I've been working as a literary assistant at my company for six months now, and as a reward for doing such an excellent job, my agency has gone and given me more work.
I am now officially the sub rights manager and literary assistant for my agency!
Well, technically all of my work with the sub rights will just be added to my duties as an assistant, so it's not like I get a fancy new title (except in emails) or a raise (I wish). Still, it's a very cool area to be working in, and it's giving me a bunch of experience communicating with editors and other agents--which will definitely be a bonus when I start actively representing authors.
But I'm getting ahead of myself because it's quite possible that many of you don't have a full grasp on what sub rights are.
I get the sense that sub rights are often off the radar for aspiring publishing professionals and authors. It's just not something that one thinks about when you think about the publishing industry. It's really pretty niche, so much so that I--the only assistant at a full-service literary agency--didn't deal with them at all until about a month ago.
When you--as an agent, an editor, or an unrepresented author--are negotiating a book contract, there's a whole massive section on rights. It's all about which parties have the rights to which forms of publication and distribution, whether those rights are exclusive, and how long they last.
The rights section[s] in a contract is long and complicated and deserves an entire series of posts written by someone with more experience in contracts. For the purpose of this little intro, here's the very basic facts you need to know: when making a deal in publishing, the only right that an author by definition must sign away is the right to publish the work in one medium (print or ebook) in one language (English, in this case) in one country. Everything else--foreign translation, audio rights, performance rights, english rights in other countries, ebook rights, etc.--can be up for varying degrees of negotiations. Those are sub rights.
Some publishers are open for negotiations on some or all of these rights (although all that I know of will retain ebook rights nowadays, making them much less of a "sub right" than the others), while others are very firm in keeping all of them for themselves. It's ultimately in the publisher's favor to buy all of the rights that their budget and connections will allow them. That way, if the book does well, they have the opportunity to make more money. How many rights you as an author retain depends upon your publisher and the skill and connections of your agent.
If you do sell all of the rights to your book, then you and/or your agent don't really have anything left to do except meet deadlines and promote your book. You can, comparatively speaking, sit back and let the publisher handle it.
If, however, you retain some of your sub rights--let's say foreign translation, audio, and performance--then you (or if you are represented, your agent) will have to find separate publishers and draw up separate contracts for each of those sub rights (and, in the case of foreign rights, for each of those languages). No one else is going to take care of it for you.
It's a fair amount of work. With this new component to my job, I'm now reaching out to foreign agents and editors to garner interest for our available titles. I'm sending manuscript PDFs to audiobook companies and performance rights agencies in Hollywood. We do a fair amount of work in these areas. A bunch of film rights for our books have been sold, a ton of them have audio rights sold, and we even have a fair number of foreign language bestsellers.
So why is it worth it for my agency to put in this much work? It makes us more money. Of course, agents do get commission on Publisher sub right sales just like they do on any sub rights sales, but if the publisher bought the rights these sales only happen if the publisher wants them to.
Most publishers that have those rights will not bother selling them. Big publishing houses (which is the type that tends to buy all the rights) have a shit-ton of titles and therefore not a lot of time for extra work. Only their best authors will be afforded that attention. Therefore, as an agent who retains those rights, you will have to put in the extra work, but you will likely end up with more sales.
This is also why it is often in an agented author's best interest to retain their sub rights. They will have to take effectively the same commission reductions either way, but in working with an agent on the sub rights, the author is more likely to see them sold. The author also has more individual agency in this case. For example: if any one of our authors approaches me (and a few have already) asking me to try and push their books I bloody well do it, largely because it's in my company's best interest. That's just not the case for publishers.
As for unagented authors... I'm really not in a position to say definitively what's best for them, but I've got an educated guess. Unless you, as an unagented author, have a ton of connections in the larger publishing community (or... you know, are a mega best seller of some kind), it's probably in your best interest to sell as many rights as possible. You'll likely get a larger advance, and the publisher will have more luck selling those rights (should they choose to do so) than you would on your own. Of course, having no experience in this area, anyone who does is welcome to message me with their 2 cents.
