Keeping Your Rights: Why Royalty Retention Compounds
By John Herring
Most authors sign a publishing agreement with only the book in front of them in mind. The manuscript is finished, the excitement is real, and the terms feel like fine print. But the rights you hand over in that moment are worth the most in the years that follow. That is the part I think deserves a slower look.
What "rights" actually means. When you write a book, you own the copyright. Many other rights grow out of that one: the right to print the book, to turn it into an audiobook, to translate it, to publish a large-print edition, to build a study guide or curriculum from it, to excerpt it, and to bring it back after it goes out of print. A contract can give each of these away or leave it with you.
How the usual models treat them. In traditional publishing, the publisher takes on the cost of the book and pays the author a royalty, which is a share of each sale. The publisher usually controls many of those rights, often for a long time. Some hybrid and vanity arrangements charge the author a fee and still keep a share of the royalties or hold on to rights. Self-publishing leaves every right with the author, and every task too.
Brookstone works differently. We are fee-for-service. You pay for the editing, design, production and launch support, and we take no share of your royalties and none of your rights. The book is yours.
Why it compounds. A book doesn't earn once. It earns every year it stays in print, and the ways it earns keep changing. A church picks it up for a small group. A speaker builds a message around it. A reader asks for the audio. When you hold the rights, each of those is yours to accept, to price and to build on. When you have signed them away, each one is someone else's decision, and often someone else's income.
Rights also let you change course. If a book takes off in a way you didn't expect, say a ministry grows around it, or the invitations to speak begin, or a curriculum becomes possible, you can act without asking permission. A small difference per copy matters less than the freedom to use the book for what God opens up for it.
The trade-off, stated honestly. Keeping your rights means keeping the responsibility. A flat fee does not buy sales, and nothing does. Our job is to do the work to a standard we can be proud of, which is why we will tell you if a book isn't ready, and why we only say yes when we can make you proud of the result. Your job is to carry the book to its readers.
Five questions to ask any publisher.
- Who owns the copyright, and for how long?
- Who controls the audio, translation, large-print and curriculum rights?
- If the book goes out of print or sales stall, do the rights come back to me, and how?
- What do you earn when I sell a copy?
- If I leave, do I get my files: the cover, the interior and the book's metadata?
Any honest publisher, ours included, should answer those without hesitation. If you'd like to compare the models for your own book, schedule a discovery call. We will tell you plainly where we fit and where we don't.