Authors > Milly Johnson > Author Voices

How to Get Those Lovely Foreign Rights Deals!

There's a world-wide recession on, and the book market hasn't escaped. So those foreign rights deals can be thin on the ground for some of us in the 'women's fiction' genre at the moment. Which is sad because there is a great joy to be had in receiving a copy of your book translated into German or Italian and seeing what they've done with your title/cover/name. So, are there any tricks of the trade to stand out from the crowd and pin yourself a deal? Should you set your new novel across the pond and hope that it appeals to the American market more? Or in a Dutch cheese shop? Spanish Flamenco school? Italian Limoncello farm (maybe not, but think of the essential research!). Harder still for provincial writers like myself - who need a translation service in place to even be understood by my American cousins - cuppa, bairn, ginnel... Can I even hope to make myself attractive to their marketplace when my books are so very Yorkshire? Of course the Calendar Girls and the Full Monty made it work but times have moved on now. The advice I was given is comfortingly sensible: don't compromise your work by forcing in an American/Norweigan/French connection where it doesn't fit merely in the hope that you'll catch the eye of a publisher in that country. Concentrate on building a strong readership in your own country first and foremost. 'The bigger your reputation here in the UK, the more clout you will have with foreign publishers and the more they will spend on publicity. Focus on growing your career at this end as the foreign markets will follow.' That isn't to say to avoid putting an Italian or a Frenchman in your book if you were going to anyway. If the character is a natural fit, that's an entirely different scenario to sticking one in that's only there to make you look a bit more cosmopolitan. Because it'll stick out like a sore thumb. The good thing is that the book world is cyclical. I'm sure all us authors will soon be watching our wares be auctioned off between battling foreign publishing houses - and across the pond, thoughts will once again turn to celebrating our Yorkshire vernacular - and strippers!