BookSmarts Podcast (ep. 51): Margaux Weisman on “The Value of Foreign Rights for Publishers”
Margaux Weisman is the former Director of Business Development at DropCap Inc., a tech-enabled rights agency and a global rights marketplace used by rights agents and acquisitions around the world to find great books.
She joins the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss the importance & process of foreign rights for independent authors and small publishers. We discuss why foreign rights are a valuable source of revenue for authors and publishers, how DropCap helps indie authors and smaller publishers navigate foreign rights deals, markets that show the biggest demand for U.S. books, and the typical advance ranges for foreign rights deals.
To learn more, visit dropcapmarketplace.com. You can also follow them on Instagram @DropCapAgency.
Transcript
Joshua Tallent
In this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast, I’m chatting with Margaux Weisman who is the Director of Business Development at DropCap, which is a foreign rights agency and rights marketplace. Margaux, thanks for joining me on the podcast today.
Margaux Weisman
Thank you so much for having me. I’m psyched to be here.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, me too. So we met at the Publishing Innovation Forum. You guys came out and sponsored the event, which we really appreciate. But I think the coolest thing, really, is that there’s so much going on in publishing. There’s so many opportunities, there’s so many things that you can do. There’s always this problem of knowing, whether you’re an author or a publisher, how do I get more out of the stuff I’m already producing, right? You spend all this time, years of work, in some cases, to produce a book and to get from an idea all the way through the authoring stages, and all the way through the editorial stages, all the way through the production stages, and then get it out there; it’s available in English, and that’s it. So let’s talk a little bit about foreign rights, because this is your specialty and what DropCap works on. So I’m curious what’s the reason you would say, let’s say you’re talking to an author, and I know you guys work a lot with independent authors and independent publishers. If you’re talking to an author and explaining why it’s important to go sell your foreign rights, or find a buyer for your foreign rights. What would be the reasons? What are some things that you’ve seen, kind of the, I guess, the modus operandi behind the scenes, behind what DropCap is up to?
Margaux Weisman
Yeah, a really great question. I think one of the main things is other potential sources of revenue. If you have published a book in the United States, you’re going to be continuously working to bring more readers to your book, doing all kinds of marketing and publicity and sales efforts, but you’re likely only going to capture readers that speak English or live in English language speaking countries, and that’s a lot of readers out there that you’re not tapping into. So money both from potential advances against royalties from foreign publishers, as well as money you could potentially earn from sales in other countries. I also think it’s an excellent calling card, particularly if you’re luminary or an entrepreneur, if you’re an author for whom your book is kind of an extension of other parts of your business, being able to say that you’ve published your book in other countries and other languages is really impressive and just emphasizes your reach and your sphere of influence. And it’s also just really cool to be able to say, hey, you can, like, see my book on bookshelves in a bookstore in France or China or, you know, wherever it may be
Joshua Tallent
Right. Yeah, and that leaving money on the table is a really important thing, right? You don’t want to leave out the opportunity for growth, the opportunity for revenue, wherever it might be. But it can be frustrating, I’m sure, or maybe even scary for an author or even a small publisher to hand over the publishing rights to a book in another language. So I’m curious about the process. If someone is selling their rights, what do you typically see happen in that deal? What’s the kind of input that the author or the publisher could have with that foreign language publication, and what kind of interplay do you see between the two?
