Publishing Contracts and their Consequences

This last weekend a friend of a friend contacted me. She was interested in getting her books up on Amazon Kindle. I emailed her with my take on things thinking she wanted to put up new work. She responded that she wanted to put up the books she had published many years ago.

Since I wrote this article on Sunday, I discovered that she had self-pubbed this story years ago, so everything is fine with her situation. But this is still a topic that needs to be addressed
Uh-oh.

I saw a HUGE red flag problem here, and recommended to her that she find an attorney to look over her previous publishing contract. Not just any old attorney will do, she needs a literary or contracts attorney to decipher the legalese.

If you don't know how to find an attorney, contact your local Bar Association. Many agents are also literary attorneys. Hire one for a set fee to take a look at your contract.

*I am NOT an attorney and I don't claim to be one. Nor do I play an attorney on TV, stage or commercials.*

I will be the first to admit that contracts are out of my realm. Period. Many contracts have hidden items in them that can screw the author out of their earning simply because they overlooked that particular clause in the original contract signing.

Here's my take on the situation, thinking worse case scenario:

Just because the rights to a story revert back to you (the author), it doesn't necessarily mean you are in total control of your product (book).  The cover illustration and title might be the property of the publishing company. For all the author knows, there might be a clause that the publishing company might revert the rights to the story back to the author, BUT retain control over the characters/names/world.

The stories that she wants to publish had illustrations. Until she can prove herself as the owner of the illustrations, she does NOT own the right to use them. The images may belong to the publishing company or the artist, depending on THEIR contract.

If she used an agent to originally get the book published, that agent might still have a claim to a percentage of the work. But if she has since severed ties with the agent, she needs to look at the AGENCY contract to see if the agent can claim a percentage of her ebook profits. In recent years, many agents have included a perpetuity clause that would still claim monies from the author.

She also planned to use characters, scenes, etc in some new stories that she is writing. BUT depending on HOW the original publishing contract is worded, she might have signed her rights away to those characters, scenes, etc. I know of many writers who have had to relinquish their pseudonyms and their characters when they finished out their contracts with a publishing house. Many times the publisher owns the rights to the next book regardless of what the author wants, which means they can low-ball an offer to the author and the author can't do anything except walk away.

REMEMBER--this is your career. Don't sign a contract without legal consultation. And if you have signed contracts, thoroughly investigate how to get out of the contract and your legal obligations regarding that contract in the event you must break it.

Later, Peeps!