Each month, the Edinburgh Writer’s Forum organises an event for authors and publishers in the city. On April 8th, Amy Mitchell was invited at The Edinburgh Bookshop to talk about her job and the foreign rights market’s situation. After studying for an MSc Publishing degree at Edinburgh Napier University, Amy Mitchell went on to work in London and ended up working as a foreign rights agent at United Agents. Her job consists in selling books (sometimes manuscripts!!) from her clients to publishers around the world.

Finding a market for a book is not always straightforward. For example, when it comes to personal stories and memoirs, publishers tend to privilege books from their own country but this is not the case for fiction.

“Publishers are desperate to buy foreign rights”

Amy then mentioned the role of international fairs and social media in deciding the next big title in the book industry worldwide.

The timing of when a book is published can be crucial for international rights: should the title first take off and gain popularity in the UK to gain an international interest? Or should some books be ‘saved’ for the fairs? Amy Mitchel argues that BookFairs are still extremely important for foreign sales and that they are important for building relationship with publishers abroad who could then trust you with the next manuscript you would present to them.

However, the constant need for publishers to find ‘the next big thing’ leads to many books being overlooked by the international market. Not every novel goes through the same journey as One Day by David Nichols!

As for books containing particularly British humour for example, it can be quite difficult to translate it which leads to these particular books not doing well abroad. There is also the issue of some countries where the readership would rather buy the book in its original language. For example, in Germany, many readers just buy the book in English instead of waiting for the translation to be published.

“Each market is so nuanced”

According to Amy Mitchell, there is a clear domino effect in some foreign rights sales. For example, books acquired by German publishers tend to then be sold all over Europe while the ones picked up by french publishers first do not follow that trend.

As for social media, they have clearly changed a lot in the industry. One particular area mentioned in this talk was book covers. In the past, publishers often changed book covers according to their market. In recent years however, a lot of foreign publishers use the original cover or a new one that is very similar to the original because readers will recognise the book from TikTok.

Finally, AI was mentioned. A lot of clauses against the use of AI are not being put in place when selling manuscript to foreign publishers, preventing them from not hiring in translator and using AI to do parts of the translation. The publishing industry, like any other, has to adapt to these new tools that can represent a threat to creativity.