Iranian Thieves and Bulgarian Bars:
Advice on Publishing Internationally
By David Edmonds ’02 
David Edmonds and co-author John Eidinow.
Their new book is Rousseau’s Dog: Two Great
Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightment.
I’ve been asked to cobble together 500 words on “international book contracts”—which is about 400 words beyond my expertise. Fortunately, I’ve already used up 29 words. For what it’s worth, here are some thoughts/advice (great, there goes another 15):
• Agents are worth it. Although some people manage without them, they handle all the boring and nasty bits of the book process, and most importantly allow you to remain chums with your editor.
• Retain as many rights as you can. In particular, hold back your language rights and sell them separately. In Britain, the standard deal involves giving ten percent to your agent and ten percent to the agent acting in the relevant foreign country. That means the author keeps 80 percent, which will probably be more than he/she can wrestle from the publisher.
• Unless your surname is Rowling, initials J.R., the Bulgarian and other translated versions of your book are unlikely to pay the mortgage. But they look nice on the shelf, and they haven’t added to your workload. I’m not sure whether our books are typical, but, guesstimating, the U.S. accounts for around 50 percent of our sales, Britain 30 percent and the rest of the world 20 percent. Royalty rates for foreign sales are lower than English (by about three percent). Even so, given the teeny size of most markets, the economics of publishing translated books is baffling. I watched our wonderfully enterprising Bulgarian publisher flogging copies of our book in a seedy bar, as though he was peddling narcotics.
• If you’re expecting foreign sales, make sure you acquire worldwide rights for any photographs you use—this will save you much subsequent hassle with picture libraries.
• Don’t expend too much atomic energy worrying about the Persian market. The Iranians may be covertly planning to develop nuclear weapons, but far more inexcusably, they have failed to sign on to the International Copyright Conventions. Still, I was grateful when our brazen Iranian word-thief mailed over a copy of the translated book.
We’ve been astounded by how little involvement we’ve had with foreign sales. One day you sign the contract, 18 months later the translated book drops through the letter box. There’s generally been little consultation about timing of publication, about marketing, about cover design, very few linguistic/translation queries. Still, if you suffer from high levels of control-freakery, you’re free to stipulate contractual conditions. For example, we insisted on veto rights over the German title of our second book after they lumbered the first book with a title so mind-numbingly tedious that potential readers had been spotted nodding off before they’d even turned over the cover. (Wie Ludwig Wittgenstein Karl Popper mit dem Feuerhaken drohte zzzzzz)
Well, that’s it, only got four words to…
—David Edmonds works for the BBC and has published, with co-author John Eidinow, Bobby Fischer Goes to War and Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. Rousseau’s Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment, also co-authored with Eidinow, was published in March.