Margaux Weisman
So in a traditional big five publishing landscape, publishers really actively try to acquire world rights, or World English rights to a title, because they can make a lot of money on that. Most publishers make about 20 to 30% of their profit off foreign rights. But if you are working with a smaller or mid-sized publisher, or if you are self publishing, you’re probably not really thinking about your global strategy, and that’s what we’re trying to change at DropCap and with DropCap marketplace. Peviously, there hasn’t really been a path to foreign rights deals for authors that aren’t working with a publisher that has, like, a robust subrights department. So we’re trying to give authors tools to, you know, execute those deals, whether they are working with a publisher that has those resources or not. So really, like, until we entered the chat, I don’t think there was kind of a typical way, because typically authors would only be receiving licenses for foreign rights deals if they were working with a major publisher, and in that case, their publisher would handle a lot of it. As an author, you might get meaningful consultation on the deal points, or once the publisher has made their publication plans, you might get meaningful consultation on the cover, but really you don’t have any input. We created this platform as a way for indie authors and publishers to access the foreign rights ecosystem. So the process, at least, the way we do things is anyone can list their book on the marketplace, and we’re, like, totally democratic in that way. We don’t curate or gatekeep. Anyone who wants to subscribe can list their book. However, we do have a matchmaking algorithm that will surface the books that seem most likely to appeal to particular buyers, and match books with the buyers who are most likely to be interested in them. And that’s kind of the curation that happens is within the algorithm. Once you receive an inquiry from a publisher, it comes through the marketplace, and we reach out to the author and say, hey, you’ve received an inquiry. Do you want DropCap to handle this inquiry and act as your agent? Or do you have someone that does that for you? So they might be working with a small publisher that has, like, a subrights department of one, so they have someone who can handle that incoming inquiry. Maybe isn’t just doing a ton of legwork to go out and exploit those rights. Or some of our authors are working with other agents, and that’s awesome too, but we always give authors the option of pulling in one of our in-house agents for representation, and once that happens, it kind of takes the shape of a more traditional rights licensing process and what you would usually come to expect when you have an agent or a publisher representing you. We handle the contract negotiations, make sure the contract is fair and try to get you the best possible terms and highest possible advance.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So if you’re a small publisher or an independent author, and you have a book, and you’re publishing it through Ingram Spark or KDP or wherever else. And it’s available, it’s out there. It’s an ebook form. It can be read by anybody, anywhere. What’s the value here? What’s the value add for foreign rights for someone like that?
Margaux Weisman
It’s really the difference between your book being technically available, most likely for someone who already knows about it, and the potential for discovering new readers. So I would say if your book is available through Ingram Spark or similar, most of your consumers are likely going to be people that you know in other countries who you’ve told about your book who want to go buy it and support you. You’re not going to be in channels that publishers use to meet consumers where they are. You’re not going to have the marketing and publicity push of a traditional publication. I think particularly for authors who self publish, who like to have a lot of control of their IP, it makes sense to do some of those things domestically in your own country, but it’s really tough to do all that stuff yourself in another country where potentially, you don’t speak the language. You’re not there. So even if you are someone who kind of is an author / printer and likes to do a lot of the work yourself, I still think there’s a huge benefit to having foreign rights publications. And then there’s the fact of that in some markets, the economy is such that readers in those markets actually can’t even afford the edition that you have available, whether it be ebook or physical. So when you sell your rights in another country, in another language, that publisher is going to create an edition that makes sense for their market, and that includes translating it. It includes editing it. They’re not going to change the spirit or the core of your book, but they’re going to make sure that the language and everything kind of aligns with like cultural standards, and all the meaning is intact based on any nuances of the language. They’re going to make sure the cover works for their market. They’re going to make sure the materials and the printing are such that they can put a price on it that will appeal to consumers in their market. And they’re going to make it available on all the channels where people buy books, whether it be bookstores, airports, supermarkets, wherever.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So when you’re looking at the broad landscape. You guys have been around for a while and doing this, helping publishers and authors for a while, doing this stuff. Where are the most popular, or, I guess, most active countries for foreign rights? Are there certain parts of the world that look at U.S. published books and they say, “this is exactly what we want. We’re going to come in and get a lot,” or is it fairly distributed?
