Keeping Your Reviews After Rights Revert to You

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I’ve written on rights reversion a couple of times and each time I’ve received emails from traditionally published authors concerned about one aspect or another relating to the process.

The biggest concern appears to be keeping those hard-earned reviews after a rights reversion.

ISBNs do need to be changed in some circumstances, most notably when the content of the book is changed.  These changes are due to significant alteration of the book’s content, not fixing typos, etc.

But ISBNs do not need to be changed when changing a book’s cover, for example.  Or when changing publishers. With no change, those reviews are not in any danger.

This is fresh on my mind because I’ve just recently received the long-awaited ebook rights to the first Myrtle Clover book from Midnight Ink (as of July 1).

Here is US ISBN agency Bowker on changing ISBNs: 

If an author gets the publishing rights back, does the original publisher’s ISBN remain?

No, they do not have to be assigned, but they can be.

But, of course, the most important feedback comes from Amazon.  I wrote Amazon for clarification for all of us on retaining reviews after a publisher change.  Here is the reply from Amlan Jyoti P. with Amazon seller support:

1. I would like to inform you that since the publishing rights will be transferred to you for the ASIN : B002WJH2I0, hence in this case you do not need to update a new ISBN for the product , the old ISBN will do. 

Here, we can just change the publisher name to your name since you will have the publishing rights. 

2. Please know that since in this case, the ISBN does not needs to be changed and only the publisher name needs to be changed hence the reviews will not get removed. The ASIN will contain all the reviews that is currently present on it. 

I appreciate your efforts for reporting these corrections and in helping Amazon maintain data integrity to create a positive shopping experience. 

Other retailers operate much the same way. If the ISBN remains the same, the author name is written exactly as before, and the rest of the metadata is the same, they’ll merge the two editions of the book.  I haven’t run into any issues at Apple, Nook, etc.

I simply uploaded my own version of the book with a new cover (the cover art, at least in my experience, is never reverted to the author), myself as publisher, and the same metadata as before (lowering the price substantially from the publisher’s price) and then the retailer transferred the reviews to the new  edition.  It usually took 24-48 hours for the previous version to disappear from the retailer and the reviews to transfer.

I’m hoping this puts the fears of traditionally published authors to rest and that more of them will explore asking for their rights to be reverted to them.  More information on obtaining those rights in my post here.

More information on ISBNs in general in this post by Giacomo Giammatteo for the Alliance of Independent Authors.

Have you requested rights back?  Did you run into any issues?

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