Author Income Streams, 2 of 15: Rights Sales

Photo by Noom Peerapong on Unsplash.

Rights sales refer to primary and secondary rights (pre- and post-publication, respectively, in a traditional author contract) sold to an individual, organization, or business for their own commercial development. These are such things as:

• Reprint rights
• The right to produce different versions of a title (e.g., audiobooks or an illustrated edition)
• Foreign language rights
• Merchandising rights
• Audio rights
• Television rights
• Film rights

It also includes options sales — the right to buy a right within a certain time frame.

Here are other important things to know and to consider if/how they affect you and the monetization possibilities for your content.

Subsidiary rights agents

For most who are traditionally published, the publisher will have/should have salespeople who handle rights sales. Self-published and hybrid-published authors can manage rights sales themselves or arrange with a subsidiary rights agent or firm to represent them in such deals.

Read your contract