Stephanie Vyce, Harvardworking with subagents + brief market overviews The following notes take as a premise that licensing

translation rights involves some basics that dont change, regardless of how you reach publishers. These basics are: A good knowledge of your list An understanding of the various foreign markets Realistic expectations of what can be licensed With this foundation in place you will find that distinct differences in markets, the makeup up your list, and your goals will play a part in helping you decide how to reach publishers in various countries. In the 17 years that I have been licensing translation rights I have moved from working often directly with publisher to working through sub agents as much as possible. I made this conscious decision after weighing the pros and cons of each option. When working directly with publishers you have complete control of the process and dont have payments reduced by the 10% sub agent commission. But this means you need to manage every stage of the process, including: Identifying publishers that might be interested in considering a book for translation Contacting these publishers Sending books and promotional materials Following up with publishers Negotiating terms and managing counter offers if you find yourself in that happy position Drawing up contracts Collecting and processing payments Monitoring publishing schedules Following up if any part of the process is delayed or incomplete A big pro of working with sub agents is that you get one stop shopping. Sub agents identify publishers, manage submissions, negotiate contract terms, collects and distribute payments, and monitor schedules. They know their markets and the publishers that do business in them well and speak the local language. They can also usually negotiate better terms that I can. Despite the major role they play, your press still controls the outcome of licensing and can reject terms or request negotiation. You do still need to monitor the work of the agents but by partnering with them you can streamline the process of managing licenses. Im now working on preparing royalty information for input into a data base and am following up with sub agents who have made deals for books that are late in publication. In China, there are more than 70 books that are overdue but I am contacting the office of one sub agent, not the office of more than 70 publishers, for status reports. Other considerations are that you need to balance author and sub agent expectations and pay a 10% commission on advances, fees, and royalties. In the end, I have decided that working with sub agents when possible works best for me. Before the AAUP panel, I polled the sub agents I work with to see if any of them would consider taking on new clients. I received positive responses from sub agents who work in the following languages: 1 AAUP meeting, subrights and the small press, Baltimore 2011

Stephanie Vyce, Harvardworking with subagents + brief market overviews French German Greek Hebrew Italian Korean Spanish Portuguese Eastern European languages All of these sub agents have asked that publishers that approach them provide information about their list and expectations so that they can assess whether a partnership will be possible. When deciding which markets you wish to focus your efforts on you might some of the following observations useful: China - publishers are very open to English language scholarship and particularly interested in law and political science. They would like to acquire rights to books about China - history in particular - but are prohibited by government to include sensitive material. Consult with your authors before licensing rights in China to see if they are willing to allow selective censorship or if they will only approve of a faithful translation of their entire text. In this second case, you might need to withhold some texts from this market. Spanish speaking countries - scholars do not seem to read ask much in English as in other parts of the works so translation opportunities exist Korea - publishers pay big advances for big names in scholarship and will get into bidding wars with each other Germany - the trend of publishers merging and becoming more trade oriented continues, making it more and more difficult to license rights to scholarly works France - readers and publishers prefer that their scholarship be authored by native academics Netherlands and Israel - many scholars and general readers are fluent in English and prefer reading a text in the original English edition Eastern Europe and Turkey - these are growing markets and there are good opportunities to license rights to important and serious backlist books If any of you have questions about this information or would like to request a list of sub agents please contact me directly at Stephanie_vyce@harvard.edu

2 AAUP meeting, subrights and the small press, Baltimore 2011