Hi!
I have recently read your article on the internet about the process of being published etc. I was wondering, just out of curiosity – is it possible, or just acceptable to publish one story in two different publishers at one time. For example — get the book accepted by both a publisher from UK and USA? Can the author, in that case, accept both of their offers and work with both?
Thank you horribly much for your time,
I hope you can respond,
Best regards.
anonymous
I’m not sure which article you mean, but for those people who are curious, here’s one.
And the answer to your question is, it depends. It’s possible, sure. Most everything depends on how each individual deal is structured.
The approach that I’m most familiar with, since I’m a US writer, is this: an author sells her book to a publisher in the US. That publisher buys the right to publish the book in English in the US , or in North America (US and Canada). Sometimes they also buy foreign edition rights, which means that someone from the publisher offers the book for sale into foreign markets, and in this case the UK would be one of those markets. If that’s the case, then the author cannot go off and make a deal on her own with a UK publisher – she no longer has the right to do that.
If she doesn’t sell that right to the US publisher, then she and her agent can market the book to other countries, including the UK .
In either of these examples, the US publisher would make sure to publish their edition first, before selling to other markets. Occasionally, for big name authors, a publisher like Random House or HarperCollins, with divisions in the US and UK, will buy the book for both markets and coordinate the publication. For example, I was in the UK when Stephen King’s latest came out, and got the UK edition with the (in my opinion) cooler cover.
As for submitting your novel at the same time to a US and a UK publisher, sure, you can do that if your agent thinks it’s not going to upset anyone. There used to be a firm, fast rule against simultaneous submissions, but it seems less rigid than it used to, although the author and agent need to be very clear with all the parties involved about what’s going on. It makes editors grumpy to make an offer and only then find out that they are in competition with other people.
So the short answer to your question is that you can sell your book in any way you have the right to. And every time you sell the book, you sell some of your rights to it. The game is balancing the short-term money against the long-term potential, your time and energy, et cetera. There’s no one right way.