Rights Reversion when Title is OOP

One of the traditional clauses in better fiction publishing contracts was the rights revision clause. All rights, including the rights assigned under this contract, revert to the author if the title is allowed to go out of print (unavailable by conventional means from the publisher and in bookstores) for more than 6 months. The author is required to send a certified letter to the publisher's legal department asking the publsiher to reprint the work or allow the rights to revert to the author. Sometimes the publisher would send the author copies of recent invoices to bookstores to prove the book was still in print (and then the author could make note of that for the next expected royalty statement and make certain he was paid for the sales). Today, however, pubishers claim the book is still in print when electronic copies are offered through the publisher's web site or print on demand copies are available. One publisher can easily tie up a title and keep sales to a bare minimum for decades, should the publisher decide to do so. Authors must monitor their contracts to ensure they are not vulnerable to being buried in electronic graveyards where their works barely sell but the rights are still controlled by that publsiher. All contracts should also have a reasonable expiration date (8 years after first publication, for example) when the rights can be renegotiated or offered to another publisher.







http://www.sfwa.org/contracts/intropubcontracts5521.pdf

Traditional Publishing Practices in the good old days before electronic rights considerations

In traditional publishing practices, the author submitted works to acquisitions editors at commercial or academic presses. If the work were accepted by the publisher, the publishing house would send a boilerplate contract to the author offering to publish the work. Commercial fiction publishing practices specified the transfer of all rights from the author to the publisher for a specified length of time, and the contract usually specified the amount of payment advanced against royalties, the percentage of cover price that would be paid in royalties for various editions, and the percentage of subsidiary rights (usually split 50/50 between publisher and author). If the novel sold to movies or television, the payment would be split 50/50. If the novel were sold to an audiobook publisher or paperback publisher, the split would be 50/50. But there was no mention of any royalties for electronic versions in those pre-digital days. How various publishers exploited electronic rights and paid no royalties at all for electronic publication is a horror story too terrible to relate here. Suffice it to say that authors got the short end of the stick.

    Professional writers' organizations like Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), Western Writers of America (WWA), Mystery Writers of America (MWA), Romance Writers of America (RWA), Horror Writers Association (HWA), American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), and the Authors Guild cried fowl and collectively sued some publishers. They also, individually and collectively, developed model contracts for electronic rights and urged members to line through and change boilerplate contracts to include specific wordings that protected authors' rights and assured adequate compensation. They also established the Authors Registry, a kind of Copyright Clearing House, to make it easy for anyone to legally photocopy copyrighted works for a small fee (see http://www.authorsregistry.org/).

    These writers organizations have been negotiating with Google about the digitization project settlement (http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/settlement-resources.html).

 

 

References and Links

http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/settlement-resources.html

http://www.asja.org/about.php

http://www.authorsregistry.org/

http://www.rwanational.org/

http://www.westernwriters.org/about_wwa.htm

http://www.horror.org/aboutus.htm

 

SFWA Statement on Electronic Rights

Professional writers' organizations offer guidance and model contracts to author members. The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), along with The Authors Guild, has been in the forefront of monitoring unauthorized use of members' works on the web.

http://www.sfwa.org/contracts/elec.htm

Is the Traditional Publishing Model Dying?

Here are two links to articles about the rumors of the death of the traditional publishing model:

http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/12/book-publishing-authors-oped-cx_lo_1212osborne.html


http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/04/books-publishing-social-media-opinions-columnists-kindle-twitter.html?partner=relatedstoriesbox


Traditional publishing is changing. But is it dead or dying? To paraphrase Mark Twain: rumors of its death may be greatly exagerated!

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The Fiction Industry

Publishers bank on creating a lucrative industry around each author they publish. Stephen King, for example, is an industry in himself that supports a bevy of agents, lawyers, secretaries, editors, copy editors, sub-rights specialists, screen writers, film producers, film diectors, and television series creators with his stories, novels, comic books, movies, made-for-tv movies, and tv series. They all depend on Stephen King's works selling and continuing to sell. All of Steve's novels and short stories, including his first novel (Carrie), remain in print after 30 years, and the accumulated monthly income from all of those works adds up to a pretty penny. Everyone who is part of the Stephen King Industry takes a cut of the pie, and Steve only gets to keep a fraction of the total revenue. Hopefully, there's a little of the frosting left by the time everyone else--including the IRS--slices it up into pieces. I've known authors who have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual revenue, but they don't have enough left to pay the rent and health insurance after the agents, lawyers, feds, and state revenuers take their skim.

Duke University Library Collections on mobile phones

Duke University now offers iPhone apps to access Duke University Library digital image collections. Here is the link. Read all about it!


http://tinyurl.com/n9nue7

Two LJ Articles worth reading

Wiley-Blackwell license practices

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6662895.html



ARL opposes confidentiality agreements with vendors
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6664369.html?nid=2673&source=link&rid=1690330361

Why poor, starving writers need royalties for digital works

Most fiction writers are still poor, starving artists who can't afford to quit their day jobs to pursue their craft full-time. That is their greatest desire in life: They simply want to have the time to write the Great American Novel that everyone will read and love and cherish and buy (or, atleast, every library will buy). But most writers don't have that time to write because they can't afford to quit their day jobs. It's a classic Catch-22 scenario!



Writers like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and other best-selling authors have escaped from the 9 to 5 trap (both were school teachers before their writing sold to the movies), but they still have to write constantly (and well, each novel expected to be better than the last) in order to pay their bills (including their agents, publicists, etc., as well as rent and insurance and ISP fees). Not only must they write, they must also sell their writing.