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.authorsregistry.org/
http://www.westernwriters.org/about_wwa.htm
http://www.horror.org/aboutus.htm
Paul,
ReplyDeleteThanks for this overview of how licensing works for fiction authors seeking to publish their work. I would have followed your blog a little bit better I think if this had been posted earlier in your thread.
The litigation between the Author's Guild and Google sounds interesting. It really gets at the heart of what we studied in the first week of our class. I would be interested in a summary of the case the Author's Guild made as well as the outcome, in addition to the links you provide to the guild's website about the case.
You are 100% correct: I should have used this in my introduction. But I used the blog as a way of putting my ideas down as they came to me, rather than organizing them on paper and then systematically and logically presenting the ideas in final form.
ReplyDeleteI know you did! You and I approached our blogs in a completely different way! One of the overall comments I plan to write about your blog is that I think you really treated it like a blog in the blog's traditional, weblog or diary, way, and I think it's great that you were able to stay on task while exploring different avenues and tangents of your topic. I did not do so well in that regard! I'm a very scientific writer...
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