Part 19: Reprint, Resale, and Private Label Rights

Selling stuff that other people has made is a great way to make money online.  At its simplest, you just recommend the other person’s product to your readers or site visitors, they go to the vendor’s sales page and when they buy you get a commission. That is called affiliate marketing and is hugely popular. But what if you are not happy to ‘just’ get a commission? What if you’d rather get the whole sales price for yourself?

In that case, you need to look at buying or acquiring the rights to the product. Depending on which ‘rights’ you buy or are given, you can then sell the product from your own site, in your own way, and keep all the money for yourself.

What are reprint rights, and how to profit from them.

When you buy an ebook or a program online, you generally buy the right to read it yourself, or use it on your own computer. Anything beyond that basic usage is usually forbidden.

That means that

- you cannot give it away to anyone else.
- you cannot change it in any way.
- you cannot sell it.

Even if there is no obvious copyright mark, the author of all published works (ebooks and program scripts included) is automatically awarded the copyright to their work as soon as it is published. The © mark acts as a reminder, but is not strictly required.

So how is it that some people can sell other people’s ebooks and programs, change them, rename them, give them away as free bonuses, and even sell you the rights to do the same?

It all comes down to the original author selling certain ‘rights’ to those works.

There are a few different types of ‘rights’ that you are likely to come across online. They are all quite different in what they allow you to do, so it is always wise to read the terms very closely to be sure you know exactly what rights you are actually buying.

Here are the most common ‘rights’ that you are likely to come across and what they generally mean. There can be variances though, so be sure to check the small print carefully.

Resale Rights.

The simplest of all. When you buy resale rights, you are given the right to sell the product on. While you can effectively do that as an affiliate, the difference here is that the product becomes your own. You have to handle the orders (through your own payment processor account) but you get to keep all the revenue from each sale.

Effectively the product becomes your own except that you cannot change it.

You will sometimes see resale rights being sold that attempt to dictate the price at which you will sell the product. While this is generally a good thing from the product’s point of view (if people start selling a $97 ebook for $1, the value of the book will fast disappear and resale rights owners who are charging the full price will find it hard to compete) it is almost always illegal.

Price fixing in this way is not allowed.

However, it is usually in your own interest to adhere to the recommended price.

Buying the resale rights to an ebook usually costs 3-5 times the normal selling price, but you don’t need many sales to start to see a good return on your investment.

Reprint Rights

Reprint rights are similar to resale rights, but differ slightly in as much as they confer on you the authority to have the ebook printed out to sell as a physical product.

This right is not seen as often as resale rights (and indeed, sometimes the resale rights licence will give reprint rights as well).

It can be very useful to have this right to print as a lot of extra money can be generated by offering ebooks that you sell with a physical product option. Simply by printing out an ebook and putting it in a nice binder, you can often command a much higher price from your customers.

Master Rights.

Master resale rights, or master reprint rights are the next step up and usually cost quite a bit more. Typically, 10-15 times the original product’s asking price.

They are so much more valuable because they give you the right to not just sell the book and keep the profits, but to sell the resale or reprint rights too. And again, any sales you make are entirely your own with no need to share with the product’s original author.

Master rights can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand they can help you generate significant profits by selling on the resale rights, but on the other, by selling those rights to others, you are creating your own competition!

Private Label Rights.

The final ‘rights’ that we will examine here are the so-called private label rights. With these, you buy the text to a book, or the code to a program and can then do whatever you like with them (within the terms of the license – so be careful to check).

What that means in practice is that if you buy the private label rights to an ebook, you can then change the way the book looks, add more content if you choose to, take content out if you like, reorder it, change the title of the book – even put your own name as the author. In fact, pretty much anything.

The only thing that is usually forbidden in the licence (although by no means always) is reselling the private label rights themselves.

This freedom to do whatever you want with private label rights ebooks is incredibly powerful and potentially amazingly profitable. In effect, you can create unique ebooks, under your own name, with your own look and feel, without having to do any of the hard writing work! It is almost as good as going to Elance and hiring a ghostwriter of your own.

The only drawback is that private label rights ebooks tend to be distributed via membership websites who typically have around 500 other members. Potentially, that is a lot of competition.

But the reality is that barely 5 out of every 100 people who belong to those sites ever make use of the content they are given, so your real competition is minimal.

At the time of writing this, private label rights are massively undervalued.

Most membership sites that give private label ebooks to their members have two new ones created every month, and some have a back library available of 50 or more just waiting for you to make your own and start to profit from.

Although I sell many ebooks and products that I have the resale rights to, my personal preference is to use private label works. I’ve got several reasons for this:

1. With ‘resale rights’ you have to sell the book exactly as it is supplied to you. If you are unhappy with the format or the look of it, bad luck. You cannot change it. It there is something about the content that you are less than confident with, that’s a pity, but you cannot change it.

2. With resale rights you have no real idea how many people are in competition with you, and no way to protect your profits if they start to wildly undercut your price. Often, the only way to compete against deep price cutters is to build an amazing selection of bonuses to offer alongside your product. This may be effective, but it can be time consuming and expensive.

3. Private label rights give you the power to do so much more than *just* publish an ebook. You can use the content in many different ways to make profits.

4. When you take a private label ebook and add new content, reword existing sections, add pictures, change the title and author’s name – in the ways that I recommend – you are creating a whole new unique work that has no competition in the marketplace at all.

“I’d love to start an online business but don’t know what to sell.”

Buying the rights to other people’s work is the fastest way to get a product of your own. There are literally tens of thousands of ebooks out there that you can buy the rights to – resale or private label – in an almost limitless array of niche markets.

Not having a product to sell is no longer an excuse to prevent you from starting an online business. Authors are falling over themselves to sell you the rights to their books – they’ve done all the work, so you can pick up the profits.

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