Rights assistant

Closing date: 6th April 2025

Salary: £27,000 dependent on experience and location (+bonus +benefits)

Location: This role can be based at our London office, or at our regional office in Sheffield, with a blend of in-office (3 days) and homeworking (2 days) per week.

This is an exciting opportunity to join the thriving Group Rights department at Hachette, working across John Murray Press and Headline.

Hachette UK is a creative powerhouse and the UK's second largest book publishing group. Our mission is to make it easy for everyone to discover new worlds of ideas, learning, entertainment and opportunity. We're made up of 11 autonomous publishing divisions and over 60 imprints with a rich and diverse history and an incredible range of authors. We're also the market leader in e-books and publish a range of bestsellers in audio format, the fastest growing part of our business.

Our friendly, knowledgeable and energetic team handle a huge variety of rights across a wide range of genres from US and translation through to film and television. Our role is to license these rights to third parties, negotiating the best possible deals for our authors as well as handling contracts and chasing income.

Selling rights enables our books to reach new markets and audiences and we raise awareness of titles and their authors by sharing manuscripts with editors, pitching upcoming books at rights fairs, and putting together rights catalogues featuring our frontlist and backlist titles. Our aim is to get and keep our books on the shelves of readers all over the world and we are defined by both our focus on maximising income as well as strong emphasis on author and customer care.

What you'll be doing

A successful candidate would be joining our Group Rights team to provide a high quality of support and administration to facilitate rights selling and ensuring high-quality service to customers. The Rights Assistant will be responsible for the John Murray Press and Headline divisions but will work with broader team to ensure the smooth running of the Group Rights department.

The Rights Assistant responsibilities:

• maintaining records to monitor options and rights granted or sold and to keep internal functions and authors/agents informed
• ensuring that rights contracts are fully signed and invoiced in a timely manner in order to conclude sales
• creating Rights Catalogues and other Sales materials when required
• sending out copies of licenced editions to authors and agents
• conducting the sale of Production materials
• ensuring prospective customers are fully informed of relevant rights for sale
• preparing trip, book fair and meetings schedules for the Rights team
• dealing with various rights queries from internal and external stakeholders
• dealing with foreign cover approvals
• managing reports generation and chasing activities
• working on various projects within the team to streamline processes and improve our customer service

It is a varied and busy role which offers many opportunities to learn and get involved in all aspects of rights.

Who we are looking for

The successful candidate will report to the Rights Director and will demonstrate the following skills and abilities:

Essential

• Exceptional communication skills: written and verbal, and internal and external
• Enthusiasm and curiosity
• Ability to communicate and build positive working relationship with contacts at all levels
• Ability to work collaboratively as part of a team
• Excellent organisation and attention to detail
• A customer focused approach
• Flexibility, adaptability and a can-do attitude
• Familiarity with word processing, spreadsheet and database packages
• Previous office experience, preferably within a publishing environment
• Problem solving and ownership of own role – anticipating and pre-emptively addressing potential needs
• Ability to manage multiply projects/lists simultaneously

Desirable

• An interest in or affinity with the lists
• An appreciation of the commercial structures of publishing and the role of the rights team within the bigger organisation
• Knowledge of a foreign language

What we offer

Our staff are our greatest asset, and our benefits reflect this:

• 28 annual leave days per year, increases to 29 days after 2 years' service and goes up to 30 days after 5 years' (+ bank holidays)
• Private medical insurance
• Generous pension schemes
• Rent deposit loans
• 2 community days per year
• Summer hours (finishing at 1pm on Fridays during the summer months)
• Retail discounts through Hachette rewards
• Cycle to Work scheme
• Eye care vouchers
• Wide-ranging training library
• Development programmes (including mentoring)
• Up to 70% off book purchases
• A charity bookshelf
• 12 Staff-led employee networks that are voluntary, including Gender Balance, Thrive, Pride, All Together, Wellbeing and religious networks
• Season ticket loans
• And much more!

Our commitment

Hachette employs people on the basis of their abilities. We aim to attract and develop talent from a base as broad as the world of readers we want to reach, with a wide and representative range of age, faith, disability, race, gender, sexuality and socio-economic, regional and cultural backgrounds.

If you are shortlisted and need us to make any adjustments to help you attend for interview, please let us know.

The Book Trade Charity offers financial support to people looking to enter the book trade but who may struggle to afford the costs of attending interviews and undertaking junior roles. For more information visit www.booktradeentrysupport.org

Please state in your application that you found this role through Creative Access.