Paul Carr has posted to TechCrunch about his problems finding an American publisher for his books. He points to the trouble the late Stieg Larsson had finding an English-language publisher for his (now phenomenally best-selling, including electronically) novels, and talks about his own problems finding a US publisher for his (considerably lesser-known) works.
Like Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, by my reckoning The Upgrade has been turned down by eight publishers in the U.S. Larsson’s publisher was warned by one British bookseller that “people don’t buy books by authors with funny names”; similarly I’ve grown accustomed to hearing the refrain from New York: “it’s a little too British for American readers”.
In 2009, he actually gave away the e-book version of his previous work because nobody wanted to publish it here. His next book is actually set in America and to some extent about America, but no American publisher will touch it.
Carr wonders whether the new technological face of e-publishing and self-publishing can help find a solution to this problem. He suggests a couple of ideas, such as an on-line marketplace to match unsold international rights with publishers who would be willing to take a chance on them. Carr would be happy to give his US rights away for free as long as he got a good royalty rate and reasonable marketing support, but there isn’t any sort of clearing house he could use to advertise that. If there was such a place—“a kind of eBay for intellectual property,” as Carr puts it—it would simplify matters for him and others in his position.
The other idea is combining traditional publishing and Kickstarter, an on-line fund-raising service for artistic endeavors, in which a work could be optioned by a publisher and would be published in print if a minimum number of people committed to pre-ordering it. Rather like the storyteller’s bowl model I’ve talked about before, but for completed works.
Though Carr’s article mainly talks about the situation as it affects him, it is easy to see that a solution to this problem could be useful for any number of writers. You would think that if a work was optioned in one country, that would be enough proof that it was good enough to sell everywhere, wouldn’t you?
There are websites where writers can post rights offerings, Chris. Publishers Marketplace offers the service to subscribers, and there are several sites designed specifically as marketplaces for scripts. I don’t know how effective the services are; I just know they exist. The question is whether publishers or producers will visit the sites to view the listed offerings or prefer to be approached by the writer or an intermediary — pull vs. push. The intermediary sometimes is able to communicate with the “buyer” more systematically and efficiently, not to mention in the buyer’s language, and also can act as a filter. However, some individuals seeking to acquire rights licenses probably wouldn’t mind eliminating the go-between, as long as their workload or overhead didn’t increase as a result.