The email that sends someone to the filing cabinet
An audio producer asks whether the audiobook rights to a novel from five years ago are available. A US publisher wants to know if you can license North American English rights for a title on your list. A film scout has asked about the author's first book.
Each question means finding the contract (a scanned PDF in a shared drive, or a paper copy in the cabinet), reading the grant of rights clause, checking any side letters and the rights schedule, and then checking the rights spreadsheet to see whether anything has already been licensed. On an older list, some contracts are with a previous imprint name and some were varied by letter.
Where rights knowledge actually lives
The contract is the authority, but it is written for lawyers, not for daily lookups. The spreadsheet, if there is one, is updated when someone remembers. The rights manager's memory fills the gap.
- Rights granted differ contract to contract, especially for older titles.
- Variations and side letters are filed separately from the main contract.
- Licensed rights are recorded in a different place from rights held.
- Territory lists are long and inconsistent in wording.
- Some rights revert or expire, and the date is not tracked.
The cost of slow or wrong answers
| Situation | Risk |
|---|---|
| Enquiry answered slowly | The producer or publisher moves to another project |
| Right licensed twice | Two licensees believe they hold the same thing |
| Right offered you do not hold | An embarrassing retraction to the buyer and the author |
| Expired right still marketed | Deals prepared that cannot be signed |
| Knowledge held by one person | Rights work stops when they leave |
What you hold and what you may license is ultimately a matter for your contracts and your legal adviser. The aim is to make the everyday answer quick and to send the hard cases to the right person.
The rights record we build
- A title record listing each right type you track, such as print formats, ebook, audio, translation by language, serial, dramatic, with status: held, not held, licensed, reverted.
- Territory held as structured values, so you can filter by region rather than rereading lists.
- A clause reference and a link to the contract PDF page for every entry, so the source is one click away.
- Variations and side letters attached to the same title, with the rights they changed.
- Licences recorded against the right they use, so a licensed right shows as unavailable.
- Date fields for anything time-limited, with reminders before expiry.
To get started, we can use an AI model to read your contract PDFs and propose the entries, but each one is checked and confirmed by your rights person before it counts. A proposed entry is shown as unconfirmed until then.
What rights enquiries look like now
The audio producer's email is answered by searching the title and looking at the audio line: held, not licensed, clause reference, link to the contract. If the answer is unclear, the entry says so and the question goes to the rights manager with the contract already open. When a licence is signed, it is recorded against the right and nobody can offer it again by mistake.
Before the book fairs you can pull a list of every title with unlicensed translation rights in a given language, which is how rights lists are built in the first place.
The same record helps outside the rights team. Sales can see whether a title may be sold into export markets, production can see whether a large print edition is yours to make, and when an author asks what you still hold on their early books, the answer is a printed page rather than an afternoon in the cabinet. Where an entry is unconfirmed or the contract is ambiguous, it says so plainly, so nobody quotes a guess to a buyer.
Signs your rights records need rebuilding
- Answering a rights enquiry means reading the contract again.
- Your rights spreadsheet disagrees with the contracts in places you know about.
- Side letters and variations are stored somewhere else.
- You are not sure which rights on older titles have reverted.
- One person holds most of this in their head.