The Check’s in the Airmail: Foreign Rights
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006
What do Dan Brown and Pope Benedict have in common? Well, not a lot, but they do both know how to take advantage of foreign book sales, a growing sector of the publishing industry where the right book and the right deal can provide a nice padding to authors’ and publishers’ revenue.
Dan Brown’s cultural juggernaut, The Da Vinci Code, managed to get translated into well over forty languages. It has done particularly well in Europe, where publishers obtained rights to the ubiquitous book and watched it top bestseller lists for months. Even the French—seemingly unimpressed by fanny-packed Americans making Da Vinci Code pilgrimages to the Louvre—bought enough translated copies to make it the top-selling commercial book of all time in that country, with over 5 million copies sold, according to Business Week.
And the pope? His Italian publisher, Rizzoli, sold North American rights to his upcoming Jesus of Nazareth (due in spring 2007) to Random House imprint Doubleday this month. Doubleday wisely bought not only the English rights to the book in North America, but snapped up Spanish-language rights as well, securing access to the vast population of Spanish-speaking Catholics on the continent.
These deals demonstrate both ways that foreign rights negotiations can work for U.S. publishers: we can license rights to foreign publishers to translate, distribute, and sell titles initially published in America, or we can buy the right to distribute foreign books that have an audience here. continue reading
