Selective Rights Licensing: Sell Your Book Rights At Home and Abroad

by Orna Ross

Authors: want to know how to make more money from your books without writing another word?

Receiving self-publishing commissions or publisher royalties is only one revenue stream for your books. There are many other possibilities, from translations to video games, merchandising to print, but the rights world is a complex mix of formats, platforms, apps, territories and terms. Each market and each buyer offers different opportunities and operates by different rules. This guides you through.

It shows you how to approach rights buyers, what they’re looking for, and what to expect when discussing the license or ‘sale of rights’ for your book. You’ll learn how to pitch, negotiate and close a deal, and how to work with literary agents and global publishing companies. You will also be introduced to the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi)’s indie author rights program, which offers ongoing support.

Everything you need to begin successfully and selectively licensing your publishing rights for sale.

Genres: Writing, Business

235 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 10, 2016

About the author

Orna Ross is an award-winning historical novelist, poet, who also writes creative guidebooks for authors and others.

An international bestseller, she enjoys book sales in 120+ countries worldwide and her awards include the Goethe Historical Fiction Grand Prize Award for fiction, Gold Literary Titan award for poetry, the Romantic Novelists Association's Indie Champion Award, The Writers' Digest's Top Websites for Writers, and The Bookseller's Top 100 people in publishing.

Her novels are multi-layered, historical, cross-generational family dramas, full of mystery and intrigue, and blending Irish and international settings.

Her poetry books are lyrical companions for creative minds.

In 2009, while undergoing breast cancer treatment, Ross coined the term "creativism" to expand the concept of creativity beyond the arts, and encourage the use of creative thinking and tools to improve every aspect of daily life. This led to her Go Creative! Non-fiction series, which explores the theory and practice of creativism, the application of the creative process to everything in life.

What she describes as “the best move of my writing life” followed soon afterwards, when she took her publishing rights back from her publisher, Penguin, in 2011. The experience of self-publishing has made her a passionate advocate for the commercial and creative empowerment of authors.

She founded the award-winning, global non-profit for self-publishing writers, the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) in 2012 and the creative development program for writers, Indie Author Lab, run in association with the London Book Fair and Author Nation in 2026.

Indie Author Lab Online runs through her Substack for authors and her new writing appears first on her Substack for Readers.

Browse and buy all her books on her author website: OrnaRoss.com/Books

Reviews

[Julie Capell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helpful in that it lists and defines all the different sorts of rights that authors (potentially) own--as long as they have't given them away in bad contracts! You can easily skip over the rights you are not interested in exploiting right now (fill, games, toys), but come back to those chapters when/if they ever become pertinent to you. A quick read that left me feeling better informed on this complex issue.

[Tikiri Herath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must reader for any author who is serious about their writing business. Cannot recommend this book more.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful Information

I bought this to learn more about overseas rights and it was worth the price just for that small section.

[Michael Ronn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was desperately needed in the indie publishing world. Before this the best resources on contracts and rights were either a few years old and not 100% applicable to indies or mostly for traditionally published authors. Ross and Sedwick do an amazing job of painting the picture of rights, what they are, why authors should protect them, and how. It's much longer than I initially thought I would be, and that's a great thing. This book covers just about everything you need to know in dealing with contracts and rights. It's the definitive resource. I also loved how they talked about just about every right you can think of (merchandising, video games, film, tv, dramatization, etc). That section made my head hurt but in a good way. The sample contract sections at the end were worth the price of the book alone (just like in Sedwick's Self-Publishing Legal Handbook). I recommend this book even if you may not need it right now. This is the kind of information that you want to refresh yourself on regularly, and practitioning the advice in this book is what makes the difference between authors and authorpreneurs.

[Paula Marais · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives an overview of the various rights available to authors wishing to promote their work in other markets. I found it extremely elucidating, especially in terms of markets I hadn't considered. There were a few gaps in the book for me - questions I still had left unanswered (since in some situations as a South African certain options are not available to me, as they are often focused on the US or UK). However, I am aware the author works with indie authors and I am considering joining her alliance as a result. I will definitely give this book a second read.