Frankfurt Book Fair» Blog Archive » Rights directors attend their pre-fair bootcamp

October 15th, 2008 at 18:40 by Andrew

22nd International Rights Directors Meeting. Left to right: Morgan Entrekin, Diane Spivey, Hans-Jürgen Balmes, Janice Potter, Margaret Halton and Jordi Nadal.

Agents and rights managers made a beeline Tuesday afternoon for the 22nd International Rights Directors Meeting, an essential professional development event held each year on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

After several years focusing on particular rights markets, this year’s meeting was themed ‘Getting to Yes: The Successful Rights Negotiation and Deal.’ No matter how experienced you are at selling rights, having seasoned professionals share their tips with you is an opportunity not to be missed.

Janice Potter of Simon & Schuster USA started off the event by reviewing some of the recent development sin the rights contract, which is of course, the document that enables the entire publishing process to occur. One piece of advice stayed with me in particular: ‘don’t buy more rights that you can exploit’: a simple dictum that would solve many squabbles if more people followed it. Other issues that probably didn’t have to be considered even a decade ago included digital concerns such as how much content should an author be allowed to use on their website, and how to handle ebook rights and print-on-demand (POD).

‘A basic misunderstanding of the notion of POD is that it is a right, rather than a method of manufacture. POD is simply a means to reproduce your book’, Potter observed.

Potter was followed by Margaret Halton, rights director at Pan Macmillan UK, who dispensed some excellent advice on best-practice for rights managers, include what to include in a pitch, and how to come to a book fair properly prepared.

‘I cannot stress enough the need to maintain a cool head [in negotiations]‘, she said in summary. ‘Don’t let the excitement of the moment make your forget to clarify the finer points of the deal.’

Excellent and thoughtful contributions followed from Hans-Jürgen Balmes (S Fischer Verlag, Germany) and Jordi Nadal (Plataforma Editorial, Spain), who provided a European perspective to selling and buying rights into and out of English.

Grove/Atlantic’s Morgan Entrekin was the last speaker, and spoke of the requirements when selling to English language publishers. He listed 13 suggestions, the most earnestly put being:

Be extremely selective about which books you pitch
Make as much material as possible available in English (including about the author)
Arm yourself with endorsements from authors, publishers and booksellers who have read the book
Make sure you help the English-language publisher as much as possible once the book has been sold.

Every year I bump into the occasional agent or rights manager who has decided to give the meeting a miss for once. This wasn’t one of those years to give it a miss. The well-prepared meeting notes alone are worth the price of admission and are likely to be on the bookshelves of those who attended this year’s event for many years to come.

Tags: rights