ABSTRACT
The ideal answer is specialist staff, whether they are employed by a literary agency or within a publishing house. As outlined earlier, the importance of selling rights has increased greatly since the 1960s, although their importance has also inevitably been affected by such developments as vertical hardback-paperback publishing, multilingual publishing within the same publishing group, and increasing restrictions on the range of rights granted to publishers by agents, particularly in the trade sector. On the positive side, new avenues of licensing have opened up in the digital age. The employees of a literary agency are by definition specialist staff. Their
individual areas of responsibility may be divided by function (for example translation rights, film rights) or by author. Within a medium-sized to large publishing house, a specialist rights department is advisable, even if it starts as a single person with a computer and a simple record-keeping system. The optimum size of a rights department will depend on the size of the list and the range of possible rights to be sold, as well as the perceived importance of the rights function to the company. In a very small or very new publishing house, it may well be impossible to devote the entire time of even one member of staff to the rights function, and in such cases rights deals may have to be handled on an ad hoc basis by staff whose role is primarily in editorial, marketing, sales or perhaps production work. However, as the scale of rights business expands, it will be important to dedicate more time and resources to proactive work in this area. Whoever handles the rights, it is important for them to have access to key contractual information on what rights are available to handle, and also whether rights sales may be complicated by the fact that the work includes third party copyright material for which permission may be limited to inclusion in the original edition and would have to be recleared for onward licences. This information can be complex and is normally held in the location of first publication of the book concerned; it may have some bearing on whether it is wise to depute overseas staff (e.g. sales staff in the local office of a multinational) to have responsibility
for offering rights in their territory without detailed background knowledge on the rights status of each title. Continuity of staff in the area of rights is important, as it is also in the
field of contracts. Internally, corporate memory and a knowledge of how to access information in company records and archives is extremely valuable. Externally, licensees like to build up relationships with rights sellers as regular partners who understand their markets and what projects are likely to be of interest to them; they are disconcerted by frequent changes of staff.
