To be a writer, you must know about contracts and agreements, type of rights to offer, copyright, and how to set fees for freelance work. If you write with the intention and even the need to publish, all of these factors are of great importance to you, and you must know about them before even approaching a publisher with your written words.
Writing as a full-time occupation is a profession that requires full-time work. Whether you like it or not, you must know the business end of writing, if you intend to survive in this world. There are many facets of the business that affects anyone selling his or her writing. We now take a look at these issues.
CONTRACTS AND AGREEMENTS
Journal and magazine editors generally work on verbal agreements. A few others will deluge you with a stack of legal documents that make you wonder if it is even worth the effort to write for that magazine for the $250 it pays for the article. We are not going to practice law here; you must get your own lawyer. But we can discuss some of the ramifications of contracts and agreements and they mean.
Usually when the writer offers a work for publication to a magazine or book publisher, the writer is offering only specific rights, as it is in the author's interest to limit the publisher's use of the material. The publisher, on the other hand, seeks to maximize its use or possible use of the material, all at the lowest price possible. Therefore, negotiations are necessary on some basic points.
Writers generally offer only first rights' on magazine articles. This allows the author to sell the same article over and over again to as many publishers as possible at later dates. There are also other creative uses for the work that have to be protected.
Whether you give the magazine the right to publish your article in their periodical only once or as many times as they choose, is up to you. It depends upon the contract you make with the publisher. It is always best to write the rights you offer on the cover sheet or mention it in the letter to the editor, "First serial rights are available," for example.
TYPE OF RIGHTS
First Serial Rights. This means the writer offers the right to a publisher of a magazine or newspaper the right to publish the article for the first time in any periodical owned by them. The author retains all other rights. This can be even further defined by specifying the First Serial Rights are offered but only for "UK and Europe," or "NorthAmerica," etc. This gives the writer the chance to sell the First Serial Rights in other parts of the world to different publishers.
Second Serial Rights (Reprint). This gives the newspaper or periodical the right to publish any article after it has already appeared in another newspaper or periodical. In other words, the writer is licensing the article for use in more than one market.
ALL RIGHTS. If you sign away all rights, that is exactly what you have done. You forfeit the work forever. You can never use it again. If you write something that you think you will want to publish again, ask the editor to accept first serial rights instead. Or, some periodicals will agree that after a specified time period, they will reassign the rights back to the author.
SUBSIDIARY RIGHTS. These are the rights, other than book publication rights, that should be covered in a book contract. These may include various serial rights: movie, television, audiotape, and other electronic rights, translation rights, so forth. The book contract must stipulate clearly who has control over these rights, the author or the publisher, and what percentage of sales from the licensing of these sub-rights goes to the author.
DRAMATIC, TELEVISION AND MOTION PICTURE RIGHTS. This means the writer is selling their material for use on the stage, in television or in the movies.
SELLING SUBSIDIARY RIGHTS
The primary right in the world of book publishing is the right to publish the book itself. All other rights (such as movie rights, audio rights, book club rights, electronic rights and foreign rights) are considered secondary, or subsidiary, to the right to print publication. Authors and their agents traditionally try to avoid granting the publisher subsidiary rights that they feel capable of marketing themselves. Publishers, on the other hand, typically hope to obtain control over as many of the sub rights as they can. It is logically correct to presume that subsidiary rights are best served by being left in the hands of the person or organization most capable of and most interested in exploiting them profitably. Sometimes this is the author and the agent, and sometimes it is the publisher.
Compensation for these rights is a major source of conflict between writers and publishers.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright laws are there to protect the originator of the work. It is the author's protection that he or she can profit from their labors. It is without question, unequivocally so, that the prevailing law recognizes you, the author, as the owner and grants you the exclusive rights to profit and benefit from your work.
Authors and writers mistakenly believe that copyright protection means that they have to send off for something from the government. The fact is that the work does not have to be registered with the Copyright Office in order for the work to be copyrighted. The truth is that any piece of writing is copyrighted the minute the words hit the paper. Registration can provide the added comfort of providing a legal date of the proof of the copyright.
Note: The author is the author of "English for (New) Writers! Your Guide to Success!" A book on how to get published as a new writer. |
