Rights sales are complex and intricate, and need a lot of knowledge and expertise. People who work successfully in this area usually have a wide network of colleagues and contacts across the world, and they also often work with subagents in other countries who take a commission on the sales they make.
I've negotiated quite a few book deals in my time, but I wouldn't dream of trying to buy or sell anything for the U.S. Navy.
Your experience in the Navy is great if you're making deals for the Navy. But it won't help you in working out what's an appropriate advance and royalties combination for a book you're licensing to a publisher in China. It won't help you know whether the contract you're offered by a Dutch publisher are favourable or not. It won't help you know when to refuse an offer for the audio rights to a book.
If you're not confident working with your own agency contract, and haven't spotted the problems with it, then you're very unlikely to be able to negotiate the contracts required for these deals.
It was sincerely given. I've seen so many publishers come here fighting: it's really refreshing to meet someone who is clearly keen to improve and do better.
I'm not quite sure what you mean.
If you mean you're working on producing an audio book version of your authors' books (for example) but at the moment you're still finding out about putting audio books into production, and once you've got proper costings and have a business plan in place you'll be going ahead, then I can see the point in retaining those rights.
If you mean you might eventually publish audio books but you're not doing it right now and you don't know when you'll take those first steps, then nope. That's not acceptable, in my view. Only take the rights you're already able to exploit. Leave the rest with the author.
