In book publishing, we, the publishers, purchase the rights, from authors, to publish their creations. This involves negotiation. These rights can be all-encompassing in form (ebook, paperback, hardcover, audiobook, reprint, etc.) and in region (worldwide version region) or they can be parsed out. For a few WMG books, we have the ebook rights only. For some we have ebook, paperback and hardcover but not audiobook. We usually have worldwide rights, but for three books, we had only partial regional rights (not North America, for example, but most of the rest of the world regions).
(And if you’re interested in learning more about how this whole rights thing works, you should read Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s invaluable Closing the Deal…on Your Terms.)
But we received an early Christmas present here at WMG. The North American rights for those three books reverted to the author. And WMG has contracted with that author to publish those books worldwide.
This would be exciting news for any project. But it’s particularly exciting because I’m talking about Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s wildly popular first three Diving novels: Diving into the Wreck, City of Ruins, and Boneyards.
Now, our North American readers can buy those first three novels (we already publish the fourth and fifth worldwide) from this amazing series. And I can show you the amazing covers the wonderful Philcold did for these books (he creates the art for this entire series).
If you haven’t read this series yet, now is the perfect time to start. And if you have, you still might want to pick up the paperback versions of these beautiful books.
As a reminder, The Falls—the fifth novel in this series and one from the Diving Universe rather than featuring Boss, Coop and the rest of the main crew—came out this fall. And Boss returns next fall in the sixth novel, The Runabout.
I wish you happy holiday reading full of exciting space adventure.
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer.