Julie Broad explains the distinction between legally owning book rights and practically controlling a book’s distribution and marketing. Using examples from hybrid publishing, she lists control-related access authors often lack (sales data, print-ready files, marketing dashboards, wholesale/direct sales) and warns of operational risks if the publisher becomes unresponsive or insolvent.
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Do I retain full rights to my book and intellectual property? We have learned over the many years that we've helped many authors untangle themselves from hybrid publishing companies that rights is not the same as control. Well, if you own the rights but can't access any information on the sales, or you don't have the print ready files to print at any printer you want, or you can't run promotions on KDP because you don't have your own dashboard or. Well, you may own your book but you do not control it. So in theory you can do anything you want with the book, but the reality is not the same. It's not a bad question to ask about rights because if you get a traditional book deal, you're giving up rights in exchange for the royalty and hopefully something else of major value like massive distribution, big PR push or something the publisher can give to you that you can't get on your own. But so many authors go to hybrid because they want a publisher. Traditional book deals haven't come their way, but they think a hybrid is better than self publishing only to realize that even though they own the rights, they've given up control. I want to understand not only who has the ip, but will you get all the files for your book? Will you be able to set it up so you can run Amazon ads? Will you be able to order it wholesale or set it up to sell direct from your website or in bulk to corporations or in speaking deals? Or does all that have to run through this company because what if they go out of business, someone gets super sick or they just stop responding to your emails and that happens?
