The Rights Tab - Sales Rights

The Rights tab is the area where you will define what sales rights you hold for a book, in other words, where you can sell your title. It does not refer to the editions you sell to other publishers who translate and publish them in different languages. For UK publishers, for instance, the sales rights refers to the English language edition. Please note that the sales rights are  mandatory information in your bibliographic data feeds.

You will need to fill in this information separately for each edition (HB or PB).

There are many different aspects to the rights' section. It is important that each area is clearly understood. There are also a number of sub tabs within the Rights' section. 

• AI Rights Description: Choose the appropriate item from the drop down menu. This list is used to populate AIs 
• Rights Comments: A free text field for populating AIs. 
• Rights Type*: Choose the appropriate item from the drop-down menu. The item most often used for books originated by you as the publisher will be 1 – For sale with exclusive rights in the specified country/ies. If you are an organisation that distributes/sells titles for smaller publishers, you will probably use 2 - For sale with non-exclusive rights.
• Territory: Use the drop-down menu; this will most likely be WORLD. Leave this blank if you intend to specify the countries below. Use either the country OR the territory for each row (NOT BOTH); use multiple rows for multiple countries. This will make more sense a bit further down this article.
• Adding new territories: You may want to add new territories to your system to avoid having to list out a set of countries. If you have only European rights for a title, for instance, it will be much easier to simply grab Europe from the drop down menu rather than having to tick every country within Europe individually. You can establish new territories that will then appear in your drop-down menu through Territory Admin Section.
• Country: Choose the appropriate items from the drop-down menu. You can select multiple countries for each rights type. Leave this blank if you have specified the Territory.

An Important Note about ROW:

Your rights data needs to clearly specify for every country / territory in the world, what the rights status is. It is not enough to specify eg 'I hold the rights in the UK and USA', and assume that it is implied that you do not hold the rights elsewhere. Your partners need to be able to clearly determine what the rights status of the book is everywhere in the world, to ensure that no rights infringements take place.

If you do not hold the rights to your title in a set of countries / territories, you will need to specify this, and then also specify where you do hold the rights. It is not enough to simply state where you do not hold the rights. You can use the territory 'ROW' to simplify this process. The same applies if you only hold the rights in a few countries - you also need to specify where you do not hold the rights. 

Specifying your rights in this way is often referred to as 'closing the loop' and is considered best practice. The following image demonstrates what we mean:

Click Update when you are finished.

You should review the information held in the Rights sub tabs. Then move on to the Blurbs tab where you will add further rich content about your book.

Tips & Tricks

You can also upload your rights data in bulk, via spreadsheet upload.

For general guidance on Bulk Uploading Data, see here.

For specific guidance on uploading rights data in bulk, see here.