Why does the world get divided up into publishing territories? How
has this come about? How does it affect authors?
Splitting up the World
English language publishing works primarily on a London/New York
axis. Publishing in English originated in the UK, primarily in London,
as a family business, with British publishers exporting their books to
the colonies.
The Second World War changed this, but a new status quo was
established after the war when Stanley Unwin, a British publisher, led a
British delegation which negotiated with American publishers to agree a
division of the English-speaking world.
The British Commonwealth was still a strong political and practical
reality at that time, so the result was that the British got the lion’s
share - all the major English-speaking countries such as the UK, Eire,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, India and
Singapore – whilst the US ended up with just the US itself and the
Philippines.
At the time this division represented an accurate picture of how
books were supplied to these countries, and the UK publishers were able
to claim that their export markets were far more important to them than
the US’s export markets were to American publishers.
The Open Market
If you’re wondering what happened to the rest of the world, the
answer is that this was regarded as an ‘open market’. This meant
that both the British and the American publishers of a title were
permitted to sell their English language editions in the same country,
sometimes competing on price. This was before the huge explosion in the
learning of English and its establishment as the global lingua franca,
so nobody was all that concerned about the open market at the time.
Translation rights, the right to translate and publish a book in a
foreign language, are a subsidiary right and have been dealt with
separately (see Subsidiary Rights).
The translated edition is treated
like any other book by the publisher who has acquired these rights and
arranged for the translation, as that publisher will have rights in the
translated edition only.
Growth of English Language Publishing
The agreement to divide up the English-speaking world was codified in
a list known as the ‘British publishers traditional market’ and
enshrined in book contracts as the ‘schedule of territories’. But
over the years American publishers became increasingly interested in
selling their books overseas and, with easy land access, Canada
gradually became recognised as an American market. Most contracts now
give the US publisher Canadian rights, or they are sold directly to a
Canadian publisher. Governments in the former British colonies started
to feel that they should support their own publishers, which in the case
of Canada led to the growth over the years of strong political support
for Canadian publishers.
In Australia, the growth of national self-confidence was accompanied
by the aggressive growth of Australian publishing. It is still dominated
by the local outposts of large international companies, but those
companies now feel and act much more like Australian publishers,
producing books for their own market, which they then sell overseas.
There have been similar developments in New Zealand, South Africa,
India, Hong Kong and Singapore, although on a smaller scale.
With the rapidly growing importance of the European
English-as-a-second-language market, there were moves some years ago to
make Europe a closed market for either the British or the American
publisher. the British publishers still argue for this on the basis that
the Treaty of Rome otherwise gives US publishers open access to the UK
market, because it enforces free movement of goods between EU countries.
What about the author?
But, you may be asking, where does the author stand in relation to
all this neat carving-up of the world? What’s in the author’s best
interest and how much control does the author have over who sells their
book in which country?
The answer is that the grant of territories is enshrined in the
contracts with the author, meaning that the author theoretically agrees
to the split. But agents and publishers have their own views on the
subject, which involve ‘custom and practice’. In spite of
conglomerates’ attempts to buy world rights, or at least what are
known as ‘world English language’ rights, most books are still sold
to different publishers in the US and the UK, sometimes with a separate
publisher in Australia as well.
Authors should take the advice of their agents on how to sell their
rights. However, the general view is that an Australian publisher, for
instance, will make more effort on behalf of a book which it is
publishing in Australia, rather than one which it is just distributing
for a British or American publisher. So the author is better off with a
separate Australian publisher.
British Grow Export Sales
There are currently signs that American publishers are putting more
effort into their export markets, presumably because the weak dollar
gives them a price advantage. Suddenly there are huge markets like
India, which American publishers are eying with interest. Although affected by exchange rate
changes, American publishers earned £1,189 billion or about $1.859
billion from exports in 2001, whereas British publishers overtook them
and earned more than £1.2 billion or about $1,876, benefiting
particularly from rapid growth in sales of English books to European
Union countries.
The argument from British publishers has always been that exports
matter more to publishers who have only a small home market (the US is
about five times the size of the UK in terms of population and GDP), so
they will ‘try harder’. But American publishers may not accept this
argument indefinitely.
Chris Holifield
