Thank you, Orna.
[00:51:58] Orna: Thank you. Matty. Bye.
[00:04:02] Matty: I know one thing that is sort of the first thing that people leap to if they're talking with you about your book and they'll always say, when is the TV series going to come out? That seems like the first step that people's minds go to. So is that an example of one of these selective rights categories that you would include in this topic?
[00:04:24] Orna: Yes, exactly. So TV rights are becoming more and more popular. I mean, we're living in a great time as writers. In one sense, there's a lot more content out there, there are a lot more books being produced, but also, there are a lot more outlets out there. So the new digital streaming services like Netflix and Amazon and so on, they're content hungry. And one of the first things they do, rather than make a new story is they turn to the world of books, and we can see this with classics. They make them over and over and over again. But they're always looking for new stuff. So the world of book scouting and searching out good content for TV and other outlets is on the increase.
[00:05:09] I mean, that's not to say it's easy. And it's not to say it's straightforward either, because the first thing that happens, if you are approached by the TV or film or radio, those broadcasting rights, the first thing that happens is they will ask to put an option on your book. So every single week we get members of ALLi, and they write to us, and they say, I've just been asked for an option on my book by a TV company or a TV producer, a film producer or a radio producer. And they're super excited, naturally, and we have to say, calm down, dear, because options don't get made, far more options are actually sought. “Being greenlit" is the term that's used in the industry. And the gap or the amount of time it can take between an option being signed and the green light on a project is a very long time.
[00:06:08] But just to talk a little bit about the option, because we get a lot of questions about that. An option is essentially a producer or somebody else, an investor, somebody who hopes to make money out of a broadcasting rights project, they ask you for an option on your book, which means that you won't discuss, you won't allow anybody else the right to explore making a TV program or making a film or making a radio program or whatever it might be during the option period. So an option is all about them getting the time to go to funders and actors and directors and all of the millions of people who need to get involved in making a decision as to whether the project will go ahead or not. It gives them the time, you have exclusively optioned the work to them, so if they get all their ducks in a row, the book will go to them.
[00:07:06] For you though, as the author, while it's optioned by person A, it can't be optioned by person B, and person B might be a better option. So always with your rights, when you're licensing your rights, you want to keep the term as short as possible, and the rights buyer or the option seeker would want to make the term as long as possible, so that is the negotiation that you're going to be in.
[00:07:32] If it's a company that is hoping to produce this work at a profit, not just, say, another indy artist, producer, director that you might team up with, but if it's somebody who's actually intending to make some money from your book, then they should pay for that option. And you need to set a fee, because essentially your rights are held up for that period of time. It has a value, and if they are serious, they will have a budget for the option. A lot of authors get asked for the option and never ask how much. So asking how much is definitely part of selective rights licensing.
[00:08:12] Matty: And I always like to put a plug in for ALLi in these kinds of conversations because, can you describe a little bit what sort of support ALLi provides to members in that kind of scenario?
[00:08:22] Orna: Yes, so you just would need to write to us and tell us what's going on and we will advise you accordingly. It depends, as we've talked before about how "it depends" is the answer to so many publishing questions, but it's very particular, depending on who is the person who has approached you, what are the plans, all of that kind of thing, the size of the option will vary around that.
[00:08:45] But yeah. It's actually something we do get lots of questions about, because I think all of us instantly begin to feel out of their depth in this. And the other thing I would say is, we certainly can't advise somebody on a TV contract in the way that we can advise on a publishing contract. And TV, film, radio, any kind of broadcasting rights, merchandising rights, and lots of other subsidiary rights are completely outside our arena. You do need an attorney. They're very complex, and if you get beyond the option phase and you get into the contract phase, you definitely will need support of somebody who understands the business, because it's a different business to the publishing business. So while we can give very broad guidelines, it's not our area of expertise in that sense. It never will be. It wouldn't be possible for us to be able to do that.
[00:09:37] Matty: It seems as if the earlier in the process a contract would come up, the more standardized it probably is because if they're offering options to many authors, they're probably not modifying them author by author. And so, the earlier it is, probably the easier it would be for a novice to at least understand at a high level what's going on. So that idea, I think you and I have talked about the idea of using text-to-speech to help you work through a manuscript to make sure you're catching all the errors. I would use text-to-speech to have it read you contracts so that you're not skipping over anything. And I would think early on, anybody could understand like 90% of it, and then you'd still maybe want to check in with somebody to understand the 10% or to make sure you really did accurately understand the 90% that you thought, and then the further along the process that goes, the more specialized advice you would need in order to understand all the nuances. Does that seem sensible?
