Weekly Writers: Licensing Rights

With some tips on publishing contracts

Here’s the Weekly Writers Monday post. This post is for paid subscribers only.

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Licensing Rights

As I mentioned previously, if you sign a contract with a traditional publisher (Big Five or not) you will be assigning some of your rights to them in exchange for payments. If you are a hybrid author you will be doing the same for some of your works. It’s worth mentioning a bit more about rights.

In general, an author starts out owning all the rights to their book. Some publishers and rights buyers like to treat the rights as a single thing, and to claim all of them (with “all-rights, all-territories, all-formats” contracts): even those they don’t plan to use. And I’ve heard horror stories of contracts that gave the trade publisher all the rights; the publisher then sold subsidiary filming rights on and one book became a popular TV series making the publisher a lot of money: but the contract didn’t stipulate separate payments for sales of subsidiary rights, so the author didn’t get a penny from the TV show. The publisher was bullish, and stuck to the contract, which was carefully worded in their favour. So do beware of these traps, where the initial excitement in being offered a contract can lead to accepting grossly unfair terms and conditions that are detrimental to your future. Contracts should be equitable for both parties, not just for the publisher.