Ficlets

It’s easy: If you’re a publisher, just say that you contractually want to have the rights to his or her work forever:

The Authors Guild is warning members about a new rights provision in Simon & Schuster contracts and urging them to consider not signing with the publisher.

In an an alert sent to its membership today, executive director Paul Aiken writes that S&S’s new contract language gives the publisher the ability to retain rights to a book for the entire length of copyright, even if the book is not in print but remains in S&S’s electronic database. Under its old contracts, rights to a book would revert back to the author if sales reached an agreed upon low level or the book was declared out of print. “This is an electronic warehousing of rights,” Aiken said.

According to the Guild, under the new contract S&S considers a book to be in print, and under its control, so long as it’s available in any form, even if no copies are available to be ordered by traditional bookstores. With the new contract language, the Guild asserts, the publisher would be able to stop printing a book and prevent the author from publishing it with any other house. Aiken said the change was first brought to the Guild’s attention about a week ago and discussions with authors and agents have confirmed that the new provision is now part of the standard S&S contract.

My thoughts on this? Yeah, not so much. This is one of those things that if it were slipped into one of my contracts, my agent would be slipping it right back out before we signed anything. Ideally the reason you have your books stay with a publisher is that the publisher keeps selling them – but if they aren’t selling, then you want to get the rights back and hopefully get those books out to another publisher that will give them a better push. This is the sort of thing which – despite the publisher protestations to the contrary – really isn’t in the best interest of authors.

This is also why it’s useful to have an agent, because a good agent will see something like this, know it’s a rights grab, and redline it – something that authors, who are paid to write, not negotiate contracts, might miss entirely (especially if they’re newbie writers who don’t know much of anything). So: Get that agent, people. I’m just saying.