From improving the system for rights discovery to standardizing royalty statements, this year’s award winner seeks to better the global publishing industry.

By Erin L. Cox, Publisher | @erinlcox

Last week in New York City, the U.S. publishing association Book Industry Study Group (BISG) awarded their Industry Champion Award to Kris Kliemann, founder of Kliemann & Company and long-time international rights professional.

The award was created to honor those individuals whose efforts have advanced the publishing industry as a whole. In her career, Kliemann has worked for publishers from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux to Fodor’s to John Wiley & Sons, and she has made significant efforts in advancing not only the rights business but the industry as a whole through her work as the chair of BISG’s Rights Committee. Some of these include modernizing rights practices through the use of technology, creating uniform rights reporting and royalty templates, fostering better transparency around the publishing process, and bringing rights into its rightful place at the center of the conversation.

Publishing Perspectives sat down with Kliemann to talk about the award and what she is working on next.

PP: Congratulations on winning the BISG Industry Champion Award – what does that award mean to you?

KK: It feels great, personally, to be recognized for the volunteer work I’ve done at BISG over the years. The Rights Committee has always had big goals and worked to come up with ideas and solutions that can help all rights people everywhere. It’s fun to have discussions about the things—big and small—that can be a problem for all of us in our work, and to brainstorm ways to solve them. We’ve done some great education sessions, highlighted some solutions that are out in the market, and created a few things that help out with simple questions. One example is Find A Rightsholder, which can be used to get contact info for a publisher’s rights and permissions department—something that wasn’t aggregated into one place prior to BISG putting it all together. (BTW, any publisher can add their own info by going in, suggesting a new record and adding their own contact person or page.) This has proven to be quite useful for people seeking permission to reuse content, and for folks starting down a journey of wanting to know who controls rights to a particular title. Rights discovery is one of the critical issues we all face—and we still have a long way to go to getting the data out of the private silos of each publisher and agency and into an easily accessible public space.

As the award noted, you have done a lot to champion the industry over the years, particularly in your role as a rights expert. What do you see as your most significant achievement?

The work I love the most is education. I teach rights specifically in a few different places, and I love encouraging young people and even career changers to come into our business. BISG has also done a lot around educating the publishing industry about the value of rights—especially with our annual in-person conference “Doing Rights Right.” The next one will be in January 2027. I think that publishing folks in general are starting to see that “rights” and rights transactions are at the heart of publishing, and when everyone in an organization has at least a little bit of rights knowledge, it can help overall.

Finance teams get it: investing in rights systems means enabling better analysis of results for better future dealmaking and better follow-up. Plus it frees up time for more pitching and submissions. Editorial and marketing teams who understand rights know how to avoid risk around permissions clearances and generally are better negotiators; companies overall have a better sense of total valuation of their assets. More work could be done in educating everyone about rights: vocabulary, for example, in publishing is overall very confusing: we often use the same word to mean completely different things, which slows us down and hampers our progress as a global business!

You are currently working on The Translation Rights Royalty Statement Standard. Can you tell us a little bit about what the challenges around the royalty statements and why a standard is needed?

We did a survey and agents and publishers rights teams reported too much time was wasted chasing down details related to the high volume of statements received from translations rights deals, coupled with the significant number of those statements that did NOT include all of the fields needed in order evaluate the results. BISG knows that standards are the best solution to complexity, and the Rights Committee has worked diligently to come up with a set of standard fields that will help alleviate the main issues.

Now it’s time for Licensors and Licensees to have the conversation about making the changes—in many cases it is a simple matter of only a few small tweaks, for example, ensure your statements carry both the original title and the translated title on the statement, or be sure to share contract ID numbers from each party’s system—and start working toward the eventual goal of sharing the data in an automated way, so that the important work of proper review of the financial details can become the focus of the analysis. Frankfurt Book Fair has endorsed the Translation Rights Royalty Statement Standard. We’ll be talking about these next steps in a short one-hours meeting on Friday in Frankfurt. It would be great to see Publishing Perspectives readers there!