Brockman Agency Opens Web-based Rights Center

Paul Hilts -- Publishers Weekly, 8/2/1999

Brockman Inc., a literary agency for many big-name science writers, has just opened a Web site called RightsCenter (www.rightscenter.com), a rights exchange meeting place for authors, agents and publishers.

While RightsCenter looks like a standard Web site, according to John Brockman, CEO of Brockman Inc., it is actually a customizable database that uses a secure extranet -- a private internet that allows access only to members or invited guests. Users can exchange proposals, commentary, sample chapters and PR materials for the cost of a local telephone call. The site will be supported by a service fee, paid by rights sellers, of $250 per title (the center will prepare the material for another $150). RightsCenter is run as a separate company, in which Brockman Inc. will be a minority partner.

"It's been a year," Brockman reported. "It's an unqualified success. The volume and levels of deal flow have increased dramatically, while our mail- room, telephone, copying and printing costs are now negligible."

Brockman claims six-figure printing and shipping savings, as well as shrinkage of the time needed to get to overseas clients, which can be two-thirds of the agency's business, to nothing.

Recently the agency marketed Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe on RightsCenter, attaching rave reviews from the New York Times and Amazon.com. By the deadline four working days later, 12 deals were in the works -- at a submission cost of zero. Brockman sees RightsCenter as potentially "as busy as Frankfurt, seven days a week, 24 hours a day."