SFA 081 – Selling Foreign Rights and Pitching at Book Fairs with Judith Anderle

If you’ve ever wanted to see your book translated into a foreign language and to make a little extra money by selling the foreign language rights to overseas publishers, you’ll appreciate this week’s guest. Judith Anderle is the Chief Commercial Officer at LMBPN Publishing, and she handles a lot of the international business for the company, going to book fairs in different countries and pitching publishers to sell the foreign rights for their various series.

For an example of their rights catalog, which we mentioned several times during the interview, you can see it here on their site.

Judith also recommended as a resource the book How Authors Sell Publishing Rights by Orna Ross and Helen Sedwick.

Here are the questions we asked Judith during the show:

Can you tell us about your background and the formation of LMBPN?
You’re fluent in Spanish and conversational in French and Portugese. How much has that helped with your business career and does it help with putting together foreign rights deals?
Unlike most of us, you guys actually go out and seek foreign rights deals. What’s that process like?
For the sake of folks who aren’t quite so steeped in the industry and its tactics, what exactly are you selling or licensing when you make a foreign rights deal?
For those of us who are one-man/woman shows and have maybe had some success but aren’t huge names, is it worth pursuing this stuff?
Do you have any familiarity with the sort of bonafides an author would have to have achieved in order for potential buyers to be interested? Do they look for sales numbers? Rankings? What makes a book or series worth shopping around?
What was the genesis of your rights catalog, and how helpful has it been?
This is potentially a fairly simple and basic question, but supposing you put together a rights catalog either on your site or in physical form, how often should it be updated? If you’re lucky enough to sell some rights, is it understood that a catalog might contain books that were recently sold or pending sale?
Did you guys pivot much for 2020 and CoVid? I assume you weren’t able to go to the live events to pitch publishers.
In the past we’ve spoken to authors who were of the opinion that foreign rights and the like were the sort of things best left to agents and publishers, and having the framework in place to pursue them and pitch them was one of the last huge benefits to having an agent behind you. Are foreign buyers more receptive to indies and smaller publishers now?
As far as general business things go, what drove you (LMBPN) to expand so much and so quickly, and how do you manage everything?
It seems like the larger your operation, the greater the momentum. Large publishers tend to have longer pipelines and less flexibility because of the time and money that gets invested in a given project. Is that an unavoidable consequence of scaling up? Can you remain nimble and adaptable even with a larger organization and the associated overhead?
Do you have any business tips for authors who may be thinking of getting into publishing other authors?

Thanks for checking out our interview with Judith Anderle. You can find out more about her and the books LMBPN publishs on their site.