Kris Kliemann, President of Kliemann & Company LLC, advises global publishing companies on strategies for maximising reach and revenue through rights, royalties, and new technologies.

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Lynette Owen is the author of Selling Rights (9/e, Routledge, July 2024) and General Editor of and contributor to Clark's Publishing Agreements: A Book of Precedents (11/e, Bloomsbury Professional, 2022). She works as a freelance copyright and rights consultant, running regular training courses in the UK and abroad. She was awarded the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003, an OBE for services to publishing and international trade in 2009 and the Independent Publishers Guild Award for services to independent publishing in 2018.

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What initially inspired the book ‘Selling Rights’? 

Kris Kliemann: I thought maybe the place to start was talking about how this is the ninth edition so way back when, how did you get started on this? 

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Lynette Owen: I remember this very clearly. It was back in 1989, and it was a remark made by one of the greats, Katerina Czarnecki, who worked for Macmillan US at that time. We were on the Frankfurt advisors panel together. Afterward we were discussing the resources available to younger people wanting to go into rights, and how few there actually are. Katerina said, “You couldn’t write a book about rights really, could you?”. I went away and thought, well I’m going to give it a try. 

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So the first edition was published in 1991. Since when, it’s been on a four year revision cycle. It was published by a specialist imprint called Blueprint, part of Chapman & Hall, Taylor & Francis. It has now gone from 250 pages to 550! 

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What’s new in this 2024 edition?

Kris Kliemann: It’s interesting that it's doubled in size and I think that really does have to do with how many things have changed in rights since 1989. So what is new in this edition?

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Lynette Owen: So the last edition came out about 6 months before the launch of Chat GPT which of course has been significant. There was no thought last time round about AI, the impact it would have on contracts and various aspects of licences.

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So when I came to prepare for the new edition, in fact I think I signed the contract the day before Chat GPT was launched,  my intention was mainly to cover the impact of covid on working practice because obviously a lot of things have changed: working from home, hybrid working, the effect on book fairs and in particular presentation of rights online. This means the use of Zoom, Teams and so on, that has continued after covid. I think a lot of Rights professionals will say that they are still more inclined to use it because they got so used to it during the time when we were all working from home. 

When AI arrived I didn’t feel that it could be treated as a separate chapter but rather flagged in the copyright chapters at the beginning, because obviously, it has a massive impact on copyright and ownership, and the fact that the big tech companies have been using content without permission. It affects the author, the publisher and some areas of licensing

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Kris Kliemann: Yes it’s true, I really like that you didn't treat AI as a separate issue because that’s not how it works. It’s everywhere in our lives now and again, as you’ve said, because it’s moving so quickly we don’t know where all of that is going to end up, but it’s better that we make sure we’re reminded as we go through all of our processes about the impact of AI. 

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Integrating market changes into the book

Kris Kliemann: You have covered a lot of the changes in the market due to the pandemic, like zoom calls, meaning it is now acceptable to not be in person at a fair, but also for  translation rights, what is changing here?

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Lynette Owen: There have been a lot of political situations that have affected rights trading. I mean that’s Russia and Ukraine obviously and also the current and very distressing situation in the Middle East. I think I’ve also mentioned questions of censorship. I mean we’re used to dealing with censorship in markets like China, Vietnam and Russia although things are pretty much on hold in Russia at the moment. But I think what's been sad for me as someone who entered the Eastern European markets very early is that things have moved backwards in some of those markets. Markets that became very liberated after the fall of communism in terms of content are actually closing up and a number of topics in publication particularly LBTQ issues for example are being clamped down on. However, we can't forget that there is also the question of books being removed from Libraries in the USA. 

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Kris Kliemann: Right, I think the ways to figure out what a publisher can and can’t do in their territories is part of being a good licensor. Being able to pitch books to people, letting them know when there might be sensitivities and trying to see what’s possible. I appreciate that you bring up the horrible practice now here in many states of book banning and where we are with that. 

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Talking about new streaming services 

Kris Kliemann: The other thing that has moved on is the film and tv business which now has the streaming services. I know you had to update some things in the electronic chapters. 

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Lynette Owen: Yes and  streaming services in particular meant that I had to update quite considerably the film and television chapter and I was very fortunate in that Julian Friedmann from the Blake Friedmann agency has always been kind enough to cast his eye over it. What I do try to do is update examples to give a sense of the types of projects which get turned into film and television adaptations. 

