Frankfurt Book Fair Is Not the Best Place to Sell Foreign Rights to Your Books

[Ernie Zelinski]

This last week I was offered 3 book deals with a Bulgarian publisher which jumped my total from 97 book deals to 100 books deals with various publishers around the world. I sold the Bulgarian rights to these 3 books:

• The Joy of Not Working
• The Lazy Person's Guide to Success:
• 101 Really Important Things You Already Know, But Keep Forgetting by VIP BOOKS

This offer for 3 the books will earn me about $4500 in advances.

With the release of Career Success Without a Real Job by VIP BOOKS in April, I hope to get at least 5 more book deals before the end of the year.

Apparently a book published in the U.S. and Canada has about a one in twelve chance of selling translation rights to even one foreign publisher.

Guess that I am doing okay now that I have 100 book deals with various publishers around the world.

Given that I have 13 books, each of my books has an average of 7 book deals whereas the average book published in North America has less than 1/10th of a book deal. This means that my average book has been 70 times as successful in the foreign-rights sales field as as the average book published in North America.

The cool thing is that I have never gone to the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany where a lot of book rights deals are supposed to be made.

The book image above is the cover of GUÍA HACIA LA FELICIDAD, the Spanish edition of my book The Lazy Person's Guide to Happiness published by San Pablo in Argentina.

I sold the foreign rights myself without the use of an agent or North American publisher.

I sell foreign rights in many ways.

Some American publishers are totally amazed when I contact them about a book that yet has not been published in English but for which I have already sold two, three, or even foreign rights.

In fact, two or threee greedy American publishers even got mad at me and said they refuse to deal with authors who have already sold foreign rights to a book (because these American publishers want to control foreign rights sales and end up giving the authors much, much less than I receive in advances and

Career Success Without a Real Job by VIP BOOKS


101 Really Important Things You Already Know, But Keep Forgetting by VIP BOOKS

By Ernie Zelinski, Author of the World's Best Retirement Book, a great Promotional Giveaway by VIP BOOKS






royalties.)