I just checked one sales site. In the past three months, five copies of my backlist e-books were downloaded in Ethiopia, I have no idea why. The National Library of Malaysia bought my travel memoir, Foreign Correspondences. Other titles on this particular site—I use three of them—were sold in the U.S., the U.K. the Netherlands, Australia and Unknown. I assume that means Canada, since it doesn’t show up anywhere else.

I say this because writer friends have asked why I recently re-issued the last of my backlist books, whether they should do the same—and how. 

My first short story collection, Hard Travel, is now available online, and so is my first novel, Poor Player. This means that of all my books are now out in electronic form, and I can report that backlist titles are downloaded steadily but not spectacularly, although there are upticks from time to time. A few years ago, for reasons mysterious to me, between 70 and 80 people in Denmark downloaded Foreign Correspondences within a couple of months. It’s odd and it’s satisfying. A little ping on the day you check. 

Since other writers seem to want that ping, I thought I’d write a guide.

Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer. Nor does this sort of detailed technical work come easily to me. But maybe that’s helpful. I had to blunder through it step by step, and now I can set it out for others. If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can hire people to do the technical part, and I’ll tell you where to find them. 

But there’s a first step everybody needs to take:

Make sure you have the right to re-publish your books. 

It sounds obvious, but often writers aren’t sure whether they own the rights to their work, and you have to establish this at the start so you’re not in breach of contract by re-publishing. Check your files. In some cases, the publisher of one or more of your books may already have sent you a letter informing you that they’re letting your book go out of print. This letter probably contains legal language saying the rights are reverting to you. If it helps you remember getting it, this was the letter in which you were offered the chance to buy back any copies of your book remaining in the publisher’s warehouse. I hope you find it in your files. If not, you should ask the publisher for a copy. 

My travel book and second novel were both published by Key Porter Books. When Key Porter went out of business, they very kindly sent out letters reverting the rights to their authors without being asked. My third novel was published by Penguin Books, and after a few years, another letter dropped through my mail slot giving me back the rights. This is how it usually works.  

During the pandemic, I decided to get the rights back for my other three backlist titles. What spurred me was receiving an email in late 2020 from a man in the U.S. wanting to order a sports title I’d written. Contender: Triumph, Tragedy and Canadian Baseball Player Harry Fisher was originally published through a Toronto Star e-book initiative called Star Dispatches. Now the man wrote to tell me the Dispatches site had disappeared, the program apparently mothballed. 

Contender is really a long magazine article about a baseball-playing relative who’d made it to the big leagues, pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I could have let it die, but I still like it, and the research has been useful to baseball historians and writers. I managed to get one of the last interviews with the legendary catcher and broadcaster Joe Garagiola, who had played with Harry. I also talked with several other classic players, including the genial catcher Chuck Stevens, who died six weeks shy of his hundredth birthday in 2018. Vernon Law, who first played with Harry in New Orleans, is still going strong at 91. Deacon Law, a Mormon elder, pitched the seventh game of the 1960 World Series for the Pirates, starting the only game that Mickey Mantle allowed had ever made him cry. The book is filled with little tidbits like this, straight from the source.

So, yes, I’m fond of it, and fond of the players I spoke with. But there was a problem—and I’ll warn you, problems keep cropping up when you start to wrangle your backlist. It’s going to take time. Not a lot of hours, and the work isn’t onerous, but in my experience there can be hiccups and delays, and the process is slow. 

In this case, no one who had worked on Star Dispatches was still with the paper. Fortunately, I know someone else who works there and she eventually got me through to The Star’s lawyers. Within a couple of months, they issued a formal legal letter saying that sure, I could re-publish the book, but with a caveat. I couldn’t use the book cover designed by The Star or repeat the interior layout. 

This is always true: You have to commission a new cover for your backlist book and refresh the interior design. I’ll get into the how of that later, since there’s one more point I want to make about getting the rights back. 

I’d heard that the small press which published my first two books was reluctant to revert rights, and this spring I contacted The Writers Union of Canada to ask if this was correct. As a beginning writer without an agent, I had signed a couple of contracts giving the publisher many rights to the books in perpetuity. Thirty years later, I wondered if the publisher would agree to revert the rights to me, or if the rumour was correct and they’d balk. 

TWUC read the contracts and advised me to start by simply and politely requesting the rights back, attaching one of the template legal form letters the union can provide. They told me to ask the publisher to sign and return a copy for my files, telling me that this approach works in most cases where a writer doesn’t already have a rights reversion letter on file. 

I did as they advised, shooting off my polite email one Friday evening before closing down my computer. The next morning, when I opened it again, I found a brief email sent at 3:09 a.m. Saturday from the publisher saying they never reverted rights and had no intention of doing so now. 

So the rumour was true. Despite this, again on the advice of the union, I sent another email re-iterating my request more firmly, pointing out that I hadn’t been sent royalty statements or been paid royalties since the mid-1990s, despite the clause in the contract promising an annual statement. I offered to forgive the paperwork and royalties—which probably didn’t amount to a lot—in return for the reversion of rights. Once again I attached the template letters for signature. 

This time, I received no answer.

Long story short: I hired a lawyer, wanting to check out an idea I’d had. Since my contracts were old, they didn’t mention electronic rights. Of course they didn’t; there was no such thing at the time. My question was whether the rights were implied in the wording of the old contracts, or whether the absence of any reference meant the e-rights were mine. 

The intellectual property lawyer I consulted had some relevant case law at his fingertips. He felt that the precedent set by the Heather Robertson case, among others, indicated that e-rights were not implied in the contracts. I owned them, not the publisher. In his opinion, I could publish both works as e-books.

The lawyer then emailed another couple of letters, the first of which the publisher answered quickly by offering to sell me the rights for $1,000 a book—half what the publisher now told me they usually asked for the reversion of rights. I didn’t want to go this route, so the lawyer revoked all previous offers I had made to forgo royalties and statements. Instead, he informed the publisher that I would publish e-versions of the books, to which I had the rights. We waited several weeks for a response, but received none.

For me, that was Step One done and dusted, and I was free to start the e-publication process. 

A warning to writers with one of these rare balky publishers: Don’t bull ahead on the basis of my experience. Instead, contact the Writers Union about your contract, since all of them are different and the dates are important. Given my experience, you might not need to pay a lawyer to go ahead and publish an e-title. But it’s best to ask the union for advice, since they retain lawyers who can help with the basics. If you’re not already a union member, the fee is $100 for the first year of membership and only $205 a year after that. There are special provisions for people who can’t pay, and membership provides a whole series of benefits—including access to professional seminars that I’m going to refer to heading forward, when we hit the marketing part. Stay tuned…

Part One of Two. Jump to the second post here.