BookBrunch - World rights: why agents should hold firm

Agents are under increasing pressure from the big corporates to make world rights deals - not because those publishers are suddenly more expert or passionate than we in rights selling - but because the corporate strategy is to spread their risk and to aggregate their profits and losses across multiple territories and activities. Publishers are able to make such deals very attractive, and there will always be times when an agent simply can't turn down a huge amount of money on behalf of their client. But in terms of the author community as a whole, outside highly illustrated books with their high origination and printing costs, this developing tendency to sell world rights to international conglomerates is not generally in the author's interest, and so it should be of little interest to us.