Know Your Author Rights—and Hang Onto Them!

When a book or magazine publisher agrees to publish your work, you must sign a contract. In this contract there is a very important area concerning rights.

Be very careful about which rights you retain, and which rights you hand over.
For a magazine article, you want to grant first rights only. Be careful of granting electronic rights, which almost everyone will ask for these days. If they are paying you for a piece, be clear about whether you want them to be able to distribute it on the Internet. If you do grant this right, know that the article probably can’t be resold anywhere else (because it will be so available to everyone else).

It may be advantageous for you to grant electronic rights, as long as you make sure you stipulate that they must include your byline and web site address(es). This way you will get something out of it—free, targeted traffic to your site. This is a key marketing strategy which I use all the time. I write articles and distribute them for free—but only with a carefully-worded resource box that tells people where they can go for more (enticing) information.

I was recently contacted by a publisher who wanted to rework an article I’d written back in 1987 for a product they were selling. They didn’t ask me, they just told me, and included a check for $25. Upon inspection of my contract, I learned that they had a right to do that, because even though they had bought “first rights,” the contract also said they could use it as a reprint in an anthology or other product.

As for books—grant only print rights, if you can. I have clients whose hands are tied on creating other (more lucrative) products, because they signed away things like “audio-video recordings of any or parts of the WORK or of adaptations of the WORK.”

One author recently told me that current book contracts include wording such as “the right to all forms of the WORK which currently exist or may be invented, into perpetuity”! Yikes!

If you do land any kind of publishing contract, seek out a good intellectual properties attorney, or at least send me an email about your contract. I can help you spot what may be problematic in it.

Note that agents aren’t always as sensitive to these things as you should be. Though they are supposed to have your best interests in mind, they want to seal a deal, and unless they would be included on your other information product ventures, they don’t have a vested interest in making sure you retain these rights.

The words you create are your most important assets as an author. Make sure you protect them!