[00:10:33] Orna: Yes, very much. So I mean, the option is fairly straightforward. The option is literally just an agreement letter with a term and an amount of money granted, and that's fine, you're fine with that. It's when it gets to the contract, to the actual purchase of the content, because again, even when you get to that point and they bought and they paid, there is no guarantee that it will be made. It's notoriously difficult to get these projects through the gates. And even if they are made, it can take a very long time. But also, they can be really quite ruthless around rights. They can slip in little bits and pieces that make all the difference.
[00:11:14] It's the same as with publishing. Some contracts are fine, they're very straightforward, and some are not, and yeah, it's tricky. So it's definitely advisable at that point to get some help. But I mean, once you're at that point of actually looking at a contract, there will be a fee in there for the work and the fee should be reasonable. And so there should be room in there for you to hire some help to actually get it looked over.
[00:11:42] Matty: I think the importance of getting expert advice, even on those simpler ones. My two concerns with contracts are always, that I think I understand something, and I don't. There's a nuance to a word that has a legal meaning that I'm not thinking of as someone who's not familiar with the legal terminology. And then the other one is just, what is reasonable? What is average? If they're offering me a contract that has an option for, I don't know, five years, is that normal or is that outside of normal parameters? And so, yeah, it's great to have a resource like ALLi that you can run those kinds of very basic questions by.
[00:12:15] Orna: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the third thing is, is there something that should be there that isn't? Very often one like that catches people out. So for example, if you're selling your publishing rights as opposed to broadcasting rights or merchandising rights, with your publishing rights, translation, or supposing you get a publisher, which some of our members have done, who is just going to do your print for you. You carry on with your ebook and audio, but they will look after print. Make sure there's a right to reversion clause so that when the book goes out of print, that the rights revert to you. That's missing on lots of contracts on the publisher side, surprise, surprise, and should be there. But if you're not aware that that ought to be there and you're not going to notice that it's not. So yeah, these are the kinds of things that can catch you out.
[00:13:06] Matty: We've been talking, I think, I've been thinking in terms of TV, but movies, any differences between TV and movies in terms of what authors should keep in mind?
[00:13:15] Orna: Yeah, film and TV are similar and different. So I think of it in terms, very often with the TV, it's going to be a series of books that you're dealing with out there for the amount of content that people are getting. And TV tends to be built around pilots, and then if the pilot takes off then the rest happen. Or they might have invested in one, the first series, which might be your first book say, but if that doesn't go well, then books two to eight will no longer be required. What happens in those instances is something you need to think about. So TV is, generally speaking, unless it's a one-off TV special, it's generally long form and therefore needs even more attention.
[00:14:05] But the distinction is not so much between TV, as it is between different production companies and what they put into their contracts. So, the contracts can be quite different. Overall it's generally governed by the same principles because they're turning your text into video, which is what it comes down to. The new streaming services have slightly different approaches as well. And then the traditional Hollywood machine, which has its own particular way of behaving, and then there are all, I mean there are so many of them, independent production companies, some of whom are making both film and TV. So it really is quite difficult to generalize. But I think the big distinction between film and TV is the length of time, the amount of content you're actually licensing. And obviously, it should be obvious, the more content that's being licensed, the more money you should be getting.
[00:15:09] Matty: So I think another interesting consideration for TV and movie is that oftentimes even when they get made, they look really different than they originally did in your book. So the example I was thinking of is in Episode 89, THE BOTHNESS OF COMPELLING CHARACTERS, I talked with Ben Winters, who is the author of one of my favorite series, which is THE LAST POLICEMAN, and that just got made into, or it's going to be made into a movie or a series called THE LAST POLICE, because they decided that they were going to replace the male protagonist with a woman. And similarly, John Dixon is an author I met through our local writers' group, the Brandywine Valley Writers' Group, and he had a book called, PHOENIX ISLAND that got picked up and turned into INTELLIGENCE. John's book was about a teenager. By the time it reached the film, it was an adult, it was a totally different thing, but you know, John was still getting some remuneration for his contribution, his inspiration. So totally aside from the legal considerations, do you have any advice about how authors should approach the releasing of that sense of ownership about their material, if it gets pursued in that way?
