My long-suffering readers in Australia and New Zealand have enquired about audio books. Once again we face that dreaded world of contracts and licenses.
I'm going to simply outline the complications, rather than get into the bewildering details, where I’m bound to get something wrong or incoherent. Basically, it’s a question of contracts, and who has rights/licenses to do what where.
It’s complicated because one set of my books will have one set of non-U.S. licensing arrangements for print/audio/eBooks/etc., and another set will have different ones. Also, publishing conditions change—these days, very rapidly—and what was an excellent contractual/licensing decision in, say 2012, turns out to have powerful rivals in 2015. Also, and to our great frustration, there seems to be some kind of lag time between release in the U.K. and release in Australia and New Zealand.
In every case, my agents are working to get the best publishing arrangement for all concerned—readers as well as author. This takes some research as well as negotiating.
However, they're researching and negotiating as I write this, and you can expect me to report progress here as it’s reported to me. To keep up-to-date, you might want to click on the link at the upper right of this page, and subscribe to the blog. That way, it will arrive in your inbox and spare your trawling over the website or the internet to find out what in blazes is going on.
Image: Thomas Rowlandson, Merchant's Office (1789), courtesy Yale Center for British Art.
