Selling to a Foreign Publisher – Part One

As some of you know I’ve had some success in marketing my work to foreign publishers in Germany, Italy, Russia and Poland.  But that’s just a small drop in a very large pond.  There are a lot of excellent foreign publishers out there that I would like to work with and I’ve decided to approach several of them over the next few weeks to see what I can accomplish.

So how would I go about doing that?

That’s exactly the question this short series is going to answer.

So, in part one, let’s tackle the basic question – why foreign markets?  What do you have to gain by selling to them? 

Well, the short and simple answer is free money, which I’ll explain in just a minute, but I think there is more to it than that.  Being successfully published in a foreign market expands not only your readership, but your opportunities for future work as well.

You see, having a successful writing career is kind of like the boardgame Risk.  In Risk, the objective is to control the world.  As you conquer new territory and spread your game pieces out across the map, it makes it that much harder for your opponents to defeat you.  And even if you do lose a minor skirmish here or there, the sum total of the territory you control often makes those minor losses irrelevant in the long run.  By the end of the game, you’re the last one standing.

If foreign market sales are the equivalent of conquered territory in Risk, then the more sales you have, the better off you will be long term because one poorly received book will not destroy your career overall.  You’re too diversified for the occasional problem (and trust me, there will be problems here and there) to take you out at the knees.

Then, of course, there’s the free money.

Say I sell a book to an American publisher.  That publisher pays me a fair price for my efforts to write that book (or for the work I’ve previously done in writing it, if I’m selling a completed manuscript rather than a proposal.)  Next, I turn around and sell the same book to a European publisher, say Edizioni Mondadori in Italy. The money I receive from that sale is “free money” because I do not have to do any work to go along with the sale – the book has already been written and paid for by the American publisher.

In addition, each sale to a successive market also increases my chances of making a future sale to another market – people like to back winners and the more territories your book can be sold into, the more attractive it becomes.

I’ve also used this process in reverse – I’ve used the original foreign market sale to make a follow-up sale to an American publisher.

Now that you understand why, let’s look at the steps that I use to accomplish this process:

1. Research
2. Drafting My Query
3. Initial Contact
4. Follow Up Contacts
5. Offer and Negotiation
6. Keeping the Door Open

Tagged as: book sales, foreign publishers, how to sell your book, Publishing, subsidiary rights sales