Meet Ursula Rogers

Even though Foreign Rights Executive Ursula Rogers of Templar Publishing didn't know a word of German, the prospect of seeing how a German company dealt with book rights issues was too tempting to pass up. "Working in foreign rights for a children's publisher in the U.K., I was eager to see how a rights department operates in a foreign company that publishes adult titles," says Rogers. "Templar has recently started its own fiction list, so I wanted to learn more about selling rights for these types of books and what better way to do this than to work for a company who has been selling fiction for over 100 years!"

Rogers, 27, has spent a month already of her three-month stint at Piper Verlag in Munich as part of the GROW exchange program. There, she has been working on creating foreign rights catalogs for their backlist titles and researching English publishers who might be interested in Piper titles.

"The biggest difference on the job is down to the different books the two companies produce," says Rogers. And since Templar does mostly co-editions rather than just selling the rights, the process requires much more long-term work so the department is bigger than at Piper - five people at Templar versus two at Piper.

But probably the biggest differences are not at work. "Outside of the job, the biggest difference was always going to be living in a country where English isn't the first language," Rogers says. Which isn't to say that a new culture and new city don't offer advantages. "Munich is a beautiful, very relaxed city with its parks and beer gardens. It's a relatively small city and easy to get around by bike, which is perfect. Plus, it's only a train ride away from the Bavarian lakes and Alps to the south."

After a month, Rogers has only good things to say about the exchange: "It's been an amazing experience."