[00:16:22] Orna: Yeah. So there is a kind of a practical thing to say, and then there's a more general thing to say. At the practical level, and this will come up in the contract negotiation, there's a difference, you used the word inspiration there. There's a difference between a broadcasting work that uses the term "inspired by" your book title and your author name, hopefully in the credits, and one that is "based on" is different again. And then there are a few other terms that are sometimes used, but those are the two big ones. So, you want to be negotiating that in the contract. You want it to be "based on," because that's better in every way, in terms of the flat fee that you get or the royalties that you get. But also, and this is a really important thing when it comes to broadcasting, is it's a fantastic marketing vehicle. And so if the name of the book gets changed too radically and it becomes not recognizable, or if it's not put on the cover, it's shoved down in the acknowledgement somewhere, things are really important for the value that would accrue to you for those rights. And so you need to be cognizant of them. That's at that level.
[00:17:34] So you fight like crazy during the negotiation and they'll know what they're prepared to do or what they're not prepared to do, and they'll have their break point, and so will you. And you can walk away, you don't have to take it. If somebody is interested, chances are somebody else will be interested and you may get a better deal somewhere else.
[00:17:52] So it's all that tricky kind of area and all the challenges that go with negotiation. One of the sections we have in our selective rights licensing guidebook is just about negotiation. So pitching and negotiation are two skills that come into properly licensing your rights and getting the best return you can for them.
[00:18:14] But back to your question, so that's the practical side of it. You fight like crazy during the contract, but then you let it go. Then just forget about it because it's going to be so different. I mean, let's take anything fictional and you've got your picture of your characters in your mind, just like a reader does, and you hear loads of readers say, oh, it wasn't half as good as the book. In fact, people nearly always say it wasn't half as good as the book, because it's very exceptional for a firm to exceed what a book can do. And particularly somebody who's read it before they see the film, because they've got the picture of the characters in their mind. But how much more so do you, as the author, who's been carrying it around for such a long time?
[00:18:57] And of course you feel like you own them because they first popped up in your imagination, but in the film, you don't own them. You've licensed them, they're gone. Licensing means that somebody has actually got the license now to do as they will. And the less involved you get, the better. I think the more you think about it, I mean, go along and do whatever they allow you to do. That would be written in the contract as well, whether you can turn up on set, you can get involved in things. Different production companies take very different kinds of approaches to that, but aside from enjoying that experience, and certainly not turning up to say no, you can't make him do that, he would never do that. You can't do that. You have to let it go completely, so only go on set if you can watch them mutilate and still be happy that it's happening.
[00:19:47] And secondly, think of it as a marketing tool, rather than anything else. And it's a completely different art form. Their constraints are much, much greater than yours. You've got the full swathe of your imagination; they've got to price that. My son works in film, so I'm really familiar with the challenges of casting and scenes, having to change the settings because they're too expensive or impossible to reproduce. There are just so many constraints in the making of a film that it's a wonder any of them are any good at all, ever. It's a really challenging art form, and it's different, so yeah, just let it go.
[00:20:27] Matty: Yeah. I think that what could be an obvious comparison would be having the author do the screenplay, which I just can imagine would almost always be a bad idea, and it's so unusual that when it does happen, it ends up making the news because people say, oh, in the circumstance so-and-so did the screenplay.
[00:20:45] Orna: Yeah. It's such a different, I have done screenplays of one or two of my novels, but I actually ended up in the end just using it as a vehicle to organize my mind. It helped me with a particularly complex novel to actually think of it as film and to write it in dialogue first. But yeah, I can attest to it being super challenging and just a very different way of writing and very different way of thinking about things.
[00:21:10] So yeah, best stick to what you're good at. It's hard enough to be a novelist or a book writer of any kind. Writing for the broadcasting media is a different skill, and there's no reason to knock yourself out getting both those skills unless you really want to.
[00:21:28] Matty: The other thing I liked about what you said is the idea of favoring or pursuing "based on" rather than "inspired by," or having your name more prominently displayed in whatever that production's public facing offering is. And I like that because I think a lot of times, if an author was considering whether or not they should pursue having their name included in the movie poster, let's say, just as an example, they might see it as like an ego thing and something that they would be willing to back off of because it was just an ego thing. But I like that approach of thinking of it as a marketing tool that you should fight to keep, not something you're using to feed your ego. You might be using it to feed your ego, but there are legitimate reasons you would want that too, legitimate business reasons you would want that.
[00:22:17] Orna: Absolutely, and you will be really letting yourself down as a publisher, you know? So again, it's about that thing we've discussed before in this series, about which hat are you wearing? As a writer, it's an ego thing, but as a publisher, it's your job.
