So I like creating threads like these in the hope that someone will fill in things I don't know, or correct me, but generally so that they help others. One about Copyright is here. I'll get the important part out first: I am not a lawyer, and if I was I wouldn't be your lawyer! So this isn't legal advice (and yeah on this topic that is very important, and copied from my other thread). A contract is two or more parties doing something for consideration. Meaning party A is hauling steel to party B's factory in return for party A being paid by party B. There's something going each way. Contracts in publishing tend to be of 4 types, Publishing, Hosting, Distribution/retail, Work for hire. I'll discuss in reverse order. Also a warning about Vanity publishing which isn't any of the above. Most important, in the cast majority of cases you are trading rights for money. Giving away copyright instead of a right to publish is generally bad. The basics of any novel contract are: what rights are you giving up, for how long, how/when does it end, what else do you have to do beside writing, how much are you getting paid. 1) Work for Hire This is generally the simplest and least likely for most people reading this but it does happen a lot in real life for established writers. Generally a company will create an Intellectual Property(IP) and hire writers to create short stories or novels for it while the company keeps the copyright. An example of this would be if Disney hired an author to create a novelization of the movie Frozen. The author is paid a set fee and Disney owns the copyright of the novel for eternity. That doesn't mean the set fee couldn't include things like bonuses/royalties for the book selling more copies than expected but that's not likely. Generally it's a contract that specifies how much is paid, when the payments come, how long the novel is, when is it due, topic approval by the editor, specifications on how rewrites or edits are made, and terms in case the final novel is rejected by editors or not turned in on time. In these cases you aren't really giving away copyright, you are doing a job, like you would digging ditches, and move on. 2) Distribution/retail contracts In self-publishing these tend to be much looser than a publisher dealing with a distributor but you can still run afoul of them. These are split between eBook and print mainly, but there are audio and foreign language distributors too. A distributor is something like Amazon's self-publishing platform, Direct2Digital, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble's self-publishing platform, Kobo's self-publishing platform, etc. Most of those I listed above are essentially only distributors to their own retail arm. Sites like Direct2Digital and Smashwords though distribute to others. So if you put your book on Smashwords you can sell it through their store, Kobo's store and others. Print distribution is a bit more complex. You can create a print on demand book at several places like Amazon, IngramSpark and I think Lulu. A customer could go into a local book shop and then order your book, or the local book could have copies on shelf. Many independent bookstores won't carry Amazon print on demand titles though. With a distributor/retailer you are usually agreeing to a contract with fairly straightforward terms but little protection. For example Amazon agrees to give you X percentage of a book sold in India in a certain price range and Y percentage if the price is outside that range. Distributors don't have any stake in your copyright and won't protect you if you get sued by some reader, author or local government (plagarism, defamation, obscenity, etc.) They might have some exclusivity agreements, like a better deal if you put your book up for 3 months at a time. But generally you can walk away from these contracts at any point. At no point are you giving up your rights, you are just allowing them to sell copies for you. 3) Hosting This is fairly similar to Distributors but generally set on an established website with a hopefully large reader base. The vast majority of these sites are for free stories and generally pay writers nothing though they might help writers advertise a payment method to readers. The main difference between these and the final publishers are they generally have no control over their authors other than simply banning them or removing works. The contract is generally only a Terms of Service that allows the site the right to host the novel. Wattpad and others fell into this category until they started signing authors to contracts. There are rights being assigned, for example ScribbleHub's terms of service mention: "By posting or publishing user content, you grant Scribble Hub the rights to host, store, display, broadcast, modify (which is made solely for the purpose of formatting for display) and distribute your user content in whole or in part, in any media formats only through our services." If you see anything on a site that's mentioning they have the right to monetize it through some sublicense, then it's not a host and should be treated as a publisher. By that I mean if you put your novel up on Wattpad and Wattpad decided it had the right to make a game, or allow someone else to make a game based on your novel, that isn't hosting. The rights granted to a hosting site generally are fairly restricted, and if a hosting site seeks too many rights there's often something scummy going on. Why? Because likely they are trying to get something for free that another company would pay for. 4) Publisher A publisher trades money for rights to an authors work for a certain term, the author keeps the copyright in almost every case. Those rights can be restricted in a variety of ways. Like first English publication rights, worldwide publication rights, audio rights, eBook rights, even movie rights. Terms can be limited by time, a sales goal(one example is a publisher can keep the publishing rights as long as 100+ books are sold per year) or some other method. A publisher contract is generally the most restrictive of contracts and western authors frequently complain about contracts with the big publishers. Rights are owned by the company, so if an author gives a company the right to publish their book and that company is bought by another company, the new company still has the right to publish the book. Contracts have a long list of terms like the author stating it is their original work, payment schedules, how accounting of sales can be audited. It's not simply about rights to demand changes to the work and payment schedules. Generally the rule should be, the more rights and potentially longer the right is given, the better the compensation should be. For example: English only, 1st serial world publication rights for a story in an anthology for a short story is one of the least complex contracts. You, the author, are giving the anthology publisher the right to publish the story in their anthology but no other book, only in English, and agreeing that you won't publish it anywhere else until they have published it. You might also have terms in the contract that if the Anthology isn't published within 4 years the rights revert to you in case the project fails or is cancelled. A final warning, Vanity Publishing is the bastard of all bastards. Unlike most publishing the money doesn't flow from publisher to author, instead the author is paying the publisher upfront for services like editing and printed copies. After that it is frequently on the author to find a way to sell the books, but even when it isn't they tend to charge yet more fees to do advertising and other services. There's nothing wrong with paying an editor for help with your novel. But services that make a living off of authors can sometimes be as predatory as payday loan companies. [Hurried this a bit since I have to go to work, might edit later to make it more readable and fix things left out]
english is bit weird, well there case book translated from english to english~ not old to new, but modern to modern~ uk to us.... wut it correlation with this thread? nothing~ read those contract carefully, consult with lawyer if you have no idea~
I don't think I've read that thread. The issue about the basics of contracts came to mind from the General Chat thread on Webnovel contracts.
oh it for contract on general way, on legal way depend on place sometime it possible to insert loophole on contract~ it may because of one party have insufficient knowledge or on weaker side for negotiation for various reason~ on correlation with novel theme, a new unknown writer aspire to be usually have much weaker part on negotiating contract with hmmm company~ limitation on information, connection, or other thing~ hence this cat stated it is better to consult with lawyer well cuz it expensive hmmm try to ask online maybe? hey internet is good place if used on right way~ cat video, song, cat, wiki, cat, history, sand cat kitten cought on video on desert, language course, cat who was a mayor~ read first then ask which one you dont understand~ example is hmmm EULEA.... yeah this cat read those thing on software agreement once and have no idea beside this cat buy it only for personal use forbidden to share to other for commercial? yup no idea with those wall of text~ another example is Term of Service from various sites~ this cat is B while da sites is X..... blablabla
Yep, if you are at the stage you are thinking of signing a contract you should consult a lawyer. If you are a writer who has an agent...agents aren't lawyers and are a very poor choice for advice since they make money if you sign.