Episode 79: The Ins and Outs of Book Contracts
K
Hello, my beautiful Cinnabar Moths or any kind of moth you’d like to be welcome to the Writers Triangle, a podcast about publishing and all things books. And today we’re going to be talking about book deals and author contracts. And what brought this to mind was I recently became aware of the fact that the Authors Guild has made their model contract available for free online. And I’ll have a link down in the description to Authors Guild and the model contract. Because I think that’s so cool that they did that. Our contract is 16 pages long and has over 30 sections, and each section has three or four subsections. And it’s so it’s really thick, dense reading. And the Authors Guild does a really great job of breaking down what every single section of a contract is advising authors what to look out for, and it’s free. So it’s, it’s gonna cost you a bit of time to look through it. And I advise people to give themselves a couple of days and just be gentle with yourself and make sure that you’re understanding and feeling comfortable with with going through this really dense legal document. And the same is to be said, when pressed into a contract. For example, our contracts are valid for two weeks after we send it, that’s the length of time that we give our authors to review the contract. But if at that two week mark, if there’s, if there are questions, or if you don’t feel comfortable signing it, at that point, we do have a conversation, we don’t just withdraw it. And that’s something that should be really, really important to when you look at the contract, there’ll be several different sections in the contract that talk about different things that can lead to termination of the contract and can lead to the deal or offer being pulled. And another thing to be so just sticking on termination for a minute, we do have built into our contracts. You know, I’ve talked about it before, like if there’s some conduct that doesn’t quite, you know, fall in line with, with what the precedents for if there’s hate speech or something like that coming from an author, then we can pull their deal. And so looking at why an agreement could be terminated and why an offer can be terminated. Because once they send you a contract, they aren’t a little bit the presses a little bit bound to make the offer and follow through on it if you say yes and agree to all of the terms. So that’s why we have a duration of time in there for the contract is because we don’t want to be waiting in perpetuity for someone to decide whether or not they’re going to hold us to the potential promise of a contract, because once it’s sent to you it is the ball is in your court. So pay attention to deadlines. And be aware that those deadlines are fixed. And for some places, it’s a strict cut off, if they don’t receive it by the deadline, they just move right on. And the offers off the table. And other places like us will contact you and be like, Hey, what’s going on? Do you have any questions? And we’ll you know, pursue you and follow up. But that’s not always the case. And they’re not obligated to.
K
Now of course, I think best practices would be to reach out and just say, hey, here’s if you’d like the author’s work enough to send them a contract and to make an offer, I would hope that he would like the the author’s work enough to be like, hey, what, what’s going on and to make the process transparent and to ask, and for me, that’s a huge red flag. If you’re signing a contract, and you have questions about it before you sign, or if there’s anything that’s making you nervous about signing the contract, I think, if the place or if the presser agent or whoever is not comfortable with you asking questions, and makes me kind of squint and look at them a little bit and say, Hey, what’s going on? What are you? Why are you rushing the process? What don’t you want me to see? And I think there should be no defensiveness and it should just be open, honest, polite conversation, you know, you ask, Hey, I don’t really understand this section on that section, to make sure that you are really, really comfortable with the document your assigning, because it does lock you in to whatever’s written. And, you know, so when you’re looking at the the granting of rights section, or you’re looking at the copyright section or the royalty section, make sure that you really understand each of those sections and what those different terms mean, and what those different sections talk about. So like the copyright and the granting of rights is basically giving someone the right to publish your work. And the royalty section lays out how much money you’re getting when you’re getting the money and what you have to do to get that money. And there are four basic dates that that published that presses give money to the author. We personally only do one payment of the address out, we do a one time payment, and that’s on the receipt of final manuscript. And final manuscript is, once you send us the manuscript, then we send it to our editor, then we send it back to your authors for them to review the edits, once we receive that copy back from them after they have reviewed the edits, that’s the final manuscript, because then we send that to our editor, they finalize the Edit, and they send it to our typesetter. And our types that are types of books, there’s no need for any more author interaction. And the reason that we pay on receipt of final manuscript is because I don’t want to be in the position of having to ask an author to give us money back, that’s like Ill No, and I don’t want to sue anybody. So I feel like it’s just easier to do it on receipt of final manuscript. And that makes everything Nice to meet and tidy sum. And we used to do it on the signing of the contract, we used to stage out the the advance. So the dates that advances are usually paid on the signing of the contract, receipt of final manuscript, publication date, and one year anniversary of the publication date. The reason for this, the staging of it is one to make sure that you have a book and that the author actually turns in a book. And to doing it on the one year anniversary, it gives presses a chance to earn some of the money that they need to pay the advance. We don’t do that I just find for me and for our bookkeeping, that it is much easier to just do the advance upon the entire advance upon receipt of the final manuscript.
