Should You Sell Lifetime Rights to Your Self-Published Book for a Modest Advance?

Selling the lifetime rights to a book you’ve already published is like selling your house for a year’s rent. You get a check, somebody else moves in, and the place you built stops being yours. You can’t repaint it, you can’t rent it to anyone else, and you can’t sell it to someone who’d pay more. The check feels good the week it clears. A decade later it feels like the worst deal you ever made.

Self-published authors do get these offers. A publisher spots a backlist that sells steadily, makes an approach, and puts a contract on the table that asks for everything: every format, every country, for as long as the copyright lasts, against a modest advance. My answer to that offer is no. Unless you’ve got another Twilight on your hands, the money isn’t there, and you lose control of the book for the rest of your life. Why would anyone trade a book that already pays them every month for one check and a smaller royalty?

A small self-publishing business asked exactly this question in a large indie author group this week. A publisher wanted worldwide rights to several of their existing titles for the lifetime of the copyright, for what they called a fairly average advance. When they asked for a fixed term instead, the publisher hinted the whole deal might disappear. The replies were nearly unanimous, and they were right.

What does “lifetime of the copyright” mean in a publishing contract?

It means a very long time. In the United States, copyright on a book written by an individual lasts for the author’s life plus seventy years. A contract that grants rights “for the full term of copyright” hands the publisher the book for all of that, including the decades after you’re gone, unless something in the contract or the law gives it back.

“Worldwide” means every country. Pair it with “all formats” and the publisher holds the print, ebook and audiobook rights, translations, and often the film, television and merchandise rights as well. A publisher that only plans an English-language print run and an ebook still ends up holding the Spanish audiobook and the screen rights. They don’t have to use them. You just can’t use them either.

For a book you haven’t written yet, a long grant is common in traditional publishing, and it’s part of what the publisher pays for when it takes the risk. For a book you’ve already written, edited, designed, published and proven in the market, the risk is mostly gone. They’re buying a finished asset at a discount.

Watch: How Much MONEY Does An Author Make?, Will Dean

The advance is probably all you’ll ever see

An advance is money paid against future royalties. The publisher keeps your royalties until the book has earned back the advance, and only then do royalty checks start. Most traditionally published books never earn out. An admin of a large indie author group put it at about eight out of nine in the same thread, and audio is often worse.

Treat the advance as the price.

If the book never earns out, that advance is the entire payment for every right you signed away, forever. Would you sell the book outright for that number? This deal sells it for exactly that.

Then compare it to what the book earns for you now. A self-published title that sells steadily pays you a much bigger share of every sale, every month, for as long as you keep it in print. A modest advance trades that income for a one-time check and a royalty rate that’s a fraction of what you were getting.

Why do publishers want the audiobook rights so badly?

Audio is the format a lot of these deals are built around.

Audiobooks are expensive to produce, so many self-published authors haven’t made them yet. That leaves the audio rights to a proven backlist sitting unused, and a publisher with a narration budget and a distribution deal sees them as the easiest money in the contract. They record the book, put it in front of listeners, and keep the larger share of every sale for as long as the license runs. You get whatever royalty rate they set.

There’s nothing shady about that. Publishers are businesses, and the deal can work out for an author who would never have made the audiobook otherwise. But it’s also the format where earning out is hardest, so the advance matters more. If audio is what they want, license audio, for a fixed term, and keep print and ebook. Why sign away every format when they only plan to use one? Ask them that directly.

Some of the biggest publishers now make audio-only offers to indie authors whose books already sell. In another thread in the same group, an author whose series had earned about $70,000 in seven months on their own was asked by a Big Five house for ten years of audio rights. The authors who had taken deals like that told the same story. The publisher hires a narrator, lists the audiobook, and rides on the author’s marketing, while the author keeps around a fifth of the royalties.