Margaux Weisman
There’s definitely trends. I think there is a lot of variation and breadth. But most other countries do tend to look to the U.S. for where trends start. Kind of similar to other entertainment mediums like they’re, you know, interested in what we’re doing. I think that’s part of the reason we’re even able to have so much success in foreign rights because if you think about it, it’s so much easier for a publisher and an editor in Germany or Japan or Turkey or wherever to find an author in their own country to publish. It’s so much easier, so much less work, less expensive, because they don’t have to translate. So there is a cache, an allure to finding books from the United States. Previously, we saw, for example, a big English language market in China, and now we’re seeing a big English language market in India. We do a lot of licensing in Spanish language countries. I mean, really, we do licensing everywhere. But there are trends, like in previous years, we saw a big demand for English language in China, and right now we’re seeing it in India. And those kind of represent some of the fluctuations that we’ve seen.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, the publishing market in these other countries too. It really depends. Depending on what part of the world, what country it is. There could be a small number of publishers. There could be a large number. It could be very, very, very small publishing process industry overall compared to, like, some really big players and a couple of smaller ones. Do you see certain types of publishers really engaging in DropCap in the marketplace? Certain types of genres, even, or certain types of books that you think are more popular when they’re being seen in the market?
Margaux Weisman
Yeah, I’ve noticed that books that perform well on the marketplace tend to be the ones you might expect if you’re following the book industry. I mean, we do all kinds of books. We license all kinds of books, and we have buyers who license all kinds of books. But I would say it’s about 20% childrens, 40% Adult Nonfiction and 40% adult fiction. We see a huge appetite right now for wellness and self help, which includes mind, body, spirit, parenting, business leadership. I would say we have a lot of buyers like, a density of buyers looking for those types of books. But then our biggest title of the past year was a fiction title. So there seems to be a lot of people looking for self-help nonfiction. But then when it’s big, fiction can be very big.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So mostly everything we’ve been talking about is foreign rights. You guys are a foreign rights agency and marketplace for that. Do you also do other types of rights licensing as well?
Margaux Weisman
We do occasionally do other kinds of subrights, like audio or licensing teaching materials for the educational market, but, really, our bread and butter is foreign. I don’t want to mislead anyone in saying we’ll do all these other kinds of things. We have occasionally done those kinds of deals but really foreign rights as our bread and butter. The two agents that we have in house have 24 and 28 years experience, respectively, in foreign rights. We’re super interested in, you know, we’re growing as a company, we’re kind of an early stage startup, and we’re super interested in someday maybe cracking the Film/TV rights world but we’re just not a player in that game right now.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, so give me a little bit of background then on DropCap. What’s the history? You guys are a startup. What’s the background of the people in the team, and how big is the team, and all that kind of stuff.
Margaux Weisman
Yeah, so we did start as a traditional rights agency, traditional in the sense that we operated our business the way most rights agencies do, like signing up clients, whether it be publishers or individual authors, and then going out and pitching their books and trying to get them deals. And then a few years ago, our co-founder said, “I’d really love to automate some of what I’m doing. There’s a lot of busy work in this job, multiple emails back and forth just to get a PDF. If I could automate some of what I’m doing, I could really spend time on the super high-value activities that only I can do.” So our CTO started building this software for her, basically to make her job easier and allow her to do more business, and it’s worked so well that we decided to make it public as a Software As A Service, and that became DropCap marketplace. And when we decided to do that, we were noticing that a lot of our rights buyers were shopping for books on Amazon, as in, looking for books to license on Amazon, not putting them in their cart, and we knew that probably was not the best place for them to be doing that, because the algorithm isn’t really going to work in service of them discovering new talent or books that haven’t had their rights exploited yet. But it told us that they wanted that kind of experience. They wanted everything in one place. They want to be able to browse and search, and they do want something that’s making recommendations to them. And we also noticed that we were having more and more Indian self-published authors approach us wanting help with foreign rights and with our bandwidth, we just couldn’t possibly take all of them on on an exclusive basis. Not to mention some of those authors aren’t interested in signing exclusive representation agreement with an agent. They decided to bypass the whole agent publishing house pipeline altogether to begin with. So they wanted, like, a tool to help maximize their books potential. But weren’t necessarily interested in getting an agent. So we noticed this need on the right seller side, and we noticed this need or desire on the rights buyer side for a platform like this. And that was the birth of Drop Cap marketplace. That’s great, yeah. And we have our CEO, Lindsay Jones, comes from like, a self publishing background. She worked at a self publishing company for a number of years. And we have two agents that have kind of split the globe, like they each have their own territories that they work on, and they’re always working on bringing more rights buyers to the platform. So always adding more people to do buying. And then we have our CTO and our COO and myself.
