Yes, one of the quickest ways to get into business for yourself is to buy the reprint rights for someone else's product. It saves you the time and effort of developing your own product. It lets you start selling the product right away and you often keep all of the money. The problem seen far too often is that too many newbies buy totally worthless reprint rights. Then they devote a lot of time and effort promoting something that's only going to be a big disappointment. Don't you fall into this trap!
Before you buy any reprint rights, you need to really check them out and confirm that it is something you can sell to your market. You also need to make sure that the market for that product isn't already saturated. You *also* need to confirm that the value of the reprint rights won't be soon eroded by people selling the product too cheaply... or even giving it away as a "bonus."
You see this every day.... somebody working diligently to build a website around marketing a set of reprint rights that others are giving away. It's often only after they have their masterpiece on-line that they discover there is no real hope of them selling many copies of this product. Don't you fall into this sad trap.
But how do you make sure that the value of your reprint rights will hold up long-term? One way to do this is to only buy reprint rights to products that are sold only in very limited numbers. Also, buy reprint rights only for products where the license agreement preserves the value of the product. Two excellent examples of this type of reprint rights license is Mark Joyner's going out of business package, and the reprint rights I offer to the recordings from my upcoming workshop.
Mark Joyner's offer is described at: http://williecrawford.com/mark-special.html
Mark is getting out of the internet marketing business altogether. So he is selling off a lot of proprietary source code and the reprint rights to a lot of products. He is only selling 2000 copies total, and he is selling these with a lot of restrictions. If you are set up to market this type of product, it's an excellent value. Some of the source code is uncompiled so you can basically create your own products with his proprietary code. It's not for everyone so look carefully at what you get.
The second set of reprint rights I can recommend is the recordings to my very own upcoming workshop. I will only sell 100 total sets of these reprint rights so they will really hold their value. This will be the reprint rights to both the audiotape and the video tape recordings. You will have the right to resell these and keep all of the money. You will only be allowed to sell them in their original format (the can't be turned into an MP3 file or PDF file) and they do not come with master reprint rights. This is they type of product you really should look for. This is the type of product that will hold it's value for a long time and that you will easily earn back hundreds of times your investment.
The one thing you absolutely must understand is the reason reprint rights are sold in the first place. The product behind the reprint rights is created to make money... plain and simple. If the reprint rights are dirt cheap, the creator is probably hoping for a viral effect. He wants as many copies as possible in circulation because this somehow benefits him. If you buy these reprint rights you must realize that you're not going to make a lot of money since the market is probably going to be saturated very quickly.
Another reason publishers/marketers sometimes sell reprint rights is because the product behind the reprint rights is no longer selling. So they repackage the product as "reprint rights" and generate a renewed revenue stream. However, if you buy these reprint rights you're probably buying something that you won't even earn back your investment on. That's why it's critical that you really look at what you are getting.
A third reason reprint rights are sold is because of backend sales built into the product. The creator of these products sell you the rights to a product that will probably earn you a good return on your investment. However, if it's a product that sells for less than $50, you can be sure that built-in backend sales all accrue to the product originator. Something built into the product drives subsequent, related sales back to the source. These backend sales are generally for more expensive items and this is where the product creator really makes his money. That's ok, provided you get a marketable product when you purchase the reprint rights to the front end product. Just be aware of the big picture :-)
This is a fairly brief discussion of reprint rights. I assert that the majority of reprint rights being offered to you today are virtually worthless. You rarely get something for nothing, so when you buy cheap reprint rights you need to ask yourself what are you really buying. Top end reprint rights can be expensive but are worth it if you are prepared to properly market them. I actually recommend creating and marketing your own products, but until you do, reprint rights offer a way for you to get the lions share of the proceeds. Just make sure you don't get eaten by the lion during the transaction.