Aspects of Publishing, Part II: Reversion of Rights

Meanwhile, the always-erudite Booksquare educates on the matter of rights reversion, jumping off from a recent PW article (subscription only, natch) about Silhouette’s decision to flood the market with Nora Roberts’ backlist, even though she hasn’t published a new book with them in over two years:

So what is our problem? We’re so happy you asked. We’re focused on a little thing known as “Reversion of Rights.” Unlike many contractual terms, it is exactly what it appears: wherein the license term expires, and all rights are returned to the author. The Harlequin contract, essentially, states that rights are returned to an author after the book has remained out of print for a certain period of time (we do not know the specific language in Roberts’ agreements, so are using the standard contract for the purpose of our example – while we’re focused on one author, the implications are universal). Clearly, by reprinting her backlist at regular intervals, Harlequin is making it difficult for Roberts’ rights to revert…

We understand this practice is not uncommon (we’ve also heard of authors who are actively working to regain their rights in order to better exploit their works themselves). Ebook sales are growing. They are not astronomical, but they are growing. Ebook sales of mainstream works (that is titles published by major houses versus dedicated electronic publishers) are especially robust. And because publishers long to hold on to their (licensed) assets, they resort to legal, but possibly not ethical, tricks to keep rights from reverting. This is call smart business, and we understand the logic behind it (we spent so many years arguing these points from the other side, we can’t help but see both sides of the issue).

Booksquare goes on to conclude that the best recourse of action is to retain as many rights as one possibly can before signing a deal. Hear, hear; I’ve really never understood this business of signing away all properties to one publisher, or one group. It just seems like a license to break hearts, professionally speaking, in the future. It ties into my overall belief to know exactly what you’re getting into and what to negotiate for prior to signing a contract, even though it’s no doubt easier to stay in the dark about such matters.