When you sign a contract with a publisher, you’re selling them the right to publish your book in the language and territory specified. The right to publish is the primary right. Subsidiary rights are the rights to license other editions of the title to other parties.

Subsidiary rights allow you or your publisher to exploit other aspects of the book. This may include licensing the rights to your book to book clubs, large-print publishers, audio publishers, film and television producers and studios, theater directors and producers, paperback reprint publishers, foreign publishers, first and second serial outlets, and electronic publishers and merchandisers.

Anthology
Obviously, a writer can sell a story to an anthology editor or publisher. An anthology is a collection of literary works, usually shorter pieces. It is traditional for the editor of the anthology to split the advance with the contributors. The contributors’ advance is then prorated, or distributed proportionately, often according to the number of words contributed, or according to the sales record and selling power of the contributors. If the publisher keeps anthology rights, then the editor of the anthology and the publisher will share the proceeds from the sales.

Anthologies can be a lucrative source of income, especially for a relatively unknown author packaged with a better-known author in his or her genre. The standard split in print publishing for this right is 50-50.

Performance
Performance or dramatic rights give the holder the right to adapt and perform the work onstage, on television, or in the movies.

It is said about Hollywood that many are read, but few are chosen. If your book is prominently reviewed, or if there’s a big foreign rights sale before the book is published, chances are good that you’ll get a call from a production company to see if the rights are available.

How did they hear about it? The players in Hollywood pride themselves on their extensive information networks. They read trade magazines, like Publishers Weekly and Variety too, and have scouts and agents and editors who will give them a heads-up on exciting properties in the works.

The option is basically a lease. When you sign it, you haven’t licensed the rights, exactly, but you will receive a certain amount of money in exchange for taking the property off the table, so that the option holder is the only person trying to put the elements together to make the movie. The time limit for options varies, but it’s usually between nine months and two years. There’s usually an extension built in as well, so if everything’s going well, the original option holder has the first right to extend the length of time they have.

The option is against a purchase price—if and when the producer decides to make the movie, and to pay you for the right to do so, the option will be deducted from that price.

Your book may be optioned for feature film release or for television. Usually, a feature film deal is more lucrative for an author.

Some writers do get lucky. In fact, when you look at the marquee at your friendly neighborhood cineplex, or at the Movie of the Week listings in TV Guide, you’re looking at a whole bunch of writers who got lucky. Think about it that way.

The stage is slightly different. If a play is being staged for profit, the rights need to be cleared and the playwright and the publishing company need to be compensated. So if the eighth grade is staging Our Town for the entertainment of the sixth and seventh graders, they’re free to use the play. If they’re staging it in order to raise money for a new Coke machine in the cafeteria, they’ll have to clear the rights, through Thornton Wilder’s representation (who will probably refer them to HarperCollins, who publishes the play), and pay a fee for non-exclusive use.

The standard split in print publishing for dramatic or performance rights is 90% to the author, 10% to the publisher.

Large-Print
The right to license a large-print edition is one of the subsidiary rights to your book. A large-print book is exactly what it sounds like: a version of your book with larger type so that it may be read comfortably by readers with low vision.

Type is measured in points, from the bottom of the letter to the top. A one-inch high letter has about 72 points. Books are usually set in 10- or 12-point type. Newspapers and books using a smaller typeface are usually set in 8-point type.

Large-print materials must be at least 14 points, although they are usually 16 to 18 points.

There is an astonishing variety of materials available in large print, including magazines, songbooks, religious texts, naval charts, support materials for twelve-step programs, academic testing guides, calendars, dictionaries, atlases, crossword puzzles, and cookbooks, in languages ranging from English to Finnish to Navajo. The range of fiction books is exhaustive as well; every genre is well-represented.

There are only a handful of companies that handle large-print reproduction, although some of the major publishers have large-print divisions. The big authors sell at auction for quite a lot of money, and genre authors, particularly mystery and romance writers, can expect a slow, steady stream of royalty income.

There are no large-print eBooks—or, more accurately, every eBook has large-print capabilities. One of the wonderful things about eBooks is that they allow the reader to regulate the size and clarity of the type they’re reading.

The standard split for the licensing of large-print rights is 50-50.

Merchandising
Think T-shirts, baseball hats, lunch boxes, Halloween costumes, notebooks, Christmas tree ornaments, mousepads, mugs, keychains, snow globes, stuffed animals, backpacks, notepads, pens, calendars, magazines, magnets, posters, games, screen savers—need we continue?

With the right book, this can be a gold mine. Usually, the merchandising rush is stimulated by other media, but Harry Potter has proved that books can sell “merch” even without a TV show or a movie based on the material. It’s also true that children’s literature tends to lend itself best to merchandising, but that’s not written in stone either.

In the case of licensing merchandising rights, control is as big an issue as money sometimes—it would be terrible not to like the action figures based on your characters, wouldn’t it?

Merchandising is serious business. Publishers even ask for a share in theme-park rights, so if your book is made into the next Dollywood, you’ll have to share those proceeds. The standard split for this right is 50-50.

Audio
Audiobooks are cassettes featuring a nondramatic recorded version of your book. The right to record an audio version of your book is a subsidiary right.

