It is not uncommon for a book to include content that requires permission to print. If your previous edition included any of the following, be prepared to discuss permissions with your team at Cognella:
- Contributed content: text, interviews, cases, images, etc., created specifically for your book by someone other than yourself
- Third-party excerpts: long blocks of verbatim text that were written by you or someone else and previously published in another source
- Third-party images: figures, photos, or other imagery that were not created originally by you for the book
It is important to note that any permissions granted to your previous publisher for printing of these materials in your book will likely not transfer to the new edition with Cognella. When a rightsholder grants permission for their text or images to be printed in a publication, the terms of the agreement may stipulate printing in only one edition. Even if the rightsholder grants permission for multiple editions, the permissions generally will not transfer to your new publisher. The Cognella licensing team will need to review the permissions logs, agreements, and other forms you provide to determine what permissions may or may not need to be re-requested from the rightsholder.
If you do not have any existing permissions logs or forms from the previous edition, the Cognella editorial team will work with you to recreate permissions logs. You may be asked to provide source information, contributor contact information, or other pertinent details.
If the Cognella licensing team does determine that content needs to be re-requested, there are a few important things to keep in mind:
Cognella cannot guarantee that third-party excerpts you received permission to use in the past will be approved for your new edition. Rightsholders may change their republication guidelines, reasoning, or preferences about what they do and do not allow to be reprinted. Accordingly, they may deny permission this time around. The content may also come with a fee that is prohibitively expensive. As a small publisher, we have a set licensing budget for each book that allows us to keep books affordable for students, and the sum of costs for the third-party text in your previous edition may exceed that budget. If the rightsholder denies Cognella republication rights or if the content is prohibitively expensive, your editors will assist you in making cuts.
Some third-party images may need to be replaced. Cognella may use a different stock photo site from what you used in the past, so you may need to work with your editorial team at Cognella to find replacement images. Or, similar to third-party excerpts, the image rightsholder may deny republication this time around or be prohibitively expensive.
You may need to provide contact information for previous contributors. Depending on how your previous publisher requested rights of use from contributors, these rights may not transfer to the new edition. Rights to print someone’s chapter or interview, for example, may not transfer between editions of a book. In cases where we need to re-obtain permission, we will ask that you provide the most up-to-date contact information you can for the contributor. If you don’t have any contact information, you may be asked to remove or replace the content.