Top 5 Publishing Contract pieces of advice

Oct 14, 2024

Hi lovely readers,

I’ll be on my way to the Frankfurt Book Fair tomorrow and currently in a frenzied state of mind so I thought I’d write about contracts!1 This week I'll be discussing some basic advice about publishing contracts for those of you without agents or who might be negotiating on their own. These points come up again and again when I talk to writers, so hopefully they'll be useful to you!

Reminder that if you’re in the UK, you can join the Society of Authors and ask them to vet a contract for you (do always ask a professional to at least walk you through a contract and what you’re agreeing to before signing).

Now, I know I’m a contracts geek and absolutely biased but having a basic knowledge of contracts is INCREDIBLY USEFUL. They are legally binding agreements and you need to understand what your obligations and rights are before signing. I've tried to strike a balance between providing explanations for obscure yet common terms but I may have presumed a small amount of knowledge of how publishing works, so feel free to ask me to clarify anything.

I’m not putting the below as a tip because I’m hoping you do this anyway but worth spelling it out just in case:

READ your contract.
UNDERSTAND your contract.
ASK QUESTIONS of the publisher if you don’t understand something, and let them explain to you in black and white over email (I believe the cool people call this *receipts*).
Every contract can be amended or tweaked and SHOULD be negotiated. Don’t worry about being annoying.

Disclaimer: this is general advice for your information, you should still get your specific contract checked by a professional.

Photos of contracts are utterly boring so have a cute dog instead — may you look as regal after signing a fair and well-negotiated contract that you have read and understood fully:

Rights

Any publisher’s basic contract template tends to include many, if not all, possible rights that can be exploited for a book, regardless of them having the capacity to actually do something about these rights or not. There is nothing sadder than rights that could be sold or used languishing on a publisher’s list. It’s important to understand which rights you are granting and why.

Formats: you would usually grant volume rights (which tend to be hardback and/or paperback physical formats) but always check that the publisher produces ebooks and audiobooks before granting them the rights. Include a reversion of these rights if they haven’t been produced so that you can at least sell them to someone else.
Territory/language: you don't have to grant rights for your book for all languages worldwide to a publisher — do ask them first what their distribution system is to sell their English-language edition worldwide and their Rights set-up to sell foreign rights. If they don’t have any then only grant English language rights in the UK & Commonwealth excluding Canada (the usual territory for UK deals but I’ll do a post on territories at a later stage).
Subrights / Subsidiary Rights: writers (and their agents) usually retain rights like dramatisation/film & TV / documentaries, merchandising or graphic novel rights as they tend to be better handled by an agent2 and can languish in limbo when at a publisher3. For all other rights excluding contract basics like quotation, permission, educational, anthology etc4, you may want to ask the publisher how they will use them.

Obviously, the bigger the publisher, the more they will have departments to handle these rights so this would probably be more relevant for small publishers.

Exclusivity

There are two ways this can go — your contract is either exclusive (so only one publisher can use the rights mentioned in said contract) or non-exclusive (no one can do anything exclusively and several publishers can publish non-exclusively). Exclusive rights tend to be common for full-length books and non-exclusive rights for essays/poems in anthologies and short stories, but I’m seeing a lot of these small contracts pop up with exclusive terms.

The reason why it matters is that you may want to include a short piece (poem, short story, essay) you've published elsewhere in a new collection of your writing and wouldn’t be able to if you previously granted exclusive rights. For a short story or a poem, you are also likely to only be paid a small flat fee (meaning you wouldn’t be getting royalties, even if the book sells many copies) so it is important for you to be able to leverage a successful book publication where you may not have had much financial gain in other ways.

If the publisher insists on exclusive terms for your short piece, it is possible to negotiate a time limit on the exclusivity and make it non-exclusive afterwards. Worth noting that any contract that includes exclusive wordings should ideally have a reversion/termination of contract clause (see below).

Remuneration

A writer should be remunerated for the work that they do — may that be a flat fee or advance against royalties/earnings or royalties only or sometimes just copies of the book. Any financial terms should be specified clearly in the contract with a note that money should be paid within 30 days5. You could also clarify that the contract would only be valid if signed and paid (especially relevant for very small publishers). This means that if you are not paid within a timely fashion, you are able to inform the publisher that the contract is null and void and you can take your work elsewhere.

In case this isn't obvious: if you, as the writer, are paying for the printing costs of the book or the basic marketing costs then this isn’t traditional publishing and you are effectively self-publishing / using a vanity publisher (as they used to be called, now sometimes labelled hybrid publisher). There is nothing wrong with doing that if this is what you’ve chosen to do, but some publishers pretend this is normal and is traditional publishing which isn’t the case. If you’re unsure, there’s a Society of Authors guide about Who Will Be Publishing My Book?.

Option and Non-Compete Clause

An option is when a publisher has the right to have a look at your next book exclusively, as they want to invest in your career. Some wordings can be constraining for authors so a few tips:

You can clarify the genre of the book in the option to be the same as the one you are contracted to write (poetry, narrative non-fiction, literary fiction, etc).
You can put a timeline on it — the publisher would need to get back to you with a decision/offer in a certain amount of time. (You don't have to accept the offer though! You can negotiate, or turn down the offer.)
You can avoid prescriptive terms about any future deal, or any clause restricting what you can do if a deal isn't reached. The simpler the wording, the better.

A non-compete clause is there to prevent the writer writing more or less the same book and selling it to another publisher in a way that would prejudice sales:

Clarity is king here so you can include the genre you’re writing. And it's worth specifying that the new book would need to negatively affect sales, rather than just exist.
Be careful of the specific wordings if you’re writing non-fiction/memoir — you do want to be able to talk about your life elsewhere.
If you can, agree a time limit or link it to the option clause (aka, if they turn down your next book, you can ignore the non-compete clause).

Reversion/Termination of contract

You always want to include specific wording on how to get out of a contract if things don’t go as planned. This is very important — negotiating contracts is about pre-empting any disasters and worst-case scenarios. Many publishing contracts tend to be for the term of copyright, which is 70 years after the author’s death, so you wouldn't be able to do anything in your lifetime without a reversion clause.

If you happen to be in a position where your publisher has, for example, either not published your book or left your book unavailable or out of print, you want to be able to get your rights back.

It’s especially important to include a provision in the event your publisher fails to meet its obligations like paying you money, publishing within deadlines, keeping you involved and informed, etc. The publisher will certainly want to include a provision for you not delivering the book to protect themselves, and you should be able to do the same.

Let me know in the comments if this was helpful and if you have any questions.

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