will be able to determine the places and events most likely to offer you a return on your investment in attending them. Book fairs are crucial to a rights professional, but expensive to attend. A good rights system will help you maximize the opportunities they present.
Marketing assets – It is just as important for rights marketing to outline what rights are NOT available for a title as it is to advertise which are, so that you aren’t wasting people’s time. If translation rights for a book have sold in several languages, this indicates to a buyer the book project looks likely to translate well and has attracted international interest so there will be more interest in titles like this. Similarly book prize winners attract attention. If your rights system includes comprehensive title metadata of this kind you can output all that data into a rights catalogue: better still, you could even consider tailoring a catalogue for a single customer or country.
Identify trends in rights income – A rights system offers the opportunity to interrogate your data, identify buying and selling patterns, and provides the evidence necessary to take more informed decisions about how to exploit them.
Payments – A rights system should be able to record payments due and received, and for smaller companies with no central purchasing office, be able to cope with the invoices and accounting. Many agreements have statement periods contractually added, so knowing when to expect, or indeed, produce one, is crucial for both compliance and credit control. It can be some time from signature to project publication, so scheduling when an event is due is crucial in monitoring that receipts are timely, and in ensuring a licensing project is proceeding on schedule.
Embarking on a project to ensure all your rights contracts are stored digitally, especially if you have lots of licenses, can be a challenging project to embark upon but try to remember – this will future-proof your assets and add to the value of your business. When the opportunity presents for a major licensing deal, you will be in a much better position to act quickly. Considering all these benefits, you will see a good return on your investment.
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