Several said ten years can come down to seven, and that other audio publishers will often counter once you tell them you have an offer. One author who had sold film rights made a sharper point: studios sometimes want the audio rights bundled into a film option, so locking audio up for a decade can complicate the movie deal people sign these contracts hoping to get. If you can afford the narration, producing the audiobook yourself pays better. If you can’t, a short audio-only license is the deal to look for.

The same goes for translations. A publisher with foreign partners might sell your book in Germany or Brazil, and that’s worth something.

A publisher without them will sit on those rights.

Why can’t you just get the rights back later?

Wrestling a book back from a publishing company is a nightmare, and the contract is written to make it one.

Older contracts let rights revert when a book went out of print. Modern contracts tend to define “in print” as available in any format, and a book sitting in an ebook catalog or a print-on-demand system never goes out of print.

It can sell three copies a year and the publisher still holds it.

US law does offer a way out, but it’s slow and narrow. Under the termination provision of the Copyright Act, an author can end a transfer of rights in a five-year window that opens 35 years after the grant, with some variations for publication dates. You have to serve written notice ahead of time, the dates and paperwork have to be right, and if you miss the window it closes. Thirty-five years is a long time to wait for a book you wrote and published yourself.

Control is the reason I self-publish at all. I left Amazon’s KDP for IngramSpark partly because Ingram gave me more control over where my books go. I’m not going to turn around and hand that control to a publisher for life in exchange for a check that doesn’t change anything.

When does selling the rights to your book make sense?

I’d consider it in two cases.

The first is life-changing money. If the advance is big enough that you’d be happy taking it as the only payment the book ever earns, take a hard look. That’s rare for a backlist title, and “fairly average” isn’t it.

The second is the imprint. A publisher’s name on the spine can open doors that money can’t. If I wrote a book on digital transformation, having Wiley’s imprint on it would mean something to the executives I’d want reading it. Conference organizers and journalists notice that name too. In that case, or one like it, I might consider selling the rights if asked.

But for a book like that, I’d go to the traditional publisher first, before self-publishing it. A publisher that comes after a self-published book wants a proven seller at a discount, and the imprint is a lot less useful attached to a book that already has its audience. I covered the other side of that trade-off in why self-publishing first can kill your traditional deal.

Brief notoriety isn’t a good reason. Neither is being able to say a publisher picked you up. Those feel nice for a month, and the contract lasts decades.

What should you negotiate instead of lifetime rights?

Start with the term.

Five to ten years is a normal license, and anything in that range is negotiable territory. At the end of it, the rights come back to you automatically, and if the book did well for both of you, you sign again.

Limit the formats and territories to what the publisher will really exploit. If they’re a print publisher, license print. If they sell mainly in North America, license North America. Keep the audiobook, translation, film and television rights unless they’re paying separately for them and have a plan to use them.

Tie the reversion clause to sales. A clause that returns the rights when the book sells fewer than a set number of copies over a set period, in a format you’ve agreed on, protects you from a book that sits forgotten in a catalog for thirty years.

And hire an intellectual property attorney before you sign anything. Get legal advice from a lawyer. Nobody answering questions in a Facebook group is one, and neither am I. An hour of legal review is cheap next to decades of a bad contract.

If the publisher says negotiating the term will kill the deal, believe them, and let it die. A publisher that won’t accept a fixed term on a book you’ve already proven is telling you how they value it: as an asset they want to own outright, cheaply.

Keep the house you built

You did the hard part already.

You wrote the book, paid for the editing and the cover, published it, and found the readers who keep buying it. That’s an asset, and it’s yours.

Weigh any offer against what the book earns you now and what it could earn over the next twenty years. For the bigger picture of how a book pays, see how a book really makes money, and for the paths themselves, traditional, self-publishing and hybrid compared. The rest is in the Publishing and Marketing Hub, and if you want help keeping your books in print on your own terms, look at my services for self-published authors.

Sell the house if somebody offers you the price of a mansion. Otherwise, keep living in it.

From the author

Make a Living as a Self-Published Author
Before you sign away your rights, read Make a Living as a Self-Published Author. I wrote it about building the business behind your books.

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