BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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What Curtis (as mentioned in yesterday’s post) did with OEM was make business of an opportunity. He spotted the market’s need for something, and provided that something. In Curtis’s case, it was the emerging need (due to both corporate and public policy) for occupation and environmental medical books.
Curtis secured the best OEM authors, he built a mailing list of everybody and anybody in the OEM market, he produced catalogs, he launched conferences, and when the day came, he launched an OEM website, built an OEM email list, and made sense of social media for OEM. He secured both ends of the OEM business—the demand and the supply—and their connectivity.
Meanwhile, at Houghton Mifflin, Randy quickly got his head around the business of “subsidiary rights”— the right to produce products in different formats based on original material.
For example, let’s imagine that Harper licenses your original material, perhaps a children’s book entitled, “Tess’s Tree.” You sign the standard author/publisher contract.
The core income from Harper’s investment will be realized when Harper exploits its business expertise and publishes a hardcover edition of Tess’s Tree. But as is almost always done, Harper will also grab the rights to produce Tess’s Tree in every other possible format. Those other formats may not be Harper’s expertise so they’ll sub-license those rights to other businesses (thus, “sub rights”).
For example, those extensions of Tess’s Tree might include a Braille edition, an audio book, a movie, a TV series, a large print edition, a paperback, a smaller paperback (mass market), Tess’s Tree merchandise (t-shirts, bedding, lunch boxes, dolls, coffee mugs, wallpaper, etc.), a French or Greek or Mandarin or whatever foreign language edition, a deluxe leather-bound edition, a library edition with reinforced binding, and so on and so on. And Harper will probably split the income from those sub-licenses with you, the author, 50/50.
But hold on! Do you see what’s not on that list of possible formats?
That’s right! Books bound-on-the-right-for-left-handed-readers.
And that’s what Randy spotted.
Tomorrow: Books bound-on-the-right-for-left-handed-readers