Sticks and stones may break my bones....

My advice would be to try to sell it here in England before offering it to the US. If you get a publisher here to accept it they will probably want world rights, in which case THEY will sell it to the US (or distribute it through a US branch) not you.

As for your writing, it's sweet, but I'm not really sure you are familiar with the picture book market. My editor would say it's too 'slight' - it doesn't really have a story. And what's the twist at the end? A bird who's afraid to fly finds out he can? That's not much of a twist... Are you also aware that a picture book has 24 pages? That means that an illustrator has to come up with 24 (or 12 double page) illustrations, all of which must be different. I can't see that your story offers enough in the way of illustration possibilities.

Those are just my thoughts, but I would advise not running before you can walk. Sell it to your own country before you even think about trying to sell it across the pond. There's no point doing all that research if you can't find a publisher here to accept it.

moondance said:

My advice would be to try to sell it here in England before offering it to the US. If you get a publisher here to accept it they will probably want world rights, in which case THEY will sell it to the US (or distribute it through a US branch) not you.

Click to expand...

I may be mistaken, but I don't think UK world rights include US and vice versa. Usually if a book is a big hit in the UK (like a certain boy wizard series I've heard of) US publishers would show interest and a bidding war happens. Scholastic publishes the HP series here in the US, but it is a different publisher in UK The UK publisher has World Rights.

I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than me can fill in the holes of my memory on the topic.

Both have World Rights limited to...? Come on.

The rights are specific.

reeny said:

Both have world rights (which is limited only to the part of the world each controls mwahahaha).

Click to expand...

I was wrong, I corrected that part before I saw your post.

The UK publisher has World Rights, but that doesn't include US. US world rights don't include UK and I believe some other parts of Europe, I am assuming that UK world rights, in turn, would not include US. I think when they first started World Rights, UK wasn't willing to give up its market, so they were not included.

Hmm. My picture book has world rights granted to the publisher, which includes the US. My novel, on the other hand, has English-speaking rights granted to the publisher with the exception of the US and Canada.
So as far as I am aware, world rights does mean world rights unless specified otherwise in the contract.

When this was explained to me the contract used as an example stated WE (World English) and I was told that WE did not include UK. Maybe that is different than World rights. What I thought was strange about it is that the company I worked for is an international corporation so I didn't understand how we couldn't have UK rights when we had offices there.

I did not handle contracts, as I was in the Managing Editorial side of things, but we often had workshops where each department got to share their side of things. That was when I was told about the limitations of WE rights.

World English is definitely not the same as World Rights. World English only applies to the English-speaking world, so if you wanted to sell your book in Germany, you'd only be able to sell the English version. You'd need to sell it to a German publisher in order to have it translated into German. That's how I understand it anyway.

World English should have included the UK, but I guess your company had a standard agreement that it didn't. Weird, as you say. Did you ever see a contract?

I looked at contracts, but it was only to see if we had digital rights. I worked for the audio book and large print imprints of Random House after major acquisitions had taken place, so the contracts we had come from a number of houses that were taken over by Bertlesman. They all did things differently, but from the way this issue was explained I felt that it was pretty standard to not have UK rights included. Maybe audio books are different in that respect.