About

Every day an author and a publisher lose out on a sale of book.  This is a site for readers to tell the world about the lost sale whether it is because of price, territorial restrictions or general availability. There are a whole host of reasons a particular book is not distributed all over the world. Sometimes agents advise their authors to sell only domestic rights which usually means US or UK get the goods. Sometimes publishers aren’t exploiting those rights.

When an author writes a book, intellectual property rights are created that run with the book. Think of those rights as a bouquet of flowers. When authors enter into contracts with publishers, generally, they sell just a few flowers to the publishers. Those flowers give the publisher the right to use that Book in various ways but only in North America. But these contracts can vary a great deal. Foreign rights sales can end up making as much money for the author as the original advance.

What I have been told by some authors is that they don’t want to impair their marketability for those foreign markets by allowing an English-language digital edition to be sold in that region. Other authors say that their foreign edition rights haven’t been purchased by any publisher and they don’t want to give them up for no additional money.

Still other authors say that their publishers have the rights and the publishers won’t exploit them. Nonetheless, the only reality we readers know is that we want to buy the book but can’t.

This site was inspired by Suze in a comment over at Dear Author on the topic of geographical rights.

Upon Suze’s comment, Jane of Dear Author bought the domain names and set to work.  With the help of reader and web vixen, Maili, who recommended and tweaked the base theme Daily Notes from Elegant Themes and the sage advice of Kirk Biglione who recommended Gravity Forms for the submission forms, this site was up and running within a week of Suze’s suggestion.  Keishon, a crime fiction reader, also offered to moderate and make sure we are posting real content and not spambots. 

It’s a place for readers to support other readers by telling the world their story of a lost sale and by suggesting alternative books to purchase and places to purchase the books from.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve this site, please don’t hesitate to contact Jane, Maili, or Keishon by using the form below.