Written by Roya Sarrafi-Rohar
Many people don’t know what a literary agency does, and most new authors are no different. Some might have been surprised to learn that their manuscript’s journey to publication is likely to start with a literary agent (or assistant!), rather than with an editor at a publishing house, and wonder why that is. In response, an agent can explain all the things they do to help books find their readers and help authors build careers. But we can also explain it in more hard-nosed terms: an agent’s job is ultimately to sell rights. While this might not be the most exciting topic for an aspiring author, it’s helpful to understand what we mean by rights and why they matter.
An author will (usually) own the copyright to their work. A book deal (generally) involves an author granting the publisher a licence to print, sell and promote their work in book form, although many other rights might be included too: the author will still technically “own” their work, but the publisher has the right to use it in the ways made clear in their contract, and with certain conditions.
When we grant rights to a publisher, they are always defined and limited: they will cover specific formats and languages, across specific territories (e.g. UK and Commonwealth, or US + Canada), for a certain period, and each of these rights will be exclusive or non-exclusive. Rights can be split up by and agent and sold to different publishers, and non-exclusive rights can be sold more than once. This means that an author and agent can find lots of new sources of income from one book, in different territories, languages or formats, and can decide which publisher would be best for the book in each case.
What all this looks like in practice will vary a lot from deal to deal, and there are a lot of factors the agent and author need to consider when deciding what rights to grant or hold back. But in a UK book deal, the exclusive rights are most likely to be limited to the English language, in the UK and Commonwealth territories, for full term of copyright, in print, eBook and often audio formats too, along with certain other rights.
If you have a UK book deal that looks like that, it means that the author and their agent have held on to a lot of other rights that you can sell elsewhere. You can sell rights to publish in the US to a US-based publisher, where they are probably best placed to sell the book to local readers, or you can sell French translation rights to a publisher based in France. If you have a licence term of 5-8 years, as you often do in audio or translation deals, you can renew or sell the same rights all over again after that term has expired.
It is a huge task to keep track of all these available rights, all the deals made, the various editors and publishers in the picture, as well as the trends in markets across the world – it’s extremely challenging for an author to do alone, and this is what a literary agency specialises in.
There are also other rights your agent might license, which don’t strictly involve publishing the work as a book. There are straight reading rights, for example, for when the work is abridged and read on the radio (for example, as Radio 4 Book of the Week). The most significant of these additional rights is probably film and TV rights, although that world works very differently to book publishing. Some literary agencies, including Blake Friedmann, have an in-house media department which can handle book-to-film deals for our authors.
All of this might make it clear why an author should care about what happens with the rights to their work – it can mean that they earn more money, that their book available to more people, and they have more control over what happens with their book/s.
If an author has the option of a book deal directly with a publisher, and they are wondering whether it’s worth getting an agent, one thing they should consider is what will happen with all these rights if looked after by the publisher. Often, when an author deals directly with a publisher, many more rights will be granted to the publisher, as an unagented author can’t do much with them anyway. The publisher’s rights department might then sell the rights they aren’t exploiting themselves on to other publishers, such as audio or translation publishers. They will take a cut of the income from these sublicences and pass the rest on to the author.
In theory, you could get very good financial terms in a deal like this, if your work is with a publisher with an active rights department, meaning you are no worse off with a publisher handling these rights than a literary agency – but this is often not the case in practice. An agent is vested in finding as many revenue streams as possible for their author, and building them long-term publishing relationships around the world. A publisher may not have the same resources or financial incentive to sell rights. So if an author thinks their book can lead to lots of separate deals in different formats and territories, they are likely to be better off with an agent.
Of course, this is only one aspect of what an agent offers an author, and the decision whether to find an agent, and which, should be considered alongside the value of industry expertise, vision for the book/s and editorial input, not to mention the personal relationship between author and agent. We could be considered a little biased on this issue, but we have an incredible Rights team who are keen to see our books translated around the world and possibly even watched on screen!
