Review sales, royalties, and rights
Review rights sales and territory updates
Every quarter, check with your agent or publisher whether any subsidiary rights (translation, audio, foreign territories, film, serial) have been sold or are being pursued, and record what you learn.
Authors often hire help with this: legal or contract.
Why it matters
Rights sales produce income and new editions, and both are easy to lose track of. A translation edition you never heard about is a listing you never checked, a library record you never monitored, and a royalty line you never verified. A quarterly question takes a minute and keeps the whole record honest.
Your part
- What you do
- Ask. Someone else normally owns it. Get an answer, then record it.
- Who normally owns it
- Author and Publisher and Agent. Agent or publisher rights department sells; author asks and records
- When
- Quarterly, for the life of the book (Review sales, royalties, and rights: after publication, then at every reporting period)
How to do it
The full walkthrough
Subsidiary rights are the rights to publish or adapt the book beyond the original edition: translations, editions in other territories, audio, large print, serialization, film and television, and others. The contract says which of these the publisher controls and which the author (usually through an agent) retained. Sales of those rights happen quietly, often months or years after publication, and the author is not always told promptly.
A quarterly check keeps you informed. Ask the agent, or the publisher's rights department where the publisher holds the rights, whether anything has been sold, optioned, or is under discussion, and whether any territory or translation edition has been published. Record what you hear, with dates. When a rights sale is confirmed, it produces new editions that need their own identifiers, their own listings, and eventually their own entry in your records.
Traditionally published authors typically have this handled by an agent and a publisher rights department; the check is a short email. Hybrid authors should read the contract carefully, because rights arrangements at hybrid publishers vary more than anywhere else. Self-published authors hold all rights and can sell them directly or through an agent, and the quarterly check becomes a review of any inquiries received and any translation or audio edition they have arranged themselves.
This is worth considering rather than essential because for many books nothing will happen. When something does, you want to know.
Common mistakes
- Assuming no news means no activity.
- Not knowing which rights the publisher holds and which you retained.
- Learning about a translation edition from a reader.
- Failing to record a rights sale, so the resulting edition never enters the records.
What done looks like
- A quarterly email to the agent or rights department asking about sales, options, inquiries, and new editions.
- Answers recorded with dates in the Book Identity Sheet, including territories, languages, and publishers.
- New editions from rights sales added to the edition list and given their own tasks.
- The contract's rights schedule at hand so you know which rights are whose.
- Rights income checked against the royalty statement.
Ask your publisher
Copy this into an email. Replace the bracketed parts with your details.
Sources and last checked
- Official source
- No single official page for this step.
- Last checked
- Not checked against its source yet.
- How confident we are
- Verified