MetaComet, a royalty management software provider serving nearly 200 publishers globally, is launching MetaComet Rights, a new rights management platform that marks the company’s first major product expansion beyond its core royalties business in its 25-year history.
The U.S. company is debuting MetaComet Rights at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. The platform represents a strategic shift for MetaComet, which co-founder David Marlin said has spent the past year building integrations and partnerships after completing a multi-year rebuild of its legacy systems. “We decided in Q4 of 2024 that we were going to jump into rights,” Marlin said. “Over the years, we learned a ton about rights, and we felt like we knew what the ultimate rights system would be and would do.”
MetaComet Rights aims to help publishers track available rights, manage buyer interest, monitor payments, and handle contract renewals and expirations. Unlike competitors pursuing marketplace or brokerage models, MetaComet is positioning the platform as a pure management tool with a single purpose of managing revenue from rights. “We’re not trying to sell rights— we’re not going for that,” Marlin said of the marketplace approach. “What we’re going for is a tool that is going to help publishers maximize their rights revenue.”
At present, MetaComet processes royalties for publishers ranging from small independents with 50 contracts to billion-dollar content companies with up to 50,000 contracts. Marlin said the average publisher using the platform manages approximately 1,500 contracts. The company handles not only traditional book publishers but also professional and medical content companies, video game developers, and even the Royal Opera House of London.
MetaComet rebuilt its entire technology stack starting in 2021, launching a new royalty system capable of handling millions of transactions and designed for auditability. “We had 20 years of experience and development built into the old system, so it took us a few years to get everything in there,” Marlin said. The company also rebuilt its author portal and sales aggregation tool, which consolidates data from more than 100 different sales feeds.
With that rebuild complete by late 2024, MetaComet shifted resources toward rights management and strategic partnerships. The company established a direct integration with Firebrand Technologies’ title management system and upgraded its integration with NetSuite, which Marlin described as “possibly the most popular ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] accounting system.” MetaComet also forged data-sharing partnerships with Simon & Schuster Distribution Services and the Independent Publishers Group (IPG), enabling sales and payment data to flow directly into its systems for IPG’s publisher clients.
Marlin positioned MetaComet’s competitive advantages around speed, transparency, and security. The company offers fixed-price implementations and claims to respond to customer support requests within minutes. MetaComet is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified, a North American security standard that Marlin said few publishing software vendors have achieved. The company is also the only certified NetSuite partner in the publishing industry, according to Marlin.
Remarking on competing products, Marlin argued that most are all-in-one systems that represent “a jack of all trades, master of none situation,” while “MetaComet focuses exclusively on contracts, royalties, and rights.”
Asked whether MetaComet intended to implement artificial intelligence, Marlin expressed caution: “AI is amazing. I think it does incredible stuff. I think it’s also a bubble,” he said. “AI is only useful where it’s useful, and people are trying to push it into corners where it doesn’t really fit.”
The first customer for MetaComet Rights has already been onboarded and Marlin hopes to see another half a dozen customers added by year-end.
