I self-publish so know very little about traditional publishing. I have a vague memory of reading an article that said if you sell first publisher rights say UK/English as an example that publisher retains those rights for 14 years. So if they dump the book because it is not selling well you are stuck until those rights expire before you can offer UK/English to another publisher. If I kept a link to the article I have lost it and my attempts to find whether above is correct on internet have not been successful. Just sucked me into complexities of publishing rights. Can anyone tell me if the above is correct or nonsense.
What you’re describing here is not first rights but exclusivity, and in everything I’ve ever seen, exclusivity periods are defined by the contract between you and the publisher, not by law.
First rights is what it sounds like, even when you get your rights back from publisher1, other publishers likely won’t be interested because it’s been published before ( unless it was a massive best seller of course, or if you go on to have big hits with future books)
