The Rights page

Every book has a Rights page. It answers one question: who holds each of this book’s rights today? It reads your rights contracts and works the answer out each time you open it. Nothing on it is stored, and nothing on it can be edited. Change a contract and the page changes with it.

The subtitle says so at the top: Rights, worked out from your contracts.

Where to find it

Three routes reach the same page.

  • Open a title and click Rights in the Quick Actions card.
  • Open a title for editing and click Rights in the row of buttons at the top.
  • Open a rights contract and click any book named in the Titles column of What it covers.

The Rights button on a title only appears when your plan includes Contracts.

The three columns

The page is one table. Each row is a right type: print, ebook, audio, translation, large print, book club, first and second serial, film and TV, merchandising, and anthology permissions.

Column What it shows
Right The right type this row is about
You hold What you may do with it, and which contract brought it in
Granted out Who else has it, where, and until when
Still available A short verdict, with a sentence explaining it

You hold shows Yours when you own the book outright. Otherwise it lists each inward contract that adds the right, with who it came from, the territories, and the term. Exclusive grants and rights you may sell onward carry a small label. If nothing adds the right, the column reads Nothing.

Granted out lists each outward contract passing the right to someone else, with who has it, where, and until when. Exclusive grants are marked. A right nobody else has reads Nothing.

Only contracts running today appear in either column. A contract that ended last year is not listed.

The verdict in Still available

The last column gives one of six answers, each with the sentence Pubblish prints under it.

Verdict The sentence under it
Free to grant Nobody has it, and you haven’t used it.
In use You publish this yourself.
Partly granted out Free everywhere the exclusive grant doesn’t reach.
All granted out Nothing left to grant while that runs.
Yours, but not to sell on The contract doesn’t let you sell it on.
Not yours No contract brings this one in.

In use is worked out from your editions. If a book has a paperback, the print right is in use. Three right types are read this way — print, ebook and audio — because those are the three that show up in your editions. A translation or a film option does not show up this way, so Pubblish never marks those rights as in use.

A right can be free even when the edition does not exist yet. The sentence then says which one is missing — No audiobook yet, for example. This combination is useful for a publisher: you hold audio rights, you have not made an audiobook, and nobody else has them either.

Yours, but not to sell on means the inward contract did not tick May be sold onward. You may publish the book. You may not license that right to a third party.

The ownership rule

A book with no inward rights contract is treated as fully yours. Every right shows Yours. An author publishing their own book is the ordinary case: you wrote it, nobody granted it to you, so there is nothing to be granted.

The page says which version applies, in one line at the top:

  • No contract mentions this book, so every right is yours. Nothing on file at all.
  • No contract grants you rights in this book, so Pubblish treats them all as yours. You have contracts on this book, but they only ever grant rights away.

The moment one inward contract covers the book, the rule stops applying. You then hold exactly what that contract brought in. Anything it did not bring in reads Not yours.

Expired inward contracts do not return the rights to you. A contract that ran out still means somebody else wrote the book, so the right reads Not yours.

What “Worldwide except” means

Territories are written on the page exactly as the contract records them, in three ways:

  • Worldwide — everywhere, with no list.
  • Worldwide except United States, Canada — everywhere in the world apart from the named territories. Those are exceptions. The grant is everywhere else.
  • A plain list of territories — the grant is those territories and nothing else.

The page never reasons about which country sits inside which region. It reports what the contract says. If a grant covers Worldwide except United States and another covers United States, the page shows both and leaves you to interpret them.

What the page will not do

It never refuses anything, never blocks a save, and never merges two overlapping grants into one answer. It reports what a person reading your contracts by hand would say. Decisions stay yours.