The Wordsmiths Project Journal

About a month ago, Daniel and I received a book that was entirely in Chinese. At least, I thought it was Chinese. Suffice it to say, it was in a pictographic Asian language.

It isn’t unusual for us to get strange things delivered to our studio. As journalists, we’re the targets of a wide range of public relations agents who can be very inventive in trying to get our attention long enough to tell us what a great story their clients would be. I remember we once received an enormous fruit cake in the shape of Texas. Another time, we each received a single rubber flip flop sandal (both for the right foot). We’ve gotten giant neon yoyos, magnetic aliens, miniature rock garden waterfalls and boxes filled with nothing but streamers and noise makers. I often wonder what they could have been thinking, and why the clients would be willing to shell out the money to ship such junk overnight to a whole slew of journalists. (Tip to PR representatives: The goofier the item, the less likely I will remember what the story pitch was.)

In other words, I thought nothing about getting a book in a language I not only couldn’t read, but one that I couldn’t be sure I recognized. I put it down on the pile of the day’s mail, intending to get rid of it later. Then, in an idle moment, I leafed through it, and saw that it was filled with my copyrighted photographs. I didn’t get so far as to wonder who had stolen my pictures, because I quickly looked more closely at the cover and saw that the only words in English were Daniel’s and my byline.

The book was our “Shooting for Dollars: Simple Photo Techniques for Greater eBay Profits” — translated into Chinese. Peachpit Press, the publisher of the book, had sold the rights to translate, print and sell it in China. In what appeared to be a coincidence, within a couple of weeks, we also received a copy of another one of our books “PC Magazine Guide to Digital Photography” in Chinese.

We’ve had a number of our books published in other languages and distributed around the world before. I remember the first year we were married, finding Daniel’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien in a bookstore in Frankfurt, Germany, and being very pleased. Now older and more experienced, I expect our publishers and agents to sell the international rights to our works and send us checks as a result of the extra sales, hopefully on a regular basis. But not in China.

China has the well-deserved reputation of being the Wild, Wild East, with respect to copyright. Back when Daniel and I used to frequently travel around the world on assignment, we found ourselves in Hong Kong on several occasions. One story we did (for “Computer Shopper” when the magazine weighed a few pounds and defined a whole new industry) was on software piracy in Hong Kong. In one Hong Kong neighborhood, we found booth after booth selling very expensive software (some worth thousands of dollars) for very, very little money. Some of the programs’ boxes looked very authentic, while others were papered with poor photocopied representations of the original manufacturers’ boxes. All were pirated — copies made on someone’s desktop computer or in a smoke-filled backroom. But then, that was what Hong Kong was (and is) good at… making copies. Heck, that week, we had several copies made of my father’s favorite shirt, because the designer no longer sold that style, and mother wasn’t about to let him wear it until it became completely threadbare.

A couple of years later, we were in Hong Kong the week that Margaret Thatcher announced that England would be returning Hong Kong and the surrounding territories to China. Many of the people we interviewed were in a panic. I remember the president of one of the major stock markets complaining, “What am I supposed to do — wash dishes in San Francisco’s Chinatown?” (I knew enough Asian protocol to just nod at the multi-millionaire and do my scoffing in silence.)  In an article that we did about that trip, we wrote that Hong Kong was a force that no country, not even China, would ever completely conquer. We predicted that rather than Hong Kong falling under the communist mantle, China would fall under Hong Kong’s rampant capitalism spell.

And that is exactly what has happened. In other words, the pirates of Hong Kong moved into the factories of China. But so did the hard-working capitalists who recognized what a boon to the Chinese economy it would be to become the manufacturers to the world. I’m not going to ponder whether the pirates and capitalists are the same people, because that’s not the realm of this journal, except in how all this affects publishing.

With 1.2 billion people, China is the salesperson’s dream of a market. However, like those software pirates in Hong Kong, China has long been a place where you might sell one book, but only to someone who had access to a photocopy machine, who would then sell bootlegged copies of that book. To heck with the authors whose hard work it was. Forget the publisher who had a vested (financial) interest in it. Copyright? In China, all that meant was that anyone with the ability to copy a book had the right to sell it.

In 1992, China became a member of the Berne Convention on Protection over Literary and Artistic Works. But without serious government enforcement within the country, it made little or no difference in the day-to-day practices of the country’s literary thieves. Recently, however, the Chinese government has been making overtures and promises to the international publishing industry, vowing to crack down on copyright infringement. Our publishers, obviously, believe them — the two photography books in Chinese on our shelves are the proof of that.

But the bottom line is will Daniel and I ever see a penny from the sale of our books in China? Or will the photocopy machines be even busier than before, cranking out our words and pictures for the masses, with the only money going to the sellers of the counterfeit copies? I don’t know. I am enough of a realist to know that no official decree is going to stop the copiers. But if I could get a few cents from just some of those 1.2 billion Chinese, from the honest ones who believe in buying authorized books, then I would be very happy indeed.

If you have any experience or knowledge about publishing in China, I would welcome your input. (I did ask our publishers to give us some insights about why they were suddenly now selling our books there, but I haven’t heard back from them yet. I think they are still tryiing to figure it out themselves.)

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?