[00:22:34] Matty: So we've spoken so far about TV and movies. The other thing I wanted to make sure we hit was translations, but are there any other subsidiary rights that you want to talk about before we go there?
[00:22:44] Orna: Merchandising is worth a little chat, because we've just seen a horrible thing happen with merchandising rights. And this really shows the importance of selective rights licensing. And this happened to an ALLi member, I won't name the person, but a children's book author who signed a contract for their books exclusively with the publisher, as you do sometimes if you're not thinking from a selective rights licensing perspective, and they have gone on to sell on the broadcasting rights, extremely lucrative attached merch. The character that this author created is now a household name in the UK. Everybody knows this wee character, and the merchandising rights have also been really successful, so they're popping up in bookshops and toy shops all over the country. The author hasn't gotten one penny, not one penny.
[00:23:44] So simply because she didn't think about it from a selective rights perspective. So if she had, she would have retained her merchandising rights and she would have retained her TV rights and not just sign them over to the publisher, which is what she did. And it was a very bad deal, some of the way in which the sub-rights was handled was a really, really bad. I mean, most reputable publishers will have a standard sort of contract for sub-rights that will give the author 50% minimum. This was one where possibly there was an awareness of the deal in advance of signing the work, I'm not sure exactly how she got to where she got to, but it's been awful for her. So yeah, I think if you're a children's book writer or if you're in computer games kind of territory or fantasy, or any of these things where a merchandising might become a thing and be aware of your merchandising rights. You might want to hold them rather than signing them over. And somebody, if you are signing a deal for say, the print rights or for the publishing rights, just be aware that merchandising can be lucrative too.
[00:24:55] Matty: If you wanted to pursue merchandising rights separate from the print or visual arts or whatever, are there places you can go that specialize in negotiating merchandising rights?
[00:25:05] Orna: Yes, there are places that specialize in licensing. So you're moving outside copyright and you're moving into trademarking and different kinds of agreements around your intellectual property. So it's all intellectual property rights, but they're handled quite differently. So copyright is one that we're very familiar with as writers, but when we get into the area of other kinds of subsidiary rights, then the types of agreements change. So yeah, there are lots of licensing companies that will actually take you on. There are kind of agencies for brand licensing, they'll take you on if they feel you've got potential. And again, successfully selling already in book form is what interests them. They won't be interested, no matter how brilliant your idea is, they're not going to be interested in that. They need proof of concept, and then you just, it's just a matter of pitching them.
[00:26:35] Matty: I did want to mention another recent episode, as long as we're talking about merch. So in Episode 99, I just talked about CONNECTING WITH FANS THROUGH MERCHANDISING with A. L. Jackson. And that was very interesting because she is not only making good money for merchandising related to her romance novels, but she's gotten to the point where she has a little production operation going on there, a production and distribution operation because it's so successful. So, if you decide to keep your merchandising rights and exploit them yourself, then that would be a good resource for people to check out for doing that.
[00:27:11] Orna: Fantastic. And I just love this, I love that as authors, we are thinking, well, I might license this right, but not going to expose this for myself. And it's a really good, it's a really good way to think about it. As an aside and not particularly an advice thing. I really wish there were more independent publishers who are already supplying bookstores who would team up with independent authors around print. I would license my print if I got somebody who was really cracking good already putting similar books into bookstores because they've got all infrastructure, they're set up for returns and they know how to deal with it all. And I would love to see that becoming more of a thing. I think it's a bit short-sighted of independent publishers not to recognize some indy authors who are doing extremely well in ebook and/or audio book could really be lucrative options for them as print publishers. But they're very loathe to split the rights. They want all rights. So that's where we are.
[00:28:16] Matty: Yeah. As a former project manager, I imagined an Excel spreadsheet. I imagine everything is an Excel spreadsheet, but I can imagine an Excel spreadsheet that would be all the territories, that you could sell into. And then all the media, those would be the two axes, and then in each of those cells, you would have what your desired or what your actual timeframe was for that. So it's print rights in Japan and, whatever the duration of that right is. And I think that's, when you think of it as those multiple chunks, I think the "selective" of selective rights becomes very clear.
[00:28:54] Orna: Yes, absolutely. That's a really good and interesting way to approach us. I should also put a mention in here for Ethan Ellenberg is an agent in New York that I worked pretty closely with him. A lot of our advisory for people who have queries around, rights that you would take to a literary agent. And he and his son Ezra actually has put together royalty reminder, which for people who are up and running and doing this successfully, as you've just suggested there with the print rights in Japan, on your something else rights on another line and something else on there coming up at different times, it can, when you start to successfully license your rights, it can actually become quite confusing, especially if you've got a loss of books. if you're in a genre where you produce lots and lots of books that can easily get confusing. So they produce a reminder for authors and some small publishers and as a way to keep track of your commission payments, your royalty payments, and when everything is due.
