we work a lot with contracts um but you don't need to have a legal background
hello and welcome back to my channel this week we're looking at rights again we have
Louise Henderson who is a rights assistant at Orion books i hope you find it useful and enjoy
hiya um my name is Louise and i'm the rights assistant at Orion for those of you who don't know
Orion is a publishing house that publishes both fiction and non-fiction we have a number of
different imprints across all the different genres as a rights assistant it's really exciting because
i work across all of the lists which means i get to read so much and across a really wide variety
so there's always something really interesting which is great fun so rights is where we sell the
right to publish our novel either in another country or in another format this means that
where this can mean selling translation rights US rights audio large print newspaper serial
and tv and film our aim is to get our titles into as many different languages formats and
territories as possible so that we can reach all of these different readers and it's also so that
we can generate new revenue for our authors the rights that we're able to sell are dependent per
title um on the contract that's been negotiated with our editor and the agent and author
and this is decided at the point of acquisition in a nutshell my job as a rights assistant is
to assist the rights team and make sure that the department runs smoothly i do this by helping with
administrative tasks such as preparing reports for meetings sending aftercare to foreign publishers
after a deal has been agreed this means supplying it with all the information and materials that
they need in order to publish their edition of the book i also help prepare rights guides which
a rights guide is essentially a sales catalogue with the titles that we and on the translation and
us rights or even film tv rights for we use this during rights fairs also helped prepare and the
team's schedules for these different rights fairs they're like back-to-back meetings of 30 minutes
across a period of days so it's quite busy and intense for them i also help with just general
inquiries that crop up and um supply materials for for various submissions so if people are
interested in publishing one of our books then we send them materials for them to consider i also
help with reversion requests so this is when we are asked to revert to rights to a title reverting
the rights basically means that we return the rights we acquired to the person who we acquired
them from in my role i am also responsible for handling a couple of income streams of my own
i manage the production materials sales for the company which like such as selling cover art
files and internal image plates and selling these to form publishers before i'm able to do this i
need to look into the right situation so and see where the images and artwork came from who owns
those rights and whether or not we can sell them one i also handle renewals which is basically when
a license has expired it means renegotiating the terms for a new contract i then draft and
um prepare the contract for their consideration i also handle permissions requests so that is
when people want to use extracts from our novels in a book that they are writing so again looking
into the rights that we have in our contract and seeing if we can agree to their rights request
and then also charging for it so that our author is paid for their work i've also recently started
working on newspaper cereals so that's when a newspaper pays to run an extract from a book
ahead of publication since joining Orion i've also been running the Orion with team twitter feed and
this has become increasingly important since due to covet all of our rights fairs have moved online
so yeah there's there's a lot to a rights assistant role um my day in general um revolves
around juggling all these various different tasks depending on which one is the most um
important or time sensitive it is a busy role but it is really exciting you need to be really good
at multitasking and juggling different deadlines because it's super busy it's also really important
to have good attention to detail and have strong communication skills i would also say that it is
vital to have a keen interest in other cultures and understanding of differences is really
important because you work with people across the world and it's important to notice or like be
sensitive towards just cultural differences like most roles um i would say that you aren't expected
to know everything and a large part of it is learning on the job for example we work a lot with
contracts um but you don't need to have a legal background we draft contracts based on specific
templates reading and understanding publishing contracts is something that you pick up on the
job all you really need i would say is to bring with you an open mind and a willingness to learn
so if you're somebody looking to get into rights i would say first of all
see who's your favorite publishers and by that you can look at your favorite books and make
a note of the people who publish them i would then follow them online be that on their website
or on twitter because that's where they're going to be posting their job opportunities and then
you can also just keep an eye on what they're doing and what they're up to because if you have
an interview that will definitely come in handy i would also recommend joining SYP because they
hold loads of conferences and workshops so when i was job hunting and also just trying to understand
and understand what the industry was and which department i wanted to work in and writes in
particular they held um a workshop on rights which was just really helpful and really important for
just getting a good grip of it because at that time i hadn't had any experience in publishing
i would also recommend reading the bookseller or book brunch keep abreast of what's going on in the
in the publishing industry and also keeping an eye on um different right sales because
then these get published in the trades press especially if they're exciting also especially
with the bookseller you can look at the different different tabs so you can read what's going on
internationally and while selling there basically if you're applying to roles in your interviews
it'd be really helpful and really impressive to show that you have a good understanding of also
what's going on in foreign markets not just the UK if you are being interviewed for a rights role
i would say that a good a good idea would be to check out their rights guide if you can get your
hands on it because you'll be able to see which titles are their key priorities and you can also
see and which titles they've sold the rights to i know that when i was applying for jobs and i
um i had an interview i was gushing about all these different books that the publisher was
working on but then it turns out that the rights team didn't actually hold any of those rights
so although like you know it's great that you're showing that you're interested in that publishing
house it's still it would be good to show that you are interested in the books that the rights
team are specifically working on oh it's really impossible to choose one book that everyone should
read i think that everybody should read all the young men by ruth corker barracks with um kevin
carr o'leary it's about the aids crisis in the 1980s in the us and it's a really inspirational
book about a really devastating period of history it shows the absolute importance of being kind and
showing compassion to others and i just think it's excellent and everyone should read it