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Whither Online Rights Trading? John F. Baker -- 10/30/00 It's been going on for a year now, and here's how some leading practitioners see their progress
But despite all the new alliances, the technological innovations, the determined proselytizing and the money and effort being expended by major publishers on becoming digitally viable, electronic publishing is still in its infancy. A more immediately attractive proposition may be online rights trading. Nobody disputes that as presently constituted this is a time- and labor-consuming, long winded, costly and inefficient business; heavy manuscripts have to be expensively shipped often over long distances, and there is a huge amount of copying, and faxing and phoning at international rates, with often only a comparatively small reward. Why not, indeed, work it all out online: post catalogues, properties, partial manuscripts on the Web, e-mail pitch letters and offers, conduct auctions. In fact, why not--now that electronic signatures are regarded as legitimate--even sign contracts?
This was roughly the pitch Nick Webb, former president of Simon & Schuster in London, and now the head of European operations for Rightscenter.com, was giving agent Ed Victor when the latter stopped by Rightscenter's Frankfurt stand the other day. "You must have a stake in the Jiffy Bag business!" he cried. "You don't have to go through all that!" But Victor was obdurate. "You make it sound as if all you are is a kind of electronic post office," he declared. "But that's not enough. When it comes to selling, I have to be able to talk to the person, put something in their hand, look them in the eye." Both large and voluble men, they were reduced to an impasse, with Webb apparently unable to prevail with his impressive logic of saving time and money, and Victor unable or unwilling to give up the procedures that have served him so well over the years. It's a situation that has often faced Webb in his efforts to sell the concept of online rights trading to editors, publishers and agents. "So many of them are twonks," he sighs after Victor has gone--using a word his small daughter has coined for what he called "the IT-challenged." Still, for a process that has only been seriously on offer for little more than a year, the results have been quite impressive, especially when one considers how entrenched publishing habits are. "Things haven't changed nearly enough since Gutenberg," as Webb puts it. "It's really pretty embarrassing."' He points out that online trading not only saves time, money and resources, but also expands the turf. "Publishers in emerging markets were previously just not on our map," he declares. "It wasn't worth the effort to reap the small sums involved in selling to them. Now, however, all these previously marginal markets become exploitable." And to drum home his point he notes that Rightscenter now has on its roster no fewer than 419 Chinese publishers--far more than publishers would previously have believed even existed. A Year-Old GranddaddyWebb's new employer is by far the granddaddy of online rights traders, having actually been in business for a little over a year; it was launched just before last year's Frankfurt fair. The technology that makes online trading possible actually began at the prompting of science superagent John Brockman, who was the first major literary agent to turn to the Web for all his dealings, boasting that he now has an office where the telephone seldom rings. Silicon Valley veterans Kip Parent and Jim McHugh put the elaborate system together, and now define it as an "online application" rather than a Web site, stressing that its aim is to provide a secure neutral ground on which rights traders can do business.
resistance that, as the encounter with Victor demonstrates, has by no means entirely dissipated. To build its customer and title base it has been particularly generous with its terms, offering free listings of titles (which normally cost $250 each to activate, or make them available to trading) to anyone joining up at such major book fairs as Frankfurt, London and BEA (in fact it has a partnership arrangement with the latter two). These free rides expired as of the end of July and Rightscenter is now in the process, in Parent's words, of "converting try to buy." Unlike the other major online trading operations, Rightscenter d s not charge a commission on deals that are concluded there. "Where d s that extra 5% come from?" Parent asks rhetorically. Parent is helped in the expansion of his subscription base by the adherence of some strong publishing names--Callaway Editions just committed to making Rightscenter its online rights manager--and by the sheer numbers it has managed to put together in its first year of operation: more than 8,000 registered members, from 1,000 different agencies and publishers in 60 countries, and more than 20,000 activated titles in its rights database. The establishment of an industry advisory board, chaired by agent Ira Silverberg of Donadio & Olson in New York, a fervent advocate after he made a $40,000 Japanese sale for a title using Rightscenter's facilities, has stressed the industry-friendly nature of the organization. The members of that board, who include publisher Karen Rinaldi at Bloomsbury USA, and agents like Ralph Vicinanza and Kim Witherspoon in this country and Luigi Bernabo and Peter Fritz overseas, as well as scout Mary Anne Thompson, is designed to assure that the interests of typical customers are being knowingly cared for. The company has also hired notable industry figures on staff: not only Nick Webb, but also Lucinda Karter, former rights manager at W.W. Norton, who says she "began to use it and found it addictive, so I wanted to help