[00:29:58] Matty: It's an interesting thought, you mentioned about the number of books, because I would imagine that most people who would be pursuing rights, if you had a successful series, they're probably not going to want to try to contract with that on a book-by-book basis. Or a character-by-character basis, if it's merch or whatever, that they're probably looking to contract for a series or a set of characters, for example. So I don't know if there's an answer to that other than just that they should be commensurately paying a series worth of money to you.
[00:30:30] Orna: Absolutely. That's right. And this is where the negotiation comes in, and this is where it can be tricky to make sure that you're getting what you want out of it. But you're absolutely right. They're not going to say, okay, we will pay you for one and book four, while you licensed book two and book three to somebody else that just doesn't work that way.
[00:30:47] Matty: Some of the stories that I've heard that were among the things that made me decide to go indy were these scenarios where an author was with a traditional publisher of some size. And then the publisher went under or whatever circumstance arose, and they realized that it was tricky for them to continue publishing in a series if the series had been started by the publisher. So there was the whole question of trying to get back their rights on those early books in the series from the publisher who is maybe not in business anymore, but then also having the rights to continue the use of those characters, which I think is where reversion rights or reversion clause is very important.
[00:31:22] Orna: Really important to, honestly, we have one of these a week, at least, crosses our desk. This is just more and more common as publishers are acquired and merge, imprints go out and are taken over by somebody else. The rights position become very complex. And this is another thing that you always need to look out for when you're signing your original contract, but the term is kept to a minimum. So at least if you do end up in a very kind of complex scenario, you have your original contract with the original publisher that carries some weight because you can find that publisher A sells to publisher B. so you can have all the rights, indefinitely forever, but actually they didn't have the right to sell that, they just did to do between them. So yeah, it can all get pretty tricky.
[00:32:14] But I will say that in most cases, and we see a lot of them, we are successful in getting those rights back for the author. Sometimes it takes some time, there’s sometimes kinks to straighten out, but generally speaking, particularly if they're not selling well, if they are selling well, they also should be doing well. If they aren't, then that's a different question entirely. Something's going wrong somewhere. But if they're not selling that well, you will usually get your rights back. Just ask. Sometimes the authors assume, oh, I signed something that I didn't put a term in. And I, that's it forever. Those books are gone.
[00:32:49] You know, a contract is not set in stone, and it's not written in blood. You can, post-contract, still have a conversation. And things can still happen. Always ask for what you want. Don't answer for them. Don't assume if you change your mind or things changed for you over time, which is really common, then ask. And sometimes the answer will be yes, because maybe they want to simplify and it's not worth their one and I'm making enough and they're decent people and they feel okay, now you can self-publish. I'm not going to hold you back. Here you go. We've seen a lot of that. And publishers, lots of publisher, are really decent people, and they're not interested in holding up your rights just for the sake of it.
[00:33:34] The other thing on that is, you will get in negotiation. Other publishers are very good negotiators and not very nice people also happens. And you will hear a sentence that will be fired to at some point in your negotiation. a rights buyer often is, oh, that's our standard contract. So just bear in mind, there is no such thing as a standard contract. There is a boiler plate that is meant to be adapted.
[00:34:02] Another thing that authors do is they get the contract may just sign. And the publishers do not expect that. And authors can feel sometimes, oh, if I ask them, they're not going to like me and they're maybe won't go through with it and I will get this nice rights deal that I'm looking for.
[00:34:20] And it doesn't work like that. It's business. They expect you to negotiate. If they have more respect for you, if you negotiate. And if you don't know what you're doing, get an agent to do the work for you. It's pretty easy to get an agent once you have a reasonable offer on the table, because it's easy work for an agent and it can be a way to get somebody to work on your behalf, not just for that particular negotiation, but also then maybe to begin to work on your rights licensing for you.
[00:34:52] Matty: Great, great advice. I'm going to clip that out and I'm going to put it on my social media once a month because it's an important reminder to people.
[00:34:59] Let's switch now to translations. The whole question of movies and TV is one that I can imagine that the author themselves has to almost by definition be actively involved in, that may or may not be true, but translations is one of those ones that I would love it if there was some kind of passive way that I could potentially take advantage of translations, find someone to just say, here, if you can find someone who wants to publish this, then I'll split the proceeds with you in some way. So, how far off am I with that as a possibility?
