Self-published author sells foreign rights to book for $40,000

ATLANTA. Ga. – Quickly learning that selling his allegory about the search for God from his Web site was not going to make the book a best-seller, a Colorado author changed his focus, selling some foreign rights for $40,000, and in the process, selling the English language rights to a publisher bringing it out in the U.S. and UK as a hardback in December.
The November issue of the free online Southern Review of Books newsletter details how author John Penberthy of Boulder, Colo., created Panorama Press to publish his allegory about the search for God entitled To Bee or Not To Bee.

Penberthy expected that the book, published as a paperback in 2006, would sell easily on the Internet, but he quickly learned how difficult Web marketing can be. Rather than waste time waiting for sales to come in via his Web site, he shifted his efforts. To draw attention to the book, he began giving it away and publicizing it in every forum he could find that would give attention to it.
Since then, he’s found a conventional publisher for the book. Sterling bought the worldwide English language rights and is scheduled to publish it in December as a hardback. In addition, he’s successfully sold foreign rights in Korean, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Slovenian and Chinese (both complicated and simplified) for $40,000. His agents are still seeking to sell other foreign rights.
To Bee or Not To Bee is a clever allegory that features Buzz Bee, who doesn’t quite fit into the conventional thinking in the hive. Buzz yearns to understand God, a quest in which he is helped along by an older and wiser Bert Bee, a mystic.