Joshua Tallent
Oh, great. Small team. Yeah, small, but nimble, nimble.
Margaux Weisman
That’s what I always say.
Joshua Tallent
So, looking at where things work right now, how things are going right now. Um, obviously an author thinking about this is going to think, Well, what kind of advance, if there really is, like, there’s money on the table, and what, what kind of advances are you seeing, What’s is it territorially kind of different? What kind of detail do you think you can give people on that?
Margaux Weisman
Yeah, most advances are in the low to mid four figure range. I would say it definitely absolutely varies by territory and by project. Like, how desirable is the project? How many bidders are there? But a typical advance would be like 1 to $5,000. One cool thing is because of some of our automations, we can execute extremely low advances, like, we will execute advances for $500, $600 $750. Most rights agents working out there won’t even bother with an advance of that size, because it’s just not even worth the legwork they’re going to do. But those add up. Not to mention it’s meaningful to have your book available in said country. And it can also, you know, stoke interest in other territories. And we’ve also seen very high advanced levels for very desirable projects, in more than 40,000 $50,000 range. And we’ve also done very big deals where a publisher will come in and they will acquire hundreds of titles. So the advance on a per title basis might be really low, but the overall advance might be six figures. So yeah, there’s definitely a lot of upside, especially because that’s just per territory. Your book can be available for shopping in every territory in the world all at once, and the licenses are usually for a discrete time period. When you sell your book in the United States to a traditional publisher, you’re usually selling it for your lifetime, plus 70 years. That’s usually the rights that the publisher will hang on to. But for foreign rights, it’s more common to sign a deal for a license for five years or seven years.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, yeah. And that gives you some flexibility. But also, you made a point earlier. I think it was really interesting. Once you sell your rights, let’s say, sell the rights to my book in France to a publisher there. Now, it actually has sold in another country, which has a good mark in its favor that another publisher said, hey, this is good enough that we’re gonna pursue it. So, you know, there’s a little bit of a cache there to say, yeah, it’s actually there, and then maybe somebody else sees that and picks it up, and then somebody else sees and picks it up. So that’s good. And you never know. Just because the advance is smaller, maybe even not in the four figure range, that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad advance for that book, or doesn’t even mean that the book isn’t going to sell that much. It’s a question of how much the publisher is considering that it might sell, but that doesn’t mean it can’t take off. So it’s good to just be able to get it out there and make the content available to the people who might be interested in purchasing.
Margaux Weisman
Yeah, absolutely. And if you’re just kind of breaking into the whole foreign rights world. I mean, yesterday, you weren’t exploiting any rights at all, and you had no income coming from these sources, and then today you have a few $1,000. It’s really not bad.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s good. Well, I really appreciate the time, Margaux. Where can people find out more about the work that you’re doing at DropCap?
Margaux Weisman
Well, they can visit our website, at dropcapmarketplace.com. They can follow us on Instagram @DropCapAgency, and I also have an Instagram for all of my book business antics, which is @craftbookediting, and I’ll often post about work on there, so that’s where you can find us.
Joshua Tallent
Awesome. We’ll put those links in the show notes. Thanks a lot for joining me today.
Margaux Weisman
Thank you so much for having me. This was really great.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, well, that’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a rating or review in Apple Podcast or Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. And we also really appreciate when you share the show with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com. Tanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.