How Many Rights Can You Sell From One Original Work?
I’ve finished the last episode of Vampire Academy, and I’m done with it. I’m hoping it doesn’t get picked up for a season two so that someone else will buy the rights and give me a more book accurate version.
The best thing about this show is that it has given me an idea for how to sell the rights to future works. If the people planning to buy the rights to your work is going to make drastic changes to it, don’t sell them the rights to your original work . . . instead, sell them the rights to a fanfic parallel world version of your original work. Make those who are planning to buy the rights to your original work, and then turning around and making drastic changes to it, buy the rights to the fanfic parallel world version of your original work instead. Make them change the title and character names, and leave your original work free to be sold to someone who will be loyal to it. Make them pay extra to temporarily take the original work off of the market. They can pay a yearly fee, or a three or five year fee to prevent the original work from becoming competition.
I mean, if they buy the rights to your original work, and then create fan fiction with it, why not just sell them the fanfic rights instead, and keep your original rights to sell to those who want to use the original version of your work? Sounds like a win-win to me. Fans will know from the start that the new show or movie is a fanfic parallel world version, not an original version. If Vampire Academy had been sold as a fanfic parallel world version, with a new title and new character names, and the fans were made aware of it, I probably would have enjoyed it more. But to sell me a fanfic version of the original work that I was expecting? Nope. Never going to fly with me.
Ooh. There are limitless fanfic genres, fanfic categories, and parallel world options. So, why not sell the rights to more than just one fanfic genre/category and/or parallel world option? So, this gives you even more options when selling the rights to your works. You can sell the rights to the original work, yet keep the rights to any and all fanfic and parallel world rights options. And when selling the rights to a fanfic or parallel world option, you can add keywords onto it that will define the niche the rights belong to. Thus, you keep the rights to all of the other niche keywords that you will have the ability to sell to others. And if you sell rights to a fanfic or parallel world niche, you keep the rights to your original work to sell to someone else, plus you keep the rights to all of the other keyword niches to sell to others. Anyone who wants to prevent any competitors from buying the other rights and creating their own projects at the same time should pay extra to have those rights taken off of the market.