Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Me and David Hassellhoff

In the five years that I have been writing professionally, I have been very fortunate in that all of my novel-length works (4 to date) have been acquired for foreign publication. When this first occurred, I was focused on the fact that it would provide another set of paychecks and another set of readers to help promote my career long term. What I didn’t understand at the time is that it can be so much more than just that – and I’ve been very lucky, particularly at this stage of my career, to experience it.

 

Some background for those not familiar with the fun little nuances of selling a work for publication. Typically, a publisher will buy the rights to publish the work in a particular market in a variety of formats. For instance, my contracts with Pocket Books call for publication in the English language in the US, UK, and Canada as the primary market. Additional clauses provide for an agreement where the subsidiary rights department at Pocket can then market the right to translate the work into additional languages and details just how the income from such sales is split. (A typical clause is 80% to the author, 20% to the publisher.) Some authors prefer to sell only one set of rights and allow their agent to market the rest – decision for or against such actions depend on whether you think the publisher has inroads into a particular region and whether they will diligently pursue a sale for you in that area.

 

For most of the authors I know, foreign publication means they receive a check in the mail as a result of the sale and occasionally they get a copy of the finished book. There isn’t much in the way of interaction between the foreign publishing house and the author, for a variety of reasons. Usually the work has already been published in the US, so there aren’t any revisions to be done. Discussions with marketing and sales people are very limited in the author’s home market, if they happen at all – having them with your foreign publisher is comparable to finding an extinct species in your backyard.

So you can imagine my surprise when I opened the door to my deck one afternoon and found a Tyrannosaurus Rex staring back at me.

 

He was a lean, mean, fighting machine who roared out a challenge and dared me to accept it. I’m talking about the editor who had just purchased the rights to publish my novel HERETIC in a German language edition. Tim works for Droemer-Knaur, a major publishing house in Munich, and he was very excited about developing my career in his home country. Our first conversation nearly blew me away, as he was determined to make me a household name and had a slew of ideas ready to go in order to accomplish that. From marketing plans to cover art to promotion at the Frankfurt Book Fair (one of Europe’s largest publishing conventions), Tim generated a sense of excitement that was completely infectious. Soon his staff was as excited about my career as I was, something that doesn’t happen very often, let me tell you.

 

In the months that followed, Tim went on to purchase the next two books in the Templar Chronicles series. He arranged for excellent cover art to grace each volume – art that was classy, intriguing, eye-catching – everything a writer could want. He pushed the series to his sales force and set them out like a Special Forces team with a mission. Then he pulled his coup de grace – he scheduled each of the books to hit the streets with only a few months between them, maximizing the readers’ interest in the series and capitalizing on the excitement generated by the previous volumes.

 

Our working relationship is an exciting one and as we get ready to launch the first of the Templar Chronicles volumes into the German market in the next few months, we continue to make plans for the future. Discussions are underway to broaden my fan base by writing both in the horror genre and outside of it. A proposal for a new book unrelated to the Chronicles has been met with much enthusiasm and it’s very likely that it will see publication in Germany before it’s even sold here in the US. What started out as an adjunct market to my fledgling publishing career here has turned into a parallel publishing track that has helped me go from writing part-time to making it my sole occupation. And it’s just begun. Like David Hasselhoff, I’ve found a home overseas that I never expected and one that will serve me well in the years ahead.

 

So what’s my point? Just this - Remember that the world is a big place and that there are opportunities out there for those who are willing to go after them. What starts out as a minor blip on your publishing radar can very quickly grow into something worth cultivating, something that can change your career for the better. All you’ve got to do is keep your eyes open and know the difference between a Velociraptor and a Diplodocus and you’ll do just fine.

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If you liked this post, visit Joe's XtremeLife blog for more of the same. If you're interested in working with him as either a writing or life coach, check out XtremeLife Coaching. Joe's fiction can be found at his official website, JosephNassise.com
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Related posts:

1. Foreign Rights (or how to sell your novel more than once)
2. Who’s Got Your Back?
3. When It Rains, It Pours: How David Got His Groove Back
4. From Novel to Comic - Part Two
5. David Niall Wilson - 1st

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