Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
• It may not be in an author's best interests to sign over exclusive international digital rights. It certainly weakens their bargaining position, and puts them in a real bind if they are highly popular abroad but unpopular at home, since the "home" publisher may be less enthusiastic about the author.
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Are we sure that those global license rights have to be negotiated with a regional publisher at all? Maybe the proper long-term holder for them is with the Agent?
Considering a lot of publishers have effectively outsourced content acquisition to the literary agencies and that quite a few of the established autors are taking their backlist directly from Agent to retailer, maybe the middleman that gets squeezed out of the loop is the publisher?
My point is that publishers need to start thinking global in the ebook era.
An australian publisher holding global english rights to an author who strikes it big in the UK would be cutting its figurative throat if it neglected that product line solely because it isn't popular in its home market.
The whole point of globalization is that money is money and nobody can be too picky about where sales come from if they expect to survive.
There are plenty of english speakers in Japan and China and it would be reasonable for those people to prefer to read their Harry Potter in the original. The same can be said for spanish speakers in the US who would prefer to read Allende's ZORRO or Garcia Marquez' works in their original form.
Authors who insist on sticking with regional publishers are putting themselves at a disadvantage and leaving good money on the table. And, considering the flood of content that ebooks are going to enable, that extra bit of money from out-of-home market revenue could be the difference between success and failure, economically speaking.
Remember, that we're talking global *language* rights not absolute global rights.
Translated editions are rightfully separate products in this model.
So it would be perfectly reasonable for a french author to sell french language rights to a French or Canadian global publisher, the english rights to a british or australian publisher, and the spanish rights to a mexican or argentinean publisher. In a model of language-based rather than regional rights, each edition would be handled by the player best equipped to promote that edition on a world-wide basis. And in a world of cross-regional migration, where there are more spanish-speaking people in the US than in Spain, where there are more english speakers in China than the US, geographically-limited rights simply make no sense at all.