[00:35:33] Orna: Yeah. I mean, an agent will work on getting translation rights for you, if you have a good agent who understands the principle of selective rights licensing, who isn't expecting you to sell all your rights, who is indy friendly. And it can be hard to get agents who are indy friendly because they see indy authors as essentially part of the change in the publishing worlds that is not agent favorable and that's fair enough. But there are lots of agents now who are more far seeing than that and who understand that authors will work with agents on some projects and not on others, or who will give agents certain rights to negotiate, but want to retain others.
[00:36:16] And so any agent you work with needs to have that understanding of the indy author and how that publishing works for indy authors. So the old agent contract that's exclusive, again it's part of that ALLi we're always saying, shun exclusivity. Non-exclusive is what you want. That's your advantage. You can't do selective rights licensing if you sell your rights exclusively, or if you self-published exclusively on self-publishing platform, you're also shooting yourself in the foot. So, non-exclusive is always the way to go. So yeah, there are services as well, who will actually pitch translation rights agencies.
[00:37:01] And the other thing to be aware of is that it's generally sub agents, that your home agent will work with anyway. So say Korea, taking your country off the top of my head, and you have an agent who will essentially do the work that you'd been talking about there and go and see if they can license your Korean rights for you. So we say, "sell rights," but what we really mean is "license," and I think it's important to keep that distinction, so I tend to say license. And off they go to try and do that. They don't go to Korea. They don't write Korean publishers. They actually have already probably got the Korean sub-agents that they use.
[00:37:45] So these agencies are now becoming more widely available. People that are accessible through Writer's Market and here in the UK, the equivalent does the Writers and Artists Yearbook. You can actually research them on the internet. You can see who else has published. Authors are also sharing with each other, yes, I sold my rights to them. They were great on gosh, X months that they did well. I recommend them, or no, they were a disaster. They didn't pay me what they said they would.
[00:38:13] Because translation right, copyrights itself is well embedded in certain territories. It's not very well embedded in others and it's contested in others. So in Europe, for example, there could be quite a bit of contesting between the UK edition of the work, the US edition of the work, the self-published edition of the work. And there's a lot of plagiarism. There's a lot of just taking a book and ripping it off in certain places and just selling the book in a cheap and nasty cover, but it works for that territory and somebody's making money out of that. And we often never even knowing, or the publisher or anybody agent, nobody knows it just happened. And there's not lot we can do about that. But it is worth knowing which territories are good to sell into and which are best to just not even bother because copyright is such a loose concept there that the money you get wouldn't be worthwhile.
[00:39:10] The other thing, speaking about money, is you don't get a lot of money for translation rights deal, generally speaking, unless you're a very desirable property. It's going to be somewhere in the region of about, five or 6,000 dollars, maybe a bit more, but that will be a good average benchmark. And your agent will take their percentage of that, and they will usually be 20 to 25% because there'll be their cost and they'll be the sub-agent cost. So it's not a lot of money. But once you've sold into one territory, it becomes much easier for yourself, for your agent, to go to another territory and say, I sold the Korean rights and I just thought I'd mention the Japanese rights, and they're available and you can set your price even if you want to and top it up.
[00:40:00] And when you add them up, then it gets easier. Every time you sell one, it gets easier to sell the next one. And then, over time it can just make a nice difference to your bottom line. So, yeah, that's, I think it's a whole area that needs its own set of administration. It's a wing, in publishing houses, there is the rights department and that's all they do. They just do the rights and it's kind of like the dark arts of publishing. Nobody else knows what goes on over there. It's a whole different way. So one is selling books to readers and the other is selling rights to rights buyers. It's a completely different thing.
[00:40:43] Matty: Yeah. When I think about my own books and I think about the amount of study I would have to do to feel even passively competent to make those kinds of assessments, it's just way down on my list. And another episode I can point people to is Episode 23, which is REACHING NEW READERS THROUGH TRANSLATIONS, that was with Emma Prince, who was doing very well with Scottish medieval romance in Germany. Who knew?
[00:41:06] And so I'm sure that the people who work in those areas could look at a book and say, oh yeah, that's going to do great in Germany. It's not going to do so great in Korea or vice versa. And I do think that there are plenty of authors who would say, here are my books. And if you give me a reasonable contract, I'll split it with you. Even if the split is wildly favorable to the person who's helping you do it because you figure everything you're getting is just an extra. And I'd be willing to split whatever I'm getting pretty generously with someone else if I was getting a percentage of it.
