Rights Sales Manager

About the Role

The Rights Sales Manager is responsible for driving and increasing income from co-edition and subsidiary rights in line with budget and target expectations. This includes securing licensing deals within designated territories, ensuring each agreement maximizes revenue and profitability while achieving year-on-year growth. The role will also contribute to shaping the overall Rights Strategy, covering areas such as co-edition, print and digital rights.

The role involves securing rights sales across all formats (print, digital, and other), including co-edition and film & royalty deals, to meet annual financial targets. It requires developing and managing territory strategies, building deep market knowledge, and fostering strong customer relationships, including working with agents where appropriate. You are expected to travel internationally for 6–8 weeks each year, including meeting existing and new customers, and attending major book fairs to maximize rights opportunities. You will maintain comprehensive product knowledge to inform sales and commissioning decisions, and ensure accurate processing of rights deals. You will collaborate with other internal departments to ensure smooth operations, which include contributing to revenue forecasting, monitoring emerging rights trends, and delegating administrative tasks to assistants for efficiency.

We operate a hybrid working policy that requires a minimum of 2 days per week in the Oxford office.

About You

To be successful in this role, you will ideally have/be:

Essential:

• Previous experience within a sales environment and thorough knowledge of Rights business models and processes – for co-edition and licensing
• Strong negotiation skills, including ability to think creatively to optimize third party partnerships across cultures and languages
• Willingness to travel to overseas book fairs and to visit customers at their offices, travelling alone or with team as needed
• Strong commercial acumen, ability to understand all financial models pertaining to licensing and ability to work towards targets ensuring profitability of all deals
• Adaptable, with strong organisational and time management skills to manage busy workloads
• System knowledge – possess or have ability to develop effective knowledge of all relevant systems in order to efficiently manage life cycle of rights deals

Desirable:

• Previous experience in digital licensing

Benefits

We care about work/life balance here at OUP. With this in mind we offer 25 days’ holiday that rises with service, plus bank holidays and Christmas closure (3-days) and a 35-hour working week. We are open to discussing flexibility in respect to working patterns, dependent on role. We also have a great variety of active employee networks and societies.

We help make your money go further by contributing to your pension up to 12%, offering loans and savings schemes through our partnership with Salary Finance, in addition to travel to work schemes and access to a wide range of local discounts.

This role comes with the added benefit of a sales bonus.

Please see our Rewards and Recognition page for more information.

We are committed to supporting diversity in our workforce, and ensuring an inclusive environment where all individuals can thrive. We seek to employ a workforce representative of the markets that we serve and encourage applications from all.