In 2003, when Tarek Fadel first founded the rights and royalties management company FADEL, he was not focused solely on serving the publishing industry. FADEL’s innovative software started helping companies in media and entertainment, consumer products, high tech, and other industries by streamlining and automating the licensing process across the workflow from rights management to royalty calculation and billing. Breaking into the publishing space was inevitable, though, as rights are the cornerstones of every publishing enterprise. Within just one year, FADEL had landed its first publishing project.
“It opened the door to royalty management and licensing solutions for the publishing industry,” Fadel says. In 2007, FADEL launched its end-to-end IPM Suite software, featuring a publishing-centered rights model, a royalty billing and accounting engine, contract and correspondence generation, compliance management, vendor management, and procurement integration. Over the years, the company tailored the cloud-based solution to support the publishing workflow by adding a statement portal for authors, rights management and clearance, content permissioning, a content services hub, and high-volume global processing capabilities. More publishing clients followed, including O’Reilly Media, Pearson Education, Chronicle Books, Cengage Learning, Hachette Livre, Editis, ABRAMS, and others.
Paul Gore, former CIO of Chronicle Books, had joined FADEL in 2015 and now serves as the executive vice president and general manager of the services business, responsible for working with a long list of publishing clients from its New York headquarters as well as offices in London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Lebanon. From day one, Gore has made strides to better equip publishers with technology solutions as well as best practices and research, earning him the Industry Connector Award from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) in 2020, as well as being elected as a member of BISG’s board of directors in 2021.
“At FADEL,” he says, “my mission has been to build an organization that delivers innovative rights management and royalty billing capabilities to the largest global publishers.”
A big part of Gore’s job is helping publishers understand that proper rights management is crucial for allowing future growth and innovation—especially given increasingly complex products such as subscriptions and downloads.
“New publishing models are emerging which are entirely dependent on knowing the rights that are available,” Gore says. “It is therefore critical to have the right system in place to support modern publishing, where it is essential to understand the rights and connect them to the products and royalties that are being created and generated.”
The needs of publishers are growing elsewhere, as well. Authors need more transparency when it comes to compensation. Publishers are increasingly assembling content and then recasting it as different products for new audiences. Content platforms have taken on a greater importance for direct consumer relationships. And the use of subscriptions to drive the delivery of content and compensation for authors is on the rise.
Considering all this and more, Fadel says, “now more than ever it is important to get the royalty calculation part of the equation right as publishers expand their work with IP owners and products.” He says that FADEL is very much focused on the evolving needs of the publishing industry, and the company continues to innovate with its product and technology offerings.
“We allow our customers to not have to worry about changes in technology or in newer distribution requirements; they gain assurance by being on a platform that is constantly being updated and supported and can focus on effectively managing their businesses and systems,” Fadel says. “We take away complexity for them and let them focus on the operational aspects of running their business.”
Gore says that, ultimately, FADEL’s presence across multiple industries and continents will continue to set it apart as a tech leader and service partner to publishers. “We’re committed to publishing, but we have reach into all types of rights and licensing,” he says. “This gives FADEL perspective and lessons from other industries that will help drive publishing processes into the future.”
