Secure the head rights first

Before you add a rights deal to Consonance, show that you’ve licensed the relevant rights in a work from the author or agent by storing the terms of the agreement in the head contract. This is to save you from error: before you can sell rights, you have to control them in the first place. Once you have the right to sell various sub-licenses, create a deal. This is an agreement between you and another publisher, which entitles them to publish a product of your work in another form, language, territory or a mixture of these.

1. Go to your work

Go to Work > Rights for the work you want to sublicense rights for.

2. Add a new rights deal

Click the Add button.

Choose the Work and the Language, if it’s a translation deal. If the language will not change on this deal, choose your home language e.g. English. Click Save.

3. Add more information

Deal stage

Store whether a deal is an expression of interest, or signed and sealed.

Rights type

You can only sell rights that you’ve licensed. If there are no licensed rights stated in the head contract, this dropdown is empty.

To add options to that list, go to Work > Contract. Fill in the relevant fields in the Licensed rights section. Return to this page and you see the dropdown filled in. Using your browser’s back button is the most straightforward way. Whatever you put in Consonance has to reflect real life – so only enter terms that you are actually negotiating.

Licensor

The licensor is the company who you’re licensing the sub-rights to. The dropdown contains all the organisations in Contacts.

Publisher

Sometimes, you license subrights to an agency, who then in turn license the publishing rights on to a publisher. If the licensor and the publisher are different, store the publisher here. The dropdown contains all the organisations in Contacts.

Contract template name

Choose the correct template from the dropdown. This will provide the words that go to make up the PDF contract. Fill in the remaining fields as you see fit.

Advance

In a rights deal, an advance is paid to you by the publisher that you’ve licensed the rights to. You need to store that information so that you pay your advance on time and to the correct value.

Choose the currency from the dropdown. If the currency you need doesn’t appear, follow the instructions here to add a new one.

Enter the advance value in the currency that is detailed in the contract. Ensure you enter it without including any tax.

The advance value is in your base currency if you leave Advance value in GBP blank. To override this number, which is based on your stated currency conversion rate, fill in the correct value.

Date agreed is the date you agreed the advance with the publisher. This is useful so that your colleagues can see your negotiation in progress.

If you enter a Paid date for the advance, Consonance will create a receipt record – the money paid by the other publisher to you – in the background.

You can store the tax rate and value, if they apply.

Receipts

Once you’ve saved your advance record, if you’ve included a paid date, go to Receipts. You see that Consonance has created a receipt record. Amend it, if you like, to include more information, such as the method of payment by the third party.

Payments

If you add a date in Payment made to contributor in the Receipt record, the system will create a Payment record in the background based on the author cut you recorded earlier.

Rights income on royalty statements

To include rights sales in royalty statements, incomes and payments must be entered as a sales and payment items, separately to adding the details in the rights section.