Selling Subsidiary Rights: How Authors Can Help - article

There’s no reason you can’t get involved, pay attention, and encourage your agent or your editor or the subrights department to do something for your book. If you know someone at a book club or an audio publisher, you can tell your publisher, or you take matters into your own hands and get in touch with that contact yourself. Don’t let an opportunity fade away. If you’ve won awards or received great reviews, or if you’ve garnered invitations to organizations where you’ll be speaking to large audiences, that’s all stuff you should pass on, not only to your editor and publicist, but also your agent and with the rights department, because it can make a difference. If you’re an architect who has written a fantastic book about the architecture in your area, and it just so happens that there is a huge convention coming up where you’ve been invited to speak to the Association of International Architects, that’s information that can help you get the attention you deserve. It shows that you’re important and your book is important, and your agent or your publisher’s subsidiary rights department can take that to other publishers around the world. They can take that information to magazines and see if there is an opportunity to excerpt something from your book in time to be featured before that convention.

You have to think creatively as well. If you’re being honored as an alumnus of a particular school, most universities have magazines. There’s a great opportunity to get a piece of your book in a magazine that coincides with an event. There are many different ways of looking at something, and you don’t necessarily have to judge the right piece of information—just keep the information flowing. Don’t think it’s too small. Don’t think that it doesn’t matter, that no one is going to care because it’s just a small school or organization. There are opportunities within small markets too, so just keep feeding people information that could benefit your book. If someone wants to pat you on the back, you never know what kind of opportunity that might turn into.

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