Sue Stewart (heir to Andre Norton):
The work is ongoing but now we have a permanent record of all of Andre’s contracts. This is the foundation of the Estate’s value. I highly recommend it to anyone who has to manage publishing agreements.
When Andre [Norton] died in 2005 I really had no idea what I was getting into as her heir. I was not a writer and I have never worked in publishing. I struggled for years to gather all her contracts and to keep her books in print and earning money.
I began working with Ethan Ellenberg in 2014 and we worked together assemble a complete picture of Andre’s books and contracts.
I know from Ethan that he created Royalty Reminder specifically to enable him to manage an Estate that included 175 original works of fiction and far more contracts than that.
It’s been nothing short of miraculous. We’ve reverted and re-published scores of Andre’s books. We’ve licensed new rights like audio book, film and translation. The work is ongoing but now we have a permanent record of all of Andre’s contracts. This is the foundation of the Estate’s value. I highly recommend it to anyone who has to manage publishing agreements.
Bill Keith (pseudonym Ian Douglass)
Ethan shared with me the power of Royalty Reminder and I’ve seen it in action. By tracking and exploiting all my book agreements we have been able to add tremendous value to my career. It’s a tool, but what it produces is not only new editions and new formats, but money and pride in seeing your work live on.
1993. That was the year my novel Warstrider was first published by Avon Books. There were no ebooks. There were no audiobooks. Amazon did not exist. The internet had only become commercially available in 1991 and would not become popular until two years later 1995.
The book was a success. I wrote 5 more books in the Series and they’ve been in print for many years. My agent Ethan Ellenberg negotiated those agreements on my behalf and in them he retained electronic rights. I’m not sure either of us knew just how consequential that decision would be. Correction I can say for certain neither of us did.
As eBooks took off Ethan audited all the agreements in his literary agency with Royalty Reminder and we discovered that I retained electronic rights. In July of 2014 we started re-publishing Warstrider and we have subsequently published all 6 of the books. It has been a tremendous success, really a bonanza, with royalties in the six figures and counting.
Ethan shared with me the power of Royalty Reminder and I’ve seen it in action. By tracking and exploiting all my book agreements we have been able to add tremendous value to my career. It’s a tool, but what it produces is not only new editions and new formats, but money and pride in seeing your work live on.
Jason Manning
Ethan used the insights he gleaned from Royalty Reminder regarding the status of my book contracts to revert rights back to me. I wasn’t sure much would come of it but I agreed. His agency republished my work and my novels began to reappear on Amazon in 2015. In 2016 I earned over $150,000 in royalties and have been earning ever since. This motivated me to begin writing new novels.
Ethan Ellenberg has represented me in my career as a writer for thirty years. I credit him with much of the success I’ve had, publishing over fifty novels through major New York publishing houses from about 1990 on. In 2006 I was burned out and stopped writing for what I thought would be a short period of time. But ten years passed and by that time I thought my writing career was over.
Then Ethan used the insights he gleaned from Royalty Reminder regarding the status of my book contracts to revert rights back to me. I wasn’t sure much would come of it but I agreed. His agency republished my work and my novels began to reappear on Amazon in 2015. In 2016 I earned over $150,000 in royalties and have been earning ever since. It even motivated me to begin writing new novels.
I cannot stress enough how reversion and re-publication revived my career and expanded my writing horizons, and I would urge every other writer to give it serious consideration.