A. If that is not stipulated in the contract (and it rarely is), then not without some help. Take a look at your publishing agreement to see if there are sales performance requirements written into the terms. But if you don’t find a suitable condition, you can still ask your publisher nicely.

My book didn’t sell many copies – and it’s going downhill from there!

Most publishing agreements have several provisions that allow you to get your publishing rights back.

For example, most agreements have a time frame within which the publisher must publish your work after acquiring it. Eighteen months is not atypical. In other words, a publisher can’t buy your book and just sit on it. Now, if you turned in your manuscript late or it has not yet been made acceptable through the editing process or there are some other extenuating circumstances, they (the publisher) are probably protected from surrendering rights back to you.

Another example of a rights reversion clause is most agreements have an in-print provision. If your book is not available for purchase and you bring it to the publisher’s attention – in writing – with a specific request to rectify this by reprinting the book, the publisher must send the book back to press within a defined period of time or return publishing rights to you. Just to repeat, the onus is usually on you to initiate the process in writing.

This has increasingly become a point of contention between authors and publishers in the digital age. Why? In many agreements, offering a book in a downloadable e-book form is all that is needed for a book to be considered in-print. And further, digital publishing means that the publisher can economically transition from offset printing to print on demand. In other words, your book will technically never be out of print even if nothing much is currently happening in the area of sales and marketing.

Third, a few agreements have qualifiers like a set time period for publishing rights or a minimum number of annualized sales or the requirement that it be included in a printed catalog. If you don’t remember this coming up when you were negotiating a contract, then this probably doesn’t apply to your agreement!

My book was printed on time and is still in print. It just isn’t selling like I thought it would. This is so disappointing.

Even if none of the conditions apply, go ahead and ask to have your publishing rights reverted, but don’t be surprised if the answer is no. Or if the publisher encourages you to do some marketing activities that will help rekindle demand for your book in the marketplace.

Now, if sales of your book have steadily waned to next to nothing, if you have earned out your advance against royalties (or you are willing to pay back unearned advances against royalties), if inventory levels are low (and especially if you’re willing to buy the remaining copies in stock), and if there isn’t sufficient demand to warrant an offset print run (let’s say about 1,500 copies), then your publisher just might shrug his or her shoulders and say sure, you can have your publishing rights back. Often, the publishing agreement specifies that in such cases the publisher will let you have any plates, films, and files free or at publisher’s actual cost to retrieve them. With plates and films basically being obsolete there is usually no or little cost associated with retrieving the electronic files. (Though that doesn’t mean anyone can easily put their hands on the most up-to-date print-ready iteration.)

But again, even if all the circumstances of the previous paragraph are present, many publishers (self included) are loathe to return rights. Why? They (we) have invested a lot of money into publishing your work and as distribution technology changes and morphs into podcasts, e-books, print-on-demand solutions, and more, they don’t want to lose opportunities to recoup their investment through new means of exploiting your work.

And one final question for you to ask yourself. What can you do to promote sales that the publisher hasn’t done or won’t do? If the answer is “a whole lot more” then get busy and drive sales without the manufacturing and inventory hassles. Or, if you have an iron-clad way to sell your own books directly, like a speaking schedule, ask nicely for your rights to be reverted and hope for a yes answer.

A: In the future, maybe everything!

How many shapes and forms can your idea fit into?

Okay, first let’s answer the question based on what subrights commonly mean in the publishing industry NOW. Subrights are the permission to use the content from the primary license the publisher has purchased (almost always the book) in subsidiary forms. When a publisher buys the right to publish your book, that company usually secures all subsidiary rights in the deal. This allows him or her to exploit these secondary rights him or herself, or more commonly to sell these rights to others to create new products that disseminate the content in a different format and generate new revenue streams.Common subrights are film and video rights, audio books, workbooks, gift books, e-books, translations, book club editions, international editions, commercial rights, gift products, and according to the contract language of many publishers, any medium that now exists or that will exist in the future in the universe. In other words, anything that can house your words and thoughts.The basic reasons that publishers secure subrights, the right to re-license what you’ve sold to them, are:

1. Most book publishers, not surprising, are very good at creating books, but also not surprising, not as good at creating other products that expand the reach of the content, like motivational coffee mugs or Lithuanian translations or motion pictures. But they do have staff or have contract workers who can find companies that do those things very well.
2. Since the publisher invests significant money into taking a book to market, with no guarantee that the book will be profitable, his or her default position is to reserve all opportunities available to earn a return on that investment.

So does the publisher get all the money? Not unless you signed a bad deal. The standard contract terms is for publisher and author to split the proceeds.

Why should I give the publisher all these rights? Don’t do it if you don’t have to. But unless your name is Stephen King or John Grisham, it’s probably going to be a deal breaker for the publisher. And if you have no history of selling subsidiary rights, why hold onto them? If you have a compelling argument on why you can outperform the publisher – i.e. “Ridley Scott has already bought an option on the screenplay adaptation of our work” – or you know your publisher doesn’t attend international events and has never sold a translation right – or your uncle owns a direct mail book club -then fight for them! If you think you can outperform the publisher, try to negotiate a time limit for the publisher to have exclusive right to sell subrights to your work – or counter his or her offer with terms that give you a bigger share of the subrights revenue if you generate the sale.

How important are subrights? For many publishers, their core business, creating books, is a break even proposition; profits come from subrights. For the most successful authors, creating a book opens up opportunities for many other ways to express their content, while making more money and promoting sales of the original license, the book.

Can subrights hurt my book? Sure. If you’ve written a motivational classic and the publisher sells quotes to an employee award company that makes really ugly plaques with your name on every single one of them, then yes, it can hurt your brand. If the sell of subrights doesn’t generate new business but only replaces what the publisher would have sold anyway (cannibalization), then there’s really no added benefit.

With the proliferation of e-books, in particular, the reality is that subrights might soon be the only thing you, an author, sells. In other words, the primary product will be the content and any expression of it will be the sublicense, including the veritable paper and ink book, which may or may not be necessary to distribute the content. That’s undoubtedly a long ways off. Or is it? Oprah Winfrey just reported that the Amazon Kindle is now her favorite “gadget”. That means the future might be closer than you think!