I was recently asked to write this post by an editor who is regularly amazed by how little authors seem to know about what rights they’ve given to their publishers. When you sign a book deal you’re handing over ownership of your intellectual property to a third party, and what they’re allowed to do with your work depends on that contract you’ve signed. They might only be allowed to publish your book in one country or one language, for example. Other contracts (and I kid you not), might give your publisher universal rights – yes, that does mean they’re allowed to publish your work anywhere within the universe.



Agents think a lot about what rights they’re selling to each publisher, in order to maximise the potential income for their authors. It’s important not to give publishers rights that they are ill-equipped to exploit, because doing so could mean a significant loss of potential income for an author.

In this post I’ll go through a few of the more common types of deal, explaining the benefits and shortfalls of each.

World All Languages (WAL)

In a World All Languages book deal the author gives their publisher the rights to sell their book in any language, throughout the world. Ordinarily in order to exploit these rights the publisher would sub-licence the translation rights to a foreign publishing house, so the author in effect has two publishers (or many more, depending on how successfully their book sells around the world).

The foreign publisher will pay the author’s primary publisher either a fee or an advance for the translation rights, and the author will receive a portion of this income (but not all of it).

Generally speaking, publishers like to purchase WAL because being able to sub-licence translation and US rights increases their chances of making a profit on the book. However, as agents we often prefer not to grant these rights. If a publisher secures a foreign deal for our author, they take a cut of the income for that deal, which means our author’s share (and therefore our own commission share), is smaller than it would have been were we to have negotiated that foreign deal directly.

As such, especially where agents have strong resources to sell into foreign countries, we like to hold on to as many languages/territories as possible. Please note: I’m talking mainly about translation rights here, but for UK agents this would also apply to English rights in the US, and vice versa for US agents.

However there are several instances in which it might well be in the best interests of the author to sell WAL. If the book is unlikely to sell abroad (if the author is a celebrity who’s only well-known in the UK, for example) then an agent might not see the benefit of keeping hold of foreign rights. WAL deals usually come with larger advances than deals granting more limited rights, and so in cases where foreign deals are unlikely, taking a WAL deal will usually be the most lucrative option for the author.

Conversely, if an author is very successful and likely to get many foreign deals, their UK publisher might offer them an extremely large advance in order to secure WAL rights. Though the author may stand to make even more if their agent sold foreign rights directly, the security offered by a large advance on a WAL deal might be more tempting for them.

World English (WE)

Having gone through the above, this type of deal will be much easier to explain. A World English deal gives a publisher the rights to publish your book throughout the world, but only in the English language. A UK publisher with WE rights in a book will publish it in the UK, and then also seek to publish it in the US. They can either publish the book in the US themselves (as many UK publishers have sister companies in the States), or they can sub-licence the US rights to another publisher. If they do sell the US rights to another publisher, then they will keep a proportion of the income for that deal (usually between 20-25%, with the rest going towards earning out the author’s advance).

The publisher does not, however, have the rights to publish the book in translation, or to sub-licence the translation rights. With WE deals the author keeps the translation rights, and their agent will try to sell these directly to foreign publishers. As such, even though the author’s agent can’t sell US rights directly, they can still try to maximise the author’s income for their book by securing as many translation deals as possible.

UK & Commonwealth (UK&C)

Another common type of deal for British authors to get is a UK & Commonwealth one. This gives the publisher the right to publish the author’s book in the English language, but only throughout the UK and the specific Commonwealth countries agreed in the contract. Agents have a standard list of commonwealth countries that they work from when negotiating these deals, but it can vary. The significant differences are usually whether Canada and Europe are included.

As with WE deals, the translation rights remain with the author if they’ve signed a UK&C deal. Additionally, with a UK&C deal, the author still holds on to the US rights for their book, so their agent can attempt to find them a good US deal as well. If an agent is confident that a book is going to be attractive to publishers around the world, they’ll probably try to secure a UK&C deal with a British publisher so that they can exploit the US and translation rights for the book directly.

Translation

For the most part, foreign deals are similar in concept to World English deals – the author grants their foreign publisher the rights to publish their book in one particular language, throughout the whole world.

An exception to this is with the Portuguese language. Since Brazil and Portugal both have Portuguese as their official language, when selling Portuguese rights an agent will need to specify which territory the book can be published in.

One big difference between translation deals and WE deals (or WAL or UK&C deals), is the licence term. When a British publisher purchases the English rights in a book, they are usually granted these rights for the full term of copyright. This means that they own these rights until the intellectual property comes out of copyright (70 years after the author’s death). They can thus continue publishing the book for a very long time.

However, with most translation deals the foreign publishers are granted a much shorter licence term – normally between 3 and 10 years. If a foreign publisher would like to continue publishing their translation of a book after their licence term has ended, they would need to negotiate a licence renewal. This can of course mean extra income for the author.

There is no universal ‘best’ type of publishing deal out there – what works for one book may not work for another. Whether selling translation rights to your UK publisher is a good idea will massively depend on how strong their foreign rights team is, how strong your agent’s own foreign rights team is, how well your book will translate to other cultures, and what your publisher is offering for these additional rights. These are all questions to consider when deciding whether to sign with a publisher, and hopefully your agent will be able to help you weigh them up.