Getting Your Book Rights Back: How to Manage Rights Reversion

My books have always been self published, so I own the rights. But many of our authors at Book Launchers started off with a publisher and for a variety of reasons, they're now trying to get their rights back, or they've gotten their rights back and they're publishing their book on their own. If that's you or you're thinking of signing a publishing deal and want to make sure you have options in the future, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad author act avid cold plunger. Yes, I love me some 42 degree water and the founder of Book Launchers, a full service self publishing company. We look like a publisher, but our authors are the publisher, keeping all the rights and proceeds from their book sales. But not every author starts off self publishing. Many, in fact think they've hit it big when they land a publishing deal. But that feeling of validation from a publisher can make it easy to overlook all the things you're giving up when you sign that deal. It's easy, easy to also forget that a publisher's job is to get as much from every book as they can. So this means they want all the rights, as much of the money per book for themselves as possible. And while this can be a great trade off for some authors who seek very specific results from a publisher, access to distribution channels or access to key connections can be great reasons to go the traditional publishing route. But especially as a nonfiction author, it's not usually the route to go for monetary gains. And you're better off to self publish for the money unless you can negotiate big contracts. And even then, a friend of mine got a sweet traditional book deal for two books and got a six figure advance. The deal was good for him as far as he believes. The fact that, you know, it got him onto some of the lists, although it was a lot of his audience that did that and that increased his speaking fee. But he says he does cry a little on the inside when he does the math on what money he would have made self publishing the book because selling the same number of copies, he would have made seven figures, not six. So next time he's self publishing anyway, I'm not saying don't go with a publisher, just saying it's not all roses and rainbows. And we see that clearly at Book Launchers. When we're helping an author who had a publishing deal and that publisher stopped publishing the book, they won't create an audio version or an ebook version, or they've gone out of business or another company has bought them and everything has changed. So if something like this happens to you, then you'll be looking for the rights to your book to revert back to you. Reversion of rights simply refers to the point in time where the publisher no longer owns the rights to your book when it again belongs to you, the author. You can do what you want with the book. In most publishing contracts, there are stipulations as to how this right reversion can. Sorry, I stumbled. In most publishing contracts there are stipulations as to how the rights reversion can happen. Sometimes it's a period of time or after X number of sales or a combination of those things. And that will be the stipulation of when the rights can revert back to the author. Now, what used to be more clear cut is not anymore. Because some contracts don't state what it means to have a book in print with digital and audio versions of your book. Well, how are you to argue that it wasn't in print? So it can get sticky for some contracts if that wasn't set up clearly from the beginning? Now that might not sound fair. But remember, the publisher needs to make their costs back and make a profit off the majority of their books or they won't make money and stay in business. And I mean, publishing is not a high margin business. So we've had a few clients take their book back from publishers because they fulfilled their obligation and the publisher wasn't printing their book anymore. Or more commonly, we've helped authors who have experienced a publisher going out of business. So if your publisher goes out of business or they've been bought by another company, then this can be the perfect time to get your rights back. Start by contacting your publisher. Contact and then contact your agent. And if you don't have an agent, go to a lawyer to review your contract and understand your options. Then you'll probably need a letter written and then you wait. So we can't help with any of that. But where we come in for our clients is when you're getting ready to republish. Because we're not lawyers or agents, so we can't help with the actual reversion of rights. But in anticipation of getting their rights back, or once they get them back, authors come to book launchers to help get their book updated and ready for relaunch. One of the first things we do is we want to find out about source files. Does the author have those? Or are we starting from a previous draft of a book and recreating it from there? So if you're working with a publisher now, take note. Keep your files as you go through the edits because you often won't get source files, so you'll end up needing to go back to the last version that you had in editing. That said, after you get your rights back, they may give them to you, or more commonly, they may sell them to you. It may or may not be worth it to you to pay for the file. If you want a new cover and you have the word doc of the almost final files and you plan to make changes and edits anyways, it might not be worth it to pay money for them. But if you want to keep your cover or you don't need to edit much, you might want to pay pay for those files so you don't have to pay to get them all recreated again. The next thing is that we advise the author to copy and paste and screenshot all the Amazon details for their book. This means you want the summary, the author bio, the reviews, the product details, and especially the asin, the Amazon number. You want this because if you republish your book largely unchanged, you'll be able to link the reviews from this version to your new version. But if you have mostly positive reviews, you'll probably want to start off your own publishing of your book, or with those reviews if you can. The rest of the information just helps with getting the book ready to republish faster. So you want to do this before your rights revert back, or shortly right after, because once your publisher takes the books down, these things are often gone. You might be able to ask the publisher for them. But again, trying to get things from a publisher, especially if they've closed or been bought or after you've negotiated your rights back, is really hard. Once the rights have reverted, your book will be for sale for a while. So this is just like I've talked about with the unpublishing of your book, which I'll link to that video at the end. It doesn't just stop being sold, there's stock and there's always secondary sellers. Give it 60 to 90 days and then check all the retailers and you can start trying to get them removed. You have to go through your publisher contact to do this though, so it's not always easy. Now comes the more fun part. The book is yours to do with what you want. Have you always wanted a better cover? Do you wish you'd never included chapter four, but you wish you'd added something else? Or there's little errors that you've been Anxious to change. Well, you can make changes and make the book your own. You can create your audiobook and your ebook version. Of course, this is all going to be an investment of time, money and energy. So what's your plan for the book? Once you do this work, I'd recommend a relaunch. Treat it like the new book that it is and I have a book to help you with that relaunch. It's called Self Promote and Succeed. You can get it where you buy your favorite books. Or head to self promote and succeed.com and you'll find a special invitation to buy the book. Now back to that republishing. Once your book is ready to relaunch, this is where you can use that ASIN number that your publisher uploaded. With this ASIN is the key to restoring reviews for your book, both positive and negative. Once the book is uploaded in, live, email the Amazon team through the Amazon Author Central and request them to link the books and previous reviews. They usually will do this if you've changed a ton of the book. They might not, but if you've kept, you know, 80% of the book the same and you've got a lot of good reviews, it's worth the effort. This will all take months and months. You'll definitely be investing in your book. So again, go to your bigger picture goals and besides grabbing Self Promote and Succeed to help you with your relaunch, this book. Huh? It's actually a video, it's not a book. Alright, so besides grabbing Self Promote and Succeed to help you with your relaunch, this book. This video on making money from your book will be helpful as will this one on the five unexpected ways to promote your brand. And of course there's also the video I promised which was what? What did I say? What was the video I said I would send to at the end? Shoot. Besides grabbing Self Promote and Succeed to help you with your relaunch, this video is the one I mentioned on unpublishing your book which might help you in this journey. And this one is the one that will help you with your bigger picture on making money from your book. So go ahead, click on over to those. I can't wait to see you there.