Know Your Rights

The value of the rights revenue stream – starting out

When I set-up Legend Press is 2005, I did so on the back of a single idea, a generous credit card and a good line of credit at the local internet shop in North London. I had worked in magazine publishing for the last year, had some book publishing experience, but none of running a business.

I applied to the Prince’s Trust and GLE One London for some start-up funding and in order to do so had to submit a cashflow forecast. On it I started with the number of physical sales (those long ago days prior to the ebook invasion) I had achieved for the short story collection I had initially published and multiplied in by increased number of titles and for general business growth.

I can’t remember the multiple but by the end of Year 3, it was looking good for a plot neighbouring Branson's NeckerIsland. I was also aware that I should have additional revenue streams and so included, I think, talks and misc and added some happily multiplying number to those lines too.

It was shortly after this that a friend in the industry asked if I was going to the London Book Fair and whether I was actively selling rights for the titles. Before I started discussing Hollywood, she patiently explained to me her job at a major publishing house selling reprint, translation, large print, audio rights and so on.

I saw at this point that here was a potential revenue stream with little cost, apart from time, and that could supplement low margin book sales. I therefore spoke to a few friends, drew up a list of contacts (due to the lack of a central database then, this took around 35 hours to do in its entirely) and then started contacting over 1,000 publishers around the world to see if they were interested in the rights for Legend Press’s first two novels.

Slowly but surely I started to get responses and at this point the great leveller of the internet became apparent – there I was in my living room (I had by this point up-graded from the internet shop) talking to the likes of Penguin and HarperCollins in countries around the world.

To cut a long story short, I sold the rights to one of our novels into seven editions and four languages, providing a vital revenue stream to the business. This was a revenue stream I hadn’t expected but turned out to be the key one in getting the company up and running as book sales revenue, unsurprisingly, took more attrition to secure than I had initially expected.

And nearly eight years on, rights revenue is as important a part of our traditional book publishing business as when I started out. In fact, there are now more opportunities – the international market is more open, contact is easier than ever and with the increase of mediums and format, there are more rights to do business with.

And it is not just publishers for which licensing is absolutely vital. The licensing of rights is what authors are looking for when they are seeking a publisher or agent. In addition to selling rights, much of the last eight years has been spent looking for the best new work. With Frankfurt Rights, we can not only sell rights to our work but we can find the best new work directly from writers – becoming the rights buyer as well as the seller.

For this and future years, it can now be the writer, as well as the publisher, sitting in an internet shop or at home selling their rights to Penguins and HarperCollins around the world, or maybe to Legend Press here in London.

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