Best Practices in Global Book Sales

“It helps a lot to avoid copyright infringement,” Justke says. “If you are strongly working in Asian countries such as India and China, it is our experience that if you have a reliable license partner there, then the content is not disseminated to others, because they protect what they own.

“Of course we have to trust that the information given is correct,” Justke points out, “but this can happen also in Western countries.”

The main challenge moving forward, Mint agrees, is ensuring accurate tracking and reporting of sales so that publishers—whether receiving royalties from a licensee or a percentage of profits––get paid what they are owed. While acknowledging copyright challenges in countries such as Russia and Korea, he says that legal conventions are being increasingly adhered to, and that, by striking distribution deals, Ripley achieves the same advantage in terms of copyright protection without loss of brand control.

Jorge Pinto Books has had to master the fine art of gauging whether a piracy problem calls for deep discounting in order to undercut illegal trade, or accepting a percentage of loss and hoping sales are sufficiently high—a calculus determined by the book and region. For most U.S.-based companies, the situation calls for utilizing foreign publishers who know their market and have a vested interest in protecting their intellectual property.

Whether a publisher licenses out rights or controls parts of the process themselves, “it comes down to getting the right players,” Deska stresses. And it’s hard to argue with success––the novice publisher has, up to this point, moved about 700,000 copies of the first installment of “The Remarkable … Revealed.”

“It was a little scary for someone just starting out,” Deska recounts, “but it sold out.”