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I’ve done the same for radio readings which is a particular feature here in the UK. We are very lucky to have the BBC programmes which feature Book at Bedtime, Book of the Week and so on where there are edited solo readings of books which are enormously beneficial in terms of publicity so I try to update the examples of those as well.

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Rights trading in different places

Kris Kliemann:  I'm over here in the US, and a lot of what we do as rights people is common. If we’re selling translation rights for example there's so much we do that is the same. But in other types of rights the opportunities are very different. When I read, for example, your chapter on serial rights I'm always struck by how great it would be if we had newspapers  that wanted to pay good money for serial rights which we don’t have so much over here.

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Lynette Owen: I think yes even here people definitely yearn for the good old days when the money was very much larger. Mrs Thatcher was reputed to have received a million pounds for serial rights in her memoir. Gone are those days, I mean the money is much more modest. Just looking at my regular weekend papers, Saturdays and Sundays you’ll find probably 6 extracts across the papers which were probably done for a few hundred pounds in some places but again, there’s enormous publicity value for the publishers and the authors concerned.

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Kris Kliemann: It does have some impact when it’s timed correctly when a book is about to hit a bookstore, you know you can just drive the readership in there with the right kind of excerpt. The radio reading is another difference as we don’t really have consistent radio shows. 

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Lynette Owen: And we have set rates at the BBC, the rates are not negotiable but we are very lucky to have that facility I think. 

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Similarities in licensing rights internationally 

Kris Kliemann: This edition does also give insights into dealing with international rights as a book could be used by someone who's in France, licensing French translations rights. 

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Lynette Owen: Yes, I’ve covered this in the practical chapters. The one thing to say is both the industry in the US and UK have the advantage of publishing in English. This is an enormous advantage when you’re selling rights because wherever you are sending information or material, in any country there’s going to be someone who’s going to be able to assess that material if it’s in English.

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If you’re a rights seller publishing in another language you may immediately create a barrier. If you're a Japanese publisher and want to offer your rights to a German publisher you’ve immediately got a language obstacle. AI might help produce a sample in a common language which of course is likely to be English which could be used for assessment. I don't think that full scale translations for publication would be an issue if done by AI. 

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Kris Kliemann: There are clear examples of why AI doesn’t work. You know you can ask AI how many r’s are in strawberry and it still says 2 instead of 3. But we’re not looking for AI to help us spell necessarily that's not the thing. I know some rights people even in English language publishing houses are contemplating and perhaps even practising translating their rights guides into another language via AI and trying to see how that works, say when I’m going to the Beijing book fair it’s an advantage for me to also have it in Chinese (simplified Chinese) because it will enable even more people in a publishing company to understand what's on offer.

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Lynette Owen: I think for non-English publishers, producing at least publicity material or rights guides in English is something I would always recommend. 

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Important aspects of this book and  information on another important reference that can help us make sense of rights dealings

Kris Kliemann: I’ve practised rights a long time but I still run up on things that I don’t do daily or don’t do regularly or people are seeking advice on things, deals they want to make and I point them to those chapters because they are very useful, you can really follow through and get the perspective even to the point of really understanding what's important in negotiation. What are the points in each type of deal that you need to focus on. 

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Lynette Owen: One of the things that’s sometimes said is you don’t give definitive guidelines on terms but of course that's a very dangerous thing to do. It should reflect the market circumstances. You need to take into account the situation of the potential licensee in the market.  It makes no sense to pluck large sums of money out of thin air which the licensee couldn’t possibly earn back so it’s better to be realistic. 

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The other thing that's often been said is why are there no contracts in this book. In the UK we put those contracts into a completely different book, Clark's Publishing Agreements. It is an enormous book (which I can barely lift!!) and is currently in its eleventh edition. It is very heavily used by small publishers who don’t have in-house contract departments or legal councils. 

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Literary Agents and Rights Agents

Kris Kliemann: I grew up in Publishing companies, you grew up in Publishing companies but for our brothers and sisters in literacy agencies, there's often a designated person there who is handling rights, not necessarily representing authors, but handling rights to books as they grow beyond their primary contracts into translation, into audio, into even permissioning for estates and other useful avenues. Their operations are very much like an in-house rights department.

‍Lynette Owen: Yes, I’ve been heartened to have direct feedback on the new edition from agents. It’s good to know that they use it as well because often there’s a slight tension between Rights people working in Publishing Houses and Literary Agents. I mean I’ve worked mostly in Academic Publishing where one doesn’t encounter them as much as one would in Trade Publishing but I’ve tried to take their perspective into account as well.