[00:41:40] Orna: Yeah. And I mean, another way to do it is this is expertise that's built up over time, and it is possible to get people who have been doing this for publishers and for others and hire them and pay them a fee to do it. And then whatever money they make is yours. So there are various ways that you can go about it. But as you said, as you rightly said, where is it on your list of priorities? For a lot of authors, it's not. That's why I say it's not something to be thinking about at the beginning because rights buyers won't be interested anyway, but also because it is time consuming. You will, you need to have your equivalent of the rights department, be that an agent working on your behalf or a rights assistant, who does the pitching and stuff like that, who builds up their expertise over time. However you decide to do this, you have to allocate time, you have like everything else, time and budget to it in order for it to work.
[00:42:39] Matty: Yeah, this is one where I just want to exchange time for money. And I want it to be a percentage because I don't want to commit the money. I would rather find out that I was wildly popular in Germany, and I’ve made a million dollars and give half of the million dollars to somebody else to have found that opportunity for me than to either not pursue that opportunity or to take the chance that I'm going to pay someone whatever it would be to potentially realize there was no opportunity. It's just very, it's very tricky
[00:43:06] Orna: Absolutely. I've been trying for 10 years to find an enterprising individual who sees the opportunity here with indy authors. Because there's a major opportunity as you just said, you'd give away a lot of rights capital there in order to make that happen because you'll never get to it otherwise. And so anything is better than then that. So yeah, there is an opportunity there definitely for an enterprising individual, but it is a complex area. And even those who have been working in the rights arena for a very long time, it never gets easy. It never gets easy to sell rights. Unless you get something like the Harry Potter phenomenon, when everything gets easy. Unless you've got that going on, it's always a challenging arena. But a very interesting one, culturally and in lots of other ways. So if there's any enterprising person listening, if they want to contact ALLi, I've got a lot of ideas about how you could make money doing this.
[00:44:05] Matty: And I'll volunteer to be the beta author for trying your new service out.
[00:44:11] Another thing I think is interesting about translations is honestly, because translations is way down on my list, I'm waiting for AI translation to get good enough that it's feasible. So, in a year, three years, five years, 10 years, whatever it is, if I could just plug my book in and I could have a native speaker tell me, that's like a pretty decent thing. Maybe I would sell it for a discount because over time I'm guessing that AI generated content is going to be expected to be discounted from the human generated content, at least for a bit. Do you have any sense of like where that's going, at what point that might be realistic?
[00:44:47] Orna: I don't. It would be a brave person who would actually put a date on this one, particularly if your translation is complex. But I mean, it's coming. It's definitely coming. It will be here and, I expect it to be here when my business is still here. So, that sort of timeframe. Years rather than decades, let's put it that way. Already, I think, you get a fair translation. And that's the other option is that you retain your rights and that you work with a translator who now gets a fair copy from an auto translate, though sometimes they say, no, they'd rather work from scratch, that actually inking up the one that the AI translator gave you is harder than just translating from scratch. I don't know, I'm a bit dubious about that. But it is an option. And we have a number of big indies who are selling their own German rights particularly, but we're also seeing them sell into all the territories as well.
[00:45:47] So I think it's not a bad idea at all to wait. And if that's something that appeals to you, selling it in that way, then you can. I wouldn't be discounting too much because books in other territories outside of the Anglo-American world are more expensive, considerably more expensive. So, if you've got a translated work and if it's decent and if, you do need to do and get it checked by a native speaker or a native reader, somebody who reads in your genre and in that language, some of these things are challenging, but if they've told you that you've got a good book on your hands, there's no reason just because it was generated by a AI. And because there will have been some human input as well. It's never going to be a matter of just press a button and a perfect translation pops out.
[00:46:39] Matty: That's what I'm waiting for. I'm willing to wait a long time, but that's what I want.
[00:46:45] Orna: Okay, I'm changing my date. It's just gone into decades or maybe hundreds of years. Perfection is hard.
[00:46:52] Matty: I'm seeing another business opportunity too. If people who were willing to act as, not as the expert subsidiary rights managers or agents, but as like virtual assistants in different countries. So that somebody who’s, let’s say they're an avid romance reader in Germany who could read the book for that, to ensure the translation was good. And one of the things that Emma talk about was, even if you have a human translator, it's good to have a native QA reader as well to make sure that it's coming through, but also to deal with things like social media and stuff like that. So we're just starting out all sorts of great business opportunities for people who want to forge new paths in the indy world.
