Alexander Slater: Subsidiary Rights 101 - Growing Your Business in the Global Market

Alex loves selling foreign rights at Bologna!

Alexander Slater is a literary agent with Trident Literacy Agency where he has worked since 2010. He was a foreign rights agent for many years and a third of his agency's sales comes from overseas sales of subsidiary rights. 

Subsidiary rights refer to "the right to produce or publish a product in different formats based on the original material." Generally the original material refers to the print rights in the original contract. This will involve selling one of these three print rights: World, North American English or World English.

First, the agent intends to sell the book and then they analyze the subsidiary rights as the contract negotiation occurs. They consider:

• What should be sold to the publisher? Or . . . who is best equipped to handle these rights?
• Where and how can the author do the most business?

Literary agent Alexander Slater

Alex presented and answered questions about the following rights: foreign, film/TV, audio, serial, permissions, anthology, and book club rights. 

He shared that agents want to snowball a creator's business and find opportunities to share their work more broadly.

For more information about Alex, check out his agent profile or his follow him on Twitter.