Selling to a Foreign Publisher – Part Two

In the first part of this series I spent some time discussing the benefits that can be gained by actively pursuing foreign rights sales as a fundamental part of your career.  For the next couple of posts, I want to talk about the actual process I use to try and sell a project to a foreign publisher or to recruit a foreign agent to do so on my behalf.

The first thing you need to understand about approaching a foreign publisher or agent is that knowledge is your friend.  In fact, having the right piece of information at the right time can often mean the difference between securing a sale or not.  And the tool I use to gain much of the industry intelligence I need is the Publishers Lunch Newsletter from PublishersMarketplace.com.

Publishers Lunch is the industry’s “daily essential read,” now shared with well over 30,000 publishing people every day. Each report gathers together stories from all over the web and print of interest to the professional trade book community, along with original reporting, plus a little perspective and the occasional wisecrack added in.

Publishers Lunch comes in two different versions – a free version that you can get by signing up here or a paid version that you receive when you become a member of Publishersmarketplace.com.

Now I’ve been a member of PM for a few years and strongly believe that it is worth the $20.00 per month membership fee.  I suggest to all of my coaching clients that they try it for at least a month, as membership fees are collected on a monthly basis and you can cancel at any time.  (In fact, I think PM is so important that I am going to be doing an entire series on the site in the near future!)

When you get the paid version of the newsletter, you also get a weekly edition that is called Deal Lunch, which lists the book deals that are reported to PM every week.  (You can also view these daily on the website as part of your membership.)  Deal reports are broken down by category (Fiction, Non-Fiction, TV and Film, Foreign, etc) and be genre (Woman’s/Romance, Mystery/Crime, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, etc).  The agent and editor involved are listed, often with their email addresses, as well as an indication of the size of the deal itself.

“nice deal” $1 – $49,000
“very nice deal” $50,000 – $99,000
“good deal” $100,000 – $250,000
“significant deal” $251,000 – $499,000
“major deal” $500,000 and up

Each week, I will go through the listing, looking for any deals that might be of interest.  These include deals by writers I’m familiar with, deals involving books in the genres I write in, deals in countries that I’m interested in breaking into…you get the idea.

For instance, this week I found this deal in the listings:

Foreign rights, Fiction: French rights to J.F. Lewis’s STAKED and REVAMPED, to Bragelonne, by Heather Baror at Baror International. heather@barorint.com

If I was looking to break into the French market, this would be of interest to me for several reasons.  Number one, because J.F. Lewis writes in the urban fantasy genre, as do I.  And number two, because STAKED and REVAMPED were the first two books in a series – I would also be looking to sell a series in the same genre.  So let’s pretend I was going to submit to Bragelonne.  What would I do next?

The first thing I would do would be a more research to determine if Bragelonne was worth approaching as a potential publisher for my work.

Where would I go to get more information on Bragelonne?

Publishersmarketplace would be my first stop.  One of the benefits of having a membership there is the ability to search their Deal database going back the last nine years (all the way to October of 2000.)  Even better I can target the search in a number of ways, including the name of the publisher.  Punching “Bragelonne” into the database and indicating I wanted data for the last two years would get me a list of 16 different deals.  13 of those deals were for adult fiction titles (the other three were for children’s books.)

Included in that list ware deals for Jim Butcher’s Desden novels, Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy novels, Ilona Andrew’s Magic novels, and E.E. Knight’s Vampire Earth series.  Given that my work would fit rather nicely into this group of writers, I would see this as a good sign that the publisher might have some interest in what I would have to offer.

Unfortunately, none of the deal reports list the acquiring editor’s name, so if I was going to trya dn get in touch, I would have to do a bit more research.  A quick search in the Contact database that is also a part of my membership to Publishersmarketplace would get me the following:

Name: Stephane Marsan
Category: Foreign (Editorial director)

Company: Bragelonne

Address: 35 rue de la Bienfaisance
Paris 75008, FRANCE

along with an email address and a telephone number

With this information, I would have a place to start. Noting that the information is a little out of date, I’d probably double check to be certain that Stephane was still the Editorial Director at Bragelonne before querying, just to be safe.

Next post – Using the publisher’s site to learn more (even if the whole thing is in French!)

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