How to Get Published

by Al Philipson

Rights

When you create a manuscript in any readable form, you automatically receive “copyrights” to that work. You can sue for actual damages is someone intrudes upon those rights. If you register you copyright, you can also sue for “punitive” damages.

What most people fail to realize is that, like property rights, copyrights are actually a “bundle” of rights.

A property “owner” may not “own” the subsurface rights to his property. Here in the Northwest, where Weyerhouser has owned so much of the property that it subsequently sold to developers, the original owner has retained the “subsurface” rights. That means that if oil is discovered on your property, you don’t own it; someone else does.

Now, how does this apply to copyrights?

You don’t have to sell all of your rights to a publisher.

For instance, if it’s a magazine article, you can sell “first North American rights” or “first serialization” rights for a story that runs past one issue of the magazine. Later, you can sell 2^nd serialization rights to another magazine that doesn’t mind leftovers and first Asian rights to a Japanese publisher and first Australian/New Zealand rights to someone “down under”.

In fact, you can break up your “rights” any way you want to, only limited by your imagination and that of the other party in the negotiation.

In the past, it was common for a clueless author to give his publisher a list of rights in the publisher’s “standard” contract. This allowed the publisher to publish the work and then, if you were very lucky, sell movie rights to Hollyweird. As the author, you were usually compensated and may have a say in the movie as an paid “advisor”. It certainly didn’t hurt book sales.

eBook rights

Now, during that time, eBooks were totally unheard of, so the publishers didn’t tie up those rights. Many authors are now profiting comfortably by re-releasing their old books in digital format, much to the chagrin of the NY publishing houses.

To counter that, many publishers are now including digital rights in their contracts. The problems for the author are two-fold:

1. The royalty rate for digital versions are the same pittance they allow for the printed version.
2. Several of the big NY houses are either tying up the e-rights (not publishing a digital version) or are pricing the digital version as high as (or in some cases higher than) the paper version, thus stifling eBook sales. They think they’re protecting their traditional turf. What they’re actually doing is failing to capitalize on the new media to their own and the author’s detriment.

Movie Rights

Now, trying to negotiate a movie deal may be outside the comfort level for the average author, but that’s something your agent should be doing, not your publisher. Why give away part of the movie revenue to them AND your agent? Make the agent earn it and you keep the publisher’s cut. They’ll still make a bundle from the increase in book sales.

Now, if your publisher also owns a movie studio or production company, you might want to be more generous with your movie rights.

Contracting with an eBook publisher is a lot easier and isn’t beyond the capability of most writers as long as you have a rudimentary grasp of contracts.

Time

Do pay attention to the amount of time any contract runs. Some tie up your rights for an unreasonable time, especially some of the seemingly good deals found on the Internet (often run by Publish on Demand presses). If it’s not an imprint you recognize, a long-term contract (beyond two years) may not be in your best interest. Most full-run paper books go out of print long before two years after initial printing unless sales continue to be brisk (in which case you’ll probably be happy to extend the contract AT THAT TIME.

Negotiation

Remember, a “standard” contract isn’t cast in concrete. You can always try to bargain for the rights you want to retain. If the publisher is worried that early eBook sales will destroy the market for paper sales (it’s usually quite the opposite), you can keep the digital rights and agree not to use them until maybe 6 months after the book is released in paper form. Or if they want to issue a hardback version, followed by a trade paperback version, and then a mass market paperback version, you can agree to e-publish 6 months after the mm paperback version comes out).

So, when you get to the negotiation stage of a book sale, by all means, only sell the rights you’re willing to part with. Analyze the value of the package in the light of what’s reasonably possible and hang onto the stuff that’s too valuable to bargain away.

Tags: agent, copyrights, digital rights, eBooks, movie rights, negotiation, publisher, value of rights

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 2:00 am and is filed under legal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.