From author Catherine Ryan Howard:
As it keeps coming up in comments here and on Facebook, I think we need to take five minutes to talk about territories.
When you self-publish, the availability of your book is a simple thing. Is it available in e-book? Yes/no. Is it available in print? Yes/no. When will I be able to buy it? On the day I’ve decided that it’s coming out, which is probably the same day I manage to publish it to Amazon KDP and it goes live on all Amazon sites.
But if you ask me ‘when can I buy Distress Signals?’…
Well, that depends on where you live.
Traditional book deals are done by territories. Publishers don’t just buy the right to publish your book, they buy the right to publish your book in certain countries. For foreign languages, this is simple enough to follow, i.e. the right to publish in German means the book will be published in Germany, and so on. But for English language rights, the situation can be more complicated than that.
The deal I signed with Corvus/Atlantic was for British Commonwealth excluding Canada. In practice, this basically means that Distress Signals will be published in Ireland and the UK, and will be available in Australia and New Zealand too.
Unless I get another, entirely separate deal with a North American publishing house, it will not be available in North America.
This doesn’t just mean that if you live in North America and go to your local bookstore, you won’t see it on the shelves. It means that you won’t be able to buy an e-book version of it either. When I go onto Amazon.co.uk (there is no Amazon Ireland), the only Kindle books I see are the ones that are available for me to buy, which are the ones that have been published in Ireland/UK and “worldwide”. Some people here have their Kindles registered to Amazon.com – when us Irish folk got our Kindles first, that was our only option – so the selection they see is different. If you live in the States, when you boot up your Kindle to go shop for new books, you are only seeing the books that have been published in the States and “worldwide”. No one is seeing all of the books.
. . . .
I have spent a lot of time since I revealed the cover explaining this to people, even though this was – I thought – common knowledge. What I’ve realized is that self-publishing has blurred the territories lines to the point where people either have forgotten about traditional publishing’s territories, or never even realized there was such a thing. We follow self-published authors, they publish their books, we buy them. We can go on Amazon, no matter where we live, and pretty much find whatever self-published book we want. This is because the vast majority of self-publishers publish worldwide, and why wouldn’t they? I always did.
The thing is, it’s better for me that I didn’t sign a deal for ‘world English rights’ – which would’ve made an e-book universally available – because that means I still have additional rights to sell. It may seem silly that books are only published in some places and not others, but from an author’s perspective, it can be a good thing. When you come from a self-publishing background you might find you have that “But HE wants to buy it!” knee-jerk reaction to a lack of availability in a particular place – as in, you panic because you know there’s a certain person or group of people who want to buy your book but can’t, and all you can think about are the lost sales. I know this feeling because I used to have it. But this isn’t about the number of people in the States or elsewhere who might buy this book in May if they could – it’s about how manymultiples of people like them the book could potentially reach if, at some stage in the future, a U.S. deal was done. In other words, it’s better to hold out.
Link to the rest at Catherine Ryan Howard and thanks to Glinda for the tip.
Here’s a link to Catherine Ryan Howard’s books. If you like an author’s post, you can show your appreciation by checking out their books.
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