it to move," and Helen Garrett, formerly marketing manager at Phaidon Press. Parent is continuing to interview for new staffers, and plans soon to begin building a film rights database; "selling film rights is a very antiquated area," he says. A new relationship announced at Frankfurt was with Vista International (News, Oct. 23), which already offers a number of major publishers machinery for updating lists and rights information automatically. Another new development Rightscenter was demonstrating at Frankfurt was its "enhanced negotiation machinery," designed to bring co-agents more fully into the picture while keeping agents at the center of the deal. New Pricing at SubrightsThis was also an important consideration for Subrights.com, which is considerably younger, having celebrated its six-month anniversary on the first day of the fair. It took the opportunity to announce a new pricing plan that brought it more into line with Rightscenter: a chance for sellers, particularly bigger publishers and agencies that use large numbers of sub-agents, to pay an annual use fee instead of Subrights' previous charge of a 5% commission on each transaction completed. President J l Fishman, formerly a Doubleday editor and then an agent, explained that a number of larger U.S. and British operations, which use sub-agents extensively, found the 5% fee awkward in terms of using their sub-agents and the online service simultaneously. The new plan is open to anyone who wishes to use it, Fishman said, and for those who prefer, the 5% fee is still available as an option. He and sales and marketing manager Jacqueline LeDonne, who cut her teeth at FrankfurtVirtual, the fair's own online rights catalogue, both stress that this change in pricing, as well as the recent addition of a feature called "My Deals," which gives a subscriber an instantly updated one-screen view of all his ongoing activities, were both adopted as a result of customer feedback. And according to Fishman there have been a lot of new customers. Without giving actual numbers--though a list of registered sellers shows about 250 names of agents and publishers, most from the U.S. and U.K.--he says there has been a 20% month-to-month growth to date, and, based on current projections, he foresees a 200% increase in customers over the next six months. Particularly significant subscribers are National Academy Press, Taylor & Francis, NetLibrary and the Brava romance line at Kensington. "I want to see our title and client list grow to the point where it can be demonstrated that online trading is now the norm," says Fishman. "I aim to prove that proposition." The site, he says, "is a bit like an e-Bay to reflect the international publishing community, and I hope that, like e-Bay, we can go on expanding and improving." Rightsworld.com, which launched its Web site in April but which has only been active since late summer, is even more specifically like e-Bay, to the extent that it concentrates on auctions. "We're like an e-Bay for the publishing industry," says president and c0-founder Nick Bogaty (his co-founder is former Apple exec Eric Miller), who describes his company's initial target market as independent publishers not large enough to have their own sub-rights departments, and who can therefore use the international audience Rightsworld offers. This market has just been enlarged in a significant way, however, by an outreach that's unique so far in the online rights world: Rightsworld announced during the fair an alliance with the National Writers Union (News, Oct. 23) that will enable the NWU's 6,500 members discounted access to the site to post their works and sell their own rights. (Normal rates are $19.95 to post a title for sale, followed by a 5% commission on the proceeds of any sale.) It's too soon to say how well this will work, but Bogaty is proud of the initiative, noting that this is the first-time authors have been invited to make their own online deals. Another first was also announced during the fair: a Texas Internet investment company, Jump.Net Ventures of Austin (where Rightsworld is based), took a minority financial stake in the company. Companies that actively use Rightsworld's system include such small publishers as Soft Skull Press (which sold rights to the book about George W. Bush dropped by St. Martin's after its credibility was questioned) and university presses like those of Columbia and Harvard. Deals have also been closed within Rightsworld on major titles like the Esther Williams memoir Million Dollar Mermaid and the autobiography of Mikhail Gorbachev. Not only do small publishers use the site, but bigger ones also use it for smaller deals that are hardly worth involving their own sub-rights departments--"lower-end rights sales like $10,000 and $15,000, with boilerplate contracts," as Bogaty puts it. Like the other online trading operations, Bogaty d s not expect deals to be accomplished entirely online for a while yet, but figures that many of the ones begun online go as far as the deal memo or actual contract stage without pen touching paper. "I don't think there'll ever be a half-million-dollar deal on one of these sites," he says frankly. (The largest one we could uncover was the auction conducted by agent Linda Mead at Lit West for the book Internet Alliances by Larraine Segil; since speed was of the essence, Mead decided to sell it online via Rightscenter, and John Wiley bought it "for a princely sum plus bonuses"--the kind of wording that normally indicates a strong six figures--and it will come out as soon as this December.)
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Whither Online Rights Trading?
Oct 30, 2000
A version of this article appeared in the 10/30/2000 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline:
