Exercising Your Rights

When New York-based Guilford Press sought to replace its rights and royalties solutions with a newer, more efficient workflow, David Mitchell, director of business management and subsidiary rights, recalls that the goal was to integrate permissions with a rights system.

“Our rights and permission business has been growing in the past several years. In fact, we replaced two systems with one from Bradbury Phillips,” Mitchell says.

Guilford Press’ new rights and royalties system went live in late 2006. “We are saving significant staff time …,” Mitchell confides. “…We went into the purchase thinking we would save enough in three years to justify it. I think we’ll find, in time, the ROI [return on investment] will be better than that.”

Publishers would be well-served to look for a rights and royalties developer that can offer more than technical support for the software.

“We’ve encountered many situations in which we discovered, as we began working with the customer, that royalties payments, for example, weren’t as accurate as they should have been,” Vista’s Reiss says. “And we helped them with the workflow, to ensure that the terms and rules laid out in their royalty contracts match the rules they’re creating in the royalties system. Just recently, we worked with a mid-sized publisher that simply didn’t have the expertise or the time to input all of their data into the system, so we actually reviewed the contracts with the customer and entered all of their information into the system for them.”

Which Publishers Could Benefit From a Solution?

Reiss says that there is no “model” book publisher, no single demographic of customer, eligible for a rights and royalties solution.

“For example, the smallest customer using our royalty package brings in approximately $1 million in annual revenues. Our largest customers have revenues exceeding several million dollars,” she explains. “They’re pretty different, also, in terms of what they publish. Many sell books; others may sell music, electronic publications or other digital content.”