The Wordsmiths Project Journal

One of the ways my 91-year-old father keeps his mind sharp is with his daily Internet fix of U.S. and international newspapers. Every morning, he browses the world seeking stories that intrigue him. He prints out the most interesting articles (or the ones he feels might have some value to us), to share with my mother, my sister, me and my husband Daniel.

Recently, Dad gave me an article from The International Herald Tribune, titled “Book agents explore borderless world” by Eric Pfanner. In it, Pfanner discusses a trend among agents in which he says, more and more literary agencies are handling their own foreign rights sales rather than sub-agenting to specialists in the field of international sales. He sees this as “reflecting shifts rippling through the literary agent business as English-language publishers increasingly look for big borderless hits.” 

I found myself thinking about that article as I prepared to photograph Ben Salmon, an agent with Rights Unlimited. Rights Unlimited has long focused on foreign rights (for over 20 years) — hence, the name of the company. Among their more notable sales have been the international rights for the first 14 John Grisham books, Fern Michaels, Dr. Robert Atkins, John Lescroart, Dr. Ruth and others. But, in an apparent reverse of the phenomenon that Eric Pfanner wrote about, Ben was brought on board to give Rights Unlimited more of a presence in the domestic market (i.e. primary sales to North American publishers). As Ben explained, “Rights Unlimited… had a reputation for representing New York Times best-selling authors internationally. But the international climate has changed. Not that books aren’t doing well internationally, but they’re not being farmed out as much to international agencies.” Not only are the primary agencies going into international sales, he added, but publishing houses have become more aggressive in selling books internationally on their own.

So, one of the first thoughts that came to my mind was that, if primary agents and publishers aren’t using sub-agents as much, why are we, as authors, continuing to sign traditional contracts in which we agree to pay higher commissions for international sales versus domestic sales? Now, I’m certainly happy to have my agent earn a nice percentage of any sales she makes for me. Heck, one of my dreams is that she will become quite rich on her sales commissions of my books. But the traditional justification of international sales commissions being at least 20% (depending on the country), rather than 15% for domestic sales, was that the primary agent would have to split that with the sub-agent.

Ben had a very reasonable response. “The thing to remember is that there’s a lot of processing and administrative work associated with international rights. It’s a bit different than in the domestic realm. And the deals tend to be smaller. Often, you have to make many international deals to come close to what you could make with one domestic one. (I mean, how much money can you really get by selling Estonian rights?) But we like to get as many international deals for our authors as possible, even if it ends up costing more overhead money to make the deal happen than we actually recover in commission.”

What’s more, sub-agents are still an important component of the process. You can see proof of it in Rights Unlimited’s own offices. Of their five agents, only Ben focuses on domestic sales. The other four continue to concentrate on functioning as sub-agents, selling the international rights to books represented domestically by other agencies.

So, when I recently signed with my new agent (Mollie Glick at Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency), one of the things I didn’t argue about was the higher rate of commissions for international sales. As I said, before, I hope she becomes quite wealthy selling my novel — whether or not she uses a sub-agent.

What do you think?