Richard King to head rights team at Bookouture

Richard King is to move from Orion to Hachette stablemate Bookouture to head a new in-house rights team. 

King will join Bookouture as head of rights on 4th May. Currently senior rights manager at Orion, he has been at the imprint for the past 10 years, where he has worked significantly on film and TV rights both for Orion and Little, Brown. 

In his new role, King will report to Peta Nightingale, contracts, rights and author development director.  

The appointment marks the creation of in-house rights team for Bookouture, which was previously managed by the Little,Brown rights department. Saidah Graham, contracts and rights executive at Bookouture, will also join the team. 

Nightingale said: “For the past four years, since Bookouture’s acquisition by Hachette UK, our translation rights have been sold by the brilliant rights team at Little, Brown, who have done an amazing job for our authors. We have now reached a size and a stage in our development where we need to bring the focus on selling rights in Bookouture titles in-house, and to properly integrate the rights and editorial teams to optimise our acquisitions and development of IP.”  

She added: “I’m enormously grateful to the whole team at Little, Brown for the work they’ve put in to getting us to this point, and I will miss working with them hugely. But looking to the future, I couldn’t be more excited to begin working with Richard and, with Saidah Graham who joined us in September last year as contracts and rights executive, to building our new rights team from the ground up. Richard’s experience, creativity and energy make him the perfect person for the job, and I can’t wait for him to join us.” 

King said: “I’m absolutely thrilled to be joining Bookouture at such an exciting stage in their expansion, and to be working with Peta and Saidah in the inaugural rights team there. Commercial publishing is what gets my blood racing, and I feel privileged to be taking the reins of translation rights sales for the Booktouture list and to become a passionate ambassador for their fantastic authors in the international rights market. I’ve had a wonderful 10 years at Orion, and I am endlessly grateful for all the opportunities they have given me, which have put me in the position to take on such an exciting new role – I can’t wait to get started.” 

From 4th May, King can be contacted at richard@bookouture.com.