[00:47:30] Orna: Absolutely. And the other one that I would add to that, and I think this is important if we're thinking about not licensing our rights, but actually exploiting them ourselves in the translation arena is just getting the book up there. As we all know, it doesn't change if it's in another territory, that's only the start, how you go to marketing. And so you need a native speaker and somebody in that territory to do your social media or whatever other ways you've decided you're going to market your books. So you've always got to think about.
[00:48:01] Matty: And I guess it's worth mentioning too, that, for people who may be just starting out, but got to the end of this, even though we gave them a warning that this was more advanced material, that all this is not to say that if you want your book in German, you can't get it out there in Germany. It's just trying to be in English. And so, if you're publishing through KDP or Draft2Digital or other platforms, I'm sure, you can make your own language book available in other countries for people who speak that language.
[00:48:28] Orna: Absolutely. So you're talking about English language books selling in Germany and Spain and so on. Is that what you mean? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just by using the services that we use, they're automatically going into those territories where those platforms have a presence. On this is where, when you start looking at the international arena, this is where you see that Amazon is not as dominant as it is in the Anglo-American world. So Amazon is in, I think, 13 territories of moment, whereas Apple is in 52 and I'm not sure how many territory Kobo is in but I'm going to shout out here for the Kobo map, which I just love, which tells you where your books have sold, and I'm heading up for a hundred now. I'm dying to get to a hundred territories. But Kobo has access where Amazon doesn't. So does Apple and then PublishDrive or StreetLib are people who can take you into countries and territories where you're just there just by using other services. So your book is selling in those countries in the English language.
[00:49:36] Matty: I think Google Play is another one based just based on the number of different currencies you can enter as a price, they're in many countries.
[00:49:43] Orna: They're all over the place. Absolutely. And I'm glad you mentioned them.
[00:49:48] Matty: So my last question is that a lot of the examples we've been using have been fiction, Harry Potter or cartoon characters that were turned into merch, things like that. Any final thoughts about if someone is a non-fiction writer, any different advice for how they can be exploiting these subsidiary rights?
[00:50:07] Orna: The only thing is it is general advice that I didn't actually say. And that applies across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, is you must approach rights buyers who have an interest in that type of material. And you need to get to know the territory and you need to get to know who are the good publishers in that area and what do they publish? And don't send them stuff that they just don't do. So if you're selling specialist nonfiction, you're probably going to be more aware of publishers in that arena. It's probably easier to pick them out. But yeah, definitely make sure that you're sending the right material. Otherwise it all happens pretty similarly. It's the same process in terms of getting the contract and negotiating the contract and all of that. Nothing changes very much if it's non-fiction or poetry.
[00:50:59] Matty: That's great. Well, if people have enjoyed this episode, I would definitely point them to your earlier episode on copyright, Episode 70 COPYRIGHT FOR AUTHORS. And I also just want to give a recommendation for the ALLi book 150 SELF-PUBLISHING QUESTIONS ANSWERED, ALLi's Writing, Publishing. and Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets by Orna Ross and ML Ronn, a.k.a. Michael La Ronn, who has also been a multiple appearance guest on the podcast.
[00:51:27] So, Orna, thank you so much for going through the Seven Processes of Publishing for us. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and ALLi online.
[00:51:36] Orna: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, I'm Orna Ross at OrnaRoss.com for my author website. And the Alliance of Independent Authors is the professional association for self-publishing authors, and you'll find it at AllianceIndependentAuthors.org.
[00:51:57] Matty: Great. Thank you, Orna.
[00:51:58] Orna: Thank you. Matty. Bye.
Links
Episode 070 - Copyright for Authors with Orna Ross
https://www.ornaross.com/
https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/
https://selfpublishingadvice.org/
Your First 50 Book Reviews: ALLi’s Guide to Getting More Reader Reviews (affiliate link)
150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5) (affiliate link)
Episode 099 - Connecting with Fans through Merchandising with AL Jackson
Episode 023 - Reaching New Readers through Translations with Emma Prince
https://www.ornaross.com/
https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/
https://selfpublishingadvice.org/
Your First 50 Book Reviews: ALLi’s Guide to Getting More Reader Reviews (affiliate link)
150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5) (affiliate link)
Episode 099 - Connecting with Fans through Merchandising with AL Jackson
Episode 023 - Reaching New Readers through Translations with Emma Prince
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
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