There are two basic kinds of audiobooks: abridged and unabridged. The markets are considered to be sufficiently separate that you can often sell your book to both without conflict. Unabridged books tend to be available as rentals, directly from the publisher or through the library market.

Audiobooks are available for sale and for rental in a number of places: through book and video stores, truck stops, websites, direct mail catalogs. Some grocery stores and restaurants are even beginning to carry them.

Most of the major publishers have their own audio divisions. The publisher of the audio group will go through the print list before the books are published, to see which titles she’s interested in. Publishers prefer to publish the audio either at the same time as the print version or as close to it as possible. It’s fairly rare for a book to go directly to audio. The book will be sent to an abridger and then recorded in a studio, either by the author or by a trained actor.

As audio publishing grows, these rights are becoming more lucrative, and you should take an active interest in the exploitation of these rights. The traditional audio split is 90% to the author, 10% to the publisher. If your publisher is going to do the audio version within the company, you will receive a royalty, which varies from 10% of the net price to 8–10% of the retail price.

Foreign
Although foreign advances are usually lower than U.S. ones, the combined foreign rights to a book can be a lucrative package. The publisher or the agent for the book (depending on who has the rights) shops the book to foreign publishers all over the world, and tries to license the translation rights to the highest bidders. There are agents overseas who make a living by shopping American books to the publishers in their country.

When the foreign publisher buys the book, it commissions a translation and comes up with a book design and marketing materials appropriate for its market. Translations are expensive, so it’s often hard for foreign publishers to make a profit on longer books.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is an enormous conference held every October in Frankfurt, Germany. Some 7,000 different companies from more than a hundred countries come to exhibit there. Frankfurt, as it is called, used to be the main opportunity for communication between U.S. and foreign publishers. Of course, with e-mail, fax, and inexpensive air travel, this is less true that it was, but Frankfurt is still the time for the international publishing community to play show-and-tell.

The European markets (primarily Germany, Italy, and Spain) and Japan buy lots of American books. There isn’t automatic crossover between British and American books, despite the shared language—some trends cross over, and others don’t.

Certain kinds of books do better in certain kinds of markets, although there are no hard and fast rules. Science fiction and mystery are big in Japan. The German market loves movie tie-ins. Serious nonfiction and historical narrative go over well in Britain. Celebrity books are difficult in the foreign markets, unless the celebrity has made a huge splash overseas.

The standard splits for foreign rights ranges from 50% to 75% to the author. For British rights the figure may go up to 80%.

Serial
Serial rights are the right to reproduce a portion or excerpt of the work, and are usually licensed to a magazine, a journal, or a website.

First serial rights are the right to reproduce that excerpt for the first time—in other words, before the book is published. Second serial rights refer to the right to reproduce the material after it has been published. Territory should be specified when selling serial rights.

First serial is primarily a nonfiction market, although there are exceptions: the women’s magazines will do excerpts of fiction by bestselling authors, for example. A first serial appearance in a widely read national magazine definitely helps with sales of the book, although it often involves walking the fine line between making the audience hunger for more and satisfying its appetite.

With topical nonfiction, there is also the risk that there will be too much overlap with subjects the magazine covers regularly as a matter of course; an excerpt of a book about breast cancer, for instance, may conflict with an article commissioned by the magazine and written independently. First serial rights are usually, but not always, exclusive.

When the publisher or agent is submitting work for serial consideration, it often helps if they highlight a chapter or a section that might be of special interest to the magazine. Special care is taken to match the book’s content and perceived audience with the content and audience of the magazine. In the case of a non-exclusive license, different parts of the book may be licensed to different magazines, with the hope of reaching different markets.

The agent or the publisher will also keep a database of smaller and more specific periodicals catering to niche markets. As you know if you’ve been to one of those big international magazine stores recently, there are magazines catering to every taste, profession, and interest, and the people who read those magazines are serious about the topic and likely to be book buyers. You know your topic better than anyone, though, so if you know about a small magazine for high-school basketball coaches that would be perfect for your book, make sure to give that information to your editor so that she can pass it along to the sub rights department.

As a general rule, the smaller the periodical, the less money they’ll have. Sometimes the company will be able to negotiate a more creative deal: ad space might be traded for the rights to an excerpt, for instance.

For the most part, first serial is worth exploiting for the publicity it provides. The advances tend to be modest, unless it’s a publication like Vanity Fair or The New Yorker, which pay between $1.00 and $1.50 a word.

First serial rights splits are usually 90% to the author, 10% to the publisher.

Second serial is the right to publish in a magazine or periodical after the book has been published. Newspapers used to do a lot of second serial nonfiction, and Cosmopolitan, under Helen Gurley Brown, was known for publishing wonderful second serial fiction. There’s less of a market than there used to be, so shopping second serial rights is usually too much work for too little return, but these rights are sold occasionally. Once a piece has been sold to a magazine for first serial, the rights revert to the author, who can then sell them to any number of second serial markets.

Second serial works for some publications because it’s cheaper than first serial (and often cheaper than commissioning an original article about the subject), and it enables the magazine or newspaper to piggyback on the publisher’s publicity campaign.

As with first serial, the fear is of overexposing the material, so it’s important to make sure that the article doesn’t give away the heart of the book.

Websites and Web-based magazines are beginning to purchase both first and second serial rights to books.

The standard second serial split in print publishing is 50-50.