The Lazy Person's Guide to Success - Arab Edition

I received the following e-mail the other day inquiring about how I sell foreign rights to my books.

----- Original Message ----- From: FRA To: vip-books (at) telus (dot)net Sent: 2009 5:20 PM Subject: to Ernie Zelinski - about books

Dear Ernie,

I am a writer too. I wrote 4 books using my name a 1 using a pseudonym.

If possible please write 2 or 3 lines about how you sold the foreign rights yourself to that I can try the same.

Didn't you use an agent to go to Frankfurt or to sell rights to you? Didn't you pay any service (such as a mag) to ad your books? Did you contact publishers directly? Didn't you use other fairs such as the US and London? Did you publish anything where you explain this in details? (ebook etc.)

Thanks, Fabio Araujo

This was my response:

Sent: 2009 7:26 PM Subject: Foreign Rights Sales Hello Fabio: First, I have never been to the Frankfurt Book Fair ( I have been to Book Expo, however) and have no plans to go, even though this is where the foreign rights deals are supposed to be made. I did attend Book Expo in New York a few weeks ago but this was to meet with distributors so that I can continue to self-publish How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free and Career Success Without a Real Job instead of having Random House take the books over under a regular author arrangement.I first started selling foreign rights when foreign publishers started contacting me. I made the mistake of turning my first 4 or so inquiries to an agent in Montreal. I fired the agent when I turned over an inquiry from a Spanish publisher to him and he didn't do anything with it for a month.I still use agents in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. For European rights, I normally have not used an agent, although I am using one for 3 of my books that will soon be published by a Bulgarian publisher. I don't use an agent for South America. My advantage of controlling my foreign rights in this way is that I cut down on agents fees and I tend to get paid more and a lot faster than if I turned over the handling of foreign rights sales to publishers such as Random House and Ten Speed Press. In short, my foreign rights sales come from publishers contacting me and from my sending out my books to foreign publishers that may be interested in my books. Also, it has been quite easy to sell the foreign rights to a particular publisher after the publishers has already published one of my books. For example, a Korean publisher has published 7 of my titles and a French publisher has published 8 of my titles.This has resulted in the 101 book deals in 27 countries for about 12 books, for an average of 8 foreign rights deals per book. This is more than 50 times the success rate that even major publishers have - given that only one out of ten books published in English will get even one foreign publisher.In the end, content is king! If you have good content, you can sell more foreign rights. I have written 3 books for which I have been able to sell rights to at least 4 publishers without the books having  been published in English, the language in which the manuscript was written.I have enclosed my latest E-book (in PDF format) called 101 Reasons to Love a Recession. This E-book is designed to entertain people as well as show them the many silver linings in the current recession: Please feel free to share this e-book with your readers, friends, clients, and co-workers. The E-book is also available as a complimentary download at the following websites: Benefits of a Recession and Creative Free E-books

Ernie Zelinski Author of the International Bestseller The Joy of Not Working (Over 225,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)and  How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free  (Over 110,000 copies sold and published in 7 foreign languages)Featured at The Retirement Café and The Retirement Poems Café  

Note: How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free and Career Success Without a Real Job, two great business promo giveaways by VIP Books are now distributed by the National Book Network.