September Brown Bag Lunch

Christina A. Harcar, Vice President and Director of Subsidiary Rights at St. Martin's Press on Subrights
Thursday, September 21st at 12:30, at Random House

This September, the Young to Publishing Group tackled subsidiary rights with Christina Harcar, Vice President, Director of Subsidiary Rights at St. Martin's Press. Prior to joining St. Martin's, Ms. Harcar was the Editorial Director of Random House Audio Publishers, and prior to that she was the Director of International Rights for Sanford J. Greenburger Agency and Nicholas Ellison, Inc. Given the range of her experience acquiring and selling rights at publishing houses and agencies, Ms. Harcar covered subsidiary rights from all angles.

To understand subsidiary rights, it helps to have a crash course on the evolution of publishing over the past 30 years. Vertical integration, or the process by which a number of companies (usually within the same industry) are grouped together under one owner in order to create synergy and maximize profits, has been the general trend within publishing. One of the most obvious examples of vertical integration would be the combination of hardcover and paperback houses under the same ownership. In the 1970s, some of the largest deals a subsidiary rights department would negotiate were made between hardcover and paperback houses. They created a lot of buzz and profits. Hitting seven figures was hardly rare, and the larger houses regularly did multiple deals of this size a week.

As paperback and hardcover houses were brought under the same ownership and houses moved toward integration in a variety of other ways-audio and large print publishers are also good examples-there were fewer places to buy and sell rights. So what about those multimillion dollar deals? They certainly weren't lost. Rather than make the profits up front with the sale of rights, they are now made on the back end with sales of books.

Getting an edge in an industry with a relatively low number of companies that have similar access to market data is always difficult, but subsidiary rights are first and foremost about relationships. When a particular outlet is brought under a corporate umbrella, they simply seek out another one. Library markets and foreign publishers are a couple places where sub rights departments have recently sought such relationships.

One of the most unique aspects of subsidiary rights is that it can actually generate profits before there is a final product. The importance of these early sales of rights cannot be overstated. With an eye on the bottom line, sub rights departments can recoup some, if not all or even more, of a house's initial lay down for a work by selling it into other markets and formats. Not only do these sales put money in the publisher's hand, they also build a house's and the industry's confidence in a book, thus paving the way for its successful introduction into domestic markets.