Happy Halloween!
Cory Doctorow on the worsening and non-negotiable clauses in typical publishers' contracts:
Reasonable AgreementFor instance, some demand all existing, hypothetical, and future-conceivable rights, regardless of the unlikelihood of ever using them. As Doctorow mentions, the confidentiality clause is a bit weird. Recent contracts I've signed all include it, but when would I normally receive confidential information from a publisher, and why or to whom would I think of revealing it? No problem agreeing to that clause, since the possibility of violating it is remote.
I've heard of most of these abuses but not suffered many, happily. As for indemnifying publishers against liability, from my limited experience there's no avoiding some version of that clause. Nowadays standard contracts include it, and an author who refuses to sign simply won't get the contract. One can only hope for an agreement that doesn't include the outrageous versions described by Doctorow.
My one experience in having a novel bought by a major publisher was with Harlequin. For a first-time, unagented author, their contract is a non-negotiable boilerplate document. Fortunately, I've had no problems with them or the agreement. By the time I sold them my stand-alone vampire novel EMBRACING DARKNESS (part of my Vanishing Breed universe but not dependent on any other work in it), their former restrictive pen name policies I'd heard about no longer existed.
The small presses and e-publishers who've published my books and stories have been almost always fine to work with. I did once have a narrow escape from a noncompete clause. A startup small press that a friend in an online writers' group connected me with offered to accept the novel I sent them. The offer included a contract with a clause that made me gasp in horrified disbelief. A broad interpretation would have forbidden me in perpetuity to "compete" with the book, which included vampires, by publishing anything else on the same subject. Vampirism -- my specialty. That's enough gall to divide into three parts! I wrote VOID over each page of the contract they'd preemptively signed, filed it in a drawer, and notified the publisher that I refused the offer.
Doctorow's essay condemns noncompete clauses in the strongest terms. In my opinion, an author of nonfiction might reasonably be asked to refrain from writing anything else that might be considered duplicative for, say, a year at most. As for fiction, how would "compete" even be defined? Maybe in terms of allowing one company exclusive rights to a series? Fortunately, I'd already had lots of stories and novels in the Vanishing Breed universe published in multiple venues long before there was any chance that question would arise.
Margaret L. Carter
Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.
Posts
