On behalf of Authors Alliance, Samuelson Clinic students and faculty helped to draft the guide “Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available.” The guide is targeted at authors whose books have fallen out of print or are not selling as well as they used to.
The guide explains that a right of reversion is a contractual provision that permits authors to work with their publishers to regain some or all of the rights in their books when certain conditions are met. The guide further explains that sometimes authors can regain their rights even when the contract’s conditions have not been met or there is no right of reversion in the contract.
To prepare the guide, Samuelson Clinic students interviewed roughly twenty publishers and literary agents, ranging from a CEO of major publishing house to contracts and rights managers of trade and academic presses; as well as novelists and academic authors.