In the Literary Agents and Scouts Center at Frankfurter Buchmesse, 2011. Image: FBM, Peter Hirth
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Ad Advisor to Frankfurt Rights Meeting
A n updated edition of Lynette Owen’s Selling Rights—its ninth edition, as a matter of fact—was released on Monday (July 8) by Taylor & Francis Group’s Routledge.
The new edition includes components including not only artificial intelligence and its implications for author contracts and licensing contracts but also new intellectual property legislation and proposed legislation in the United Kingdom and United States, including issues around text and data mining and implications of European Union directives and the exhaustion of rights in the post-Brexit era.
Owen, whose work began at Cambridge University Press, Pitman Publishing, and Marshall Cavendish, would go on to move to Longman Group, which would become Pearson Education. Having sold rights and become copyright director at Longman, she now operates as a consultant in rights and copyright, and runs courses in the UK and overseas, including a stint last month in Latvia.
She’s the general editor as well as a contributor to Clark’s Publishing Agreements: A Book of Precedents, the 11th edition of which was released by Bloomsbury Professional in 2022.
Owen is also a familiar speaker at London Book Fair’s Introduction to Rights program and she’s part of the Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 16 to 20) rights advisory board, assisting with advice on events such as the annual Frankfurt Rights Meeting.
We had a chance to put several questions to Owen, and started by asking her about key developments in audio rights. The hardback edition of Owens’ new edition of the book is selling for £135 (US$175). A paperback edition is priced at £52.99 (US$67).
‘The Rise in Popularity of Audio’
“On the audio front,” she says, “the most significant development has of course been the move from CDs to digital, and as a result the rise in unabridged rather than abridged audiobooks once the constraints of a physical format were removed.
“There are now many models available, whether as single access, subscription, or streaming. Some publishers remain cautious about streaming because of the low return in revenue to rights holders.
“The rise in popularity of audio of course can affect who controls the rights, with larger publishers seeking those rights as part of their primary publishing package. Some literary agents prefer to retain audio rights to place separately, although this can affect acquisition by print publishers.”
The Artificial Intelligence Question
Like many others in the business, Owen says, “I had not envisioned the impact of AI when I was first planning for the new edition” in which the original plan was to have “a major feature on the legacies of the pandemic on workplace practices” such as the use of video meetings, hybrid formats for in- and home-office work, and so on.
Lynette Owen
“ChatGPT was announced the day after I signed my contract with Routledge,” she says, and of course the many aspects of how artificial intelligence has begun to affect many parts of the business and licensing related to it (and sometimes ignored by generative AI program’s training activities) are well known to Publishing Perspectives readers.
The issue of translation and AI may seem to some to be a more advanced element of the subject than some might realize. “Many translators are already complaining that they’re losing work entirely,” Owen says, “or being asked to ‘polish’ translation produced by AI
“Contractual restrictions are understandable, but the type of AI use needs to be defined. For example, is AI to generate ideas, or to write the whole texts? Use of AI such as spell-checkers? Grammarly? Use by publishers to create marketing material, copyedit, producing indexes? I’ve attempted to address the topic in the chapters on copyright, author contracts, translations, audio, and film and television, but of course things are developing daily.
“Here in the UK,” she says, as Publishing Perspectives readers know, “we do not have any form of legislative control yet, unlike the European Union’s AI Act, and are awaiting the policy of our new government. We’d hope to avoid a copyright exception for AI. Many publishers remain cautious about granting licenses for AI training, which would in any case need to be a company-level decision rather than taken within the rights department.
“We’re currently undergoing consultations with the UK collective management organization concerning two possible forms of collective license—one for use of AI by publishers themselves, and one for the licensing of content for LLMs.”
The Industry’s Appreciation of Rights and Licensing
And finally, we’ve asked Owen about the tendency for many publishing companies to under-value their rights and licensing departments and experts. “Those of us in the rights community have long felt that the importance of rights activities can be undervalued,” she says. “There are still many cases where rights revenue is incorrectly compared with sales turnover, when the correct comparison should be between profit on those sales and the amount of revenue retained by the publishing company.
“In February 2004, I wrote an article titled Rights: The Cinderella of Sales? and 20 years later I think that perception still continues.
“We in the rights community on both sides of the Atlantic do strive to raise the profile of our activities, with a number of rights committees,” Owens says, in various markets and settings, “as well as a number of sessions on rights associated with book fairs,” such as the Frankfurt Rights Meeting and at the summertime Publishers’ Licensing Services conference in London, most recently held on July 4.
More from Publishing Perspectives on rights issues is here, more on book fairs and trade shows at which many programs for rights professionals are offered is here, and more on the work of Taylor & Francis is here.
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