K
So understanding when you’re going to get your royalties how those royalties are going to be paid. And what you must do to to get those royalties, I think, is really important. And also in the royalty section, it talks about how royalties will be paid. So sorry, how you get the advance rather, and also how you get royalties. The royalties? Are there different royalties for different types of books, and different types of publications. So now there’s, you know, there’s hardcover, paperback, ePubs, and audiobooks. And there’s different royalty rates for that. And then there’s also, you know, in that royalty section, a clause for non royalty books for when we give out review copies. And the reason that it’s in there is because there’s this really interesting phenomena, where Amazon will sometimes sell books at a loss. So it’ll actually be cheaper for the press, to pi books in bulk from Amazon, to send out to reviewers, which I always find really interesting. And I just find Amazon business model to be fascinating. So Amazon will buy a bunch of books. And if you print through Amazon, which we sometimes do sometimes don’t, it depends on what’s going on with Amazon at the time. If you let Amazon print your books, then they will have just a lot. They will do a mass printing for some books. And if they do a mass printing for some books, those books will be sold most likely at a lower than retail through Amazon. With Amazon, I think they’re beneficial to print through them after the book has been released. Because they don’t let you schedule kind of reference to hardback or paperback but they don’t let you schedule one of them for preorder. And so that’s why we don’t do them at the beginning before the book launch. But we do promote them after the book has launched. Because it just makes sense. And it’s also great to get those deals are selling sending out those review copies. Looking at what is it you’re getting royalties for and there’s some advertising and like advertising weird because Google Play was kind of put in the advertisement because it used to be a Google Book Search. And now it’s Google Play. And Google Play is is ebooks, kind of. And sometimes they’re audiobooks and sometimes paperback sometimes are hardback. So Google Play has its own little little mistake. So just looking at make sure that every way that a publisher can make money off of a book that that you can imagine, I think is important because looking at that from advertising section, and the royalties and the day and age of tick tock and social media I think it’s really important to look at is the press that you work with monetizing their social media, and if they’re monetizing their social media, then they need to be making sure if they’re using excerpts from your book for monetization, that some sort of royalty agreement is worked out for that. And some say, No, we’re not giving you any royalties on that. And some say that we’ll give you 50% of the royalties from your book and with all of the analytics are, there is ways there are ways to track which exact book, because whenever you do sort of AdSense on social media, it does show you what videos and, and which content is making the most revenue. And if that content is related to your book, then you deserve some of the proceeds proceeds of that content. And that’s why I think in the royalty structure, making sure that from advertising, it’s in there, or social media, some kind of clause that if they’re using your book for content, and they have monetize their content, that you’re getting some of that monetization, and some of those funds, because as, as y’all probably know, if you’ve already published the publishing of the long game, right, you get your advance, and then it takes years to earn out the advance and start getting royalties from your book. So having everything that could count against that advance. And everything that could be royalties counted, is super important in the modern era. And I think that before, I know, when we started, we started before the Tik Tok boom, and monetization on tick tock is happening so quickly. It’s 2023. Right now, where we have a tick tock, but it’s not active yet. And when you’re listening to this, hopefully, far, far in the future, and we’re still around and doing well. We’ll have our Tik Tok up and running. But we are on Instagram and Twitter. And we currently don’t. And, of course, YouTube, and we currently don’t. And Facebook, we don’t monetize any of our social media. But if that monetization ever happened, then of course, we would, you know, pay royalties has already baked into our contract.
K
And I think that, for us, it just felt like the right thing to do, looking at social media and looking at at how things change, because right at the time that we were opening cinnabar moth, there was a lot of talk about Spotify, and presses making money off of published books on Spotify, that weren’t audiobooks, but still using the books for content and monetizing it and sort of just not paying authors and they were doing a lot of other shady stuff to us like, I don’t want to make my money by making authors feel bad or, or ripping off, they’re ripping off authors. And I do view that as ripping an author off, if you’re making money off of the author, then there should be some sort of agreement that the author gets to enjoy that as well like, right, let’s have a rising tide, rise all all boats sort of thing. So make sure when you’re looking at that relative section to space, that there’s room for if something happens, that you can’t imagine, make sure that it covers all monetization of your book from that entity that you signed with. Yeah, and I hope that makes sense. Looking at delivery, I think delivery delivery dates are really, really important to pay attention to look at when the manuscript is due, look at how long you have to review and edit. We give our authors 30 days to review and edit. Sometimes we do ask for a quicker turnaround. If for some reason a manuscript was delivered late and we you know, gave an author an extension, for the most part, we go for 30 days and that review process, you really need to make sure that you’re paying attention to what they expect the delivery to be, what does acceptance mean, what is the review process look like? And, you know, look at what are they? What’s the publication process? What rights are you granting them? What sub licenses are you granting. And also look at the promotional materials section, and look at what you are agreeing to do as an author, because that promotion section and the materials and ours we have promotion by authors included into our contract, and we just asked them to reasonably promote, but some contracts have it in there that you have to be on social media, that you have to be active and that you have to be doing, you know x y Zed that you have to go to two speaking engagements and just really what’s your time commitment going to be? We don’t really push our authors to do anything. And the industry’s view on that is that we’re being too soft and that we should only sign authors that have you know, a following of at least 10,000 people on As on a specific social media platform, and preferably multiple media platforms so that they can promote and be the driver of sales. And I have to say that I don’t feel that any of our authors are the drivers of the sales of their book. I think that we are. But I think that’s the job right?
K
For me, and I, maybe I’m just really old school in my thinking. And I just, I don’t know, I go back and forth. Like I would love if the authors were driving sales. I would love if Evolver authors had hundreds of 1000s of followers, and were able to really be a force to sell their books. But we got into publishing to have those underrepresented authors. And one population that is really underrepresented are people of color who are not on social media at all, it’s almost impossible for a person of color who’s not on social media to get a book deal. And I don’t think that’s right. For me, that doesn’t sit well with me. So I decided that I wasn’t going to make authors publish the I mean, promote their own books, or do any heavy lifting, when it comes to promotion. So in that promotion section, it lays out what the press does, and I’ve talked about, I have an episode on marketing. And it covers everything that we do as a press, and also press releases, and book reviews, and all of that kind of stuff in the checkout those episodes if you’re interested in what we do, and what I advise authors to do. So that’s all spelled out in in the contract, as is how we are going to report on how much money we make from the book and what we do some places, do it quarterly. And I find that if the advance isn’t earned out, it doesn’t make sense to me to send a royalty statement every three months. That’s a lot of work for our accounts department. And I don’t want them focused on that. And so what we do is we do it annually until the advances earned out and then every three months we send a statement, if any royalties are due at that time, we would also remit the royalty payment. So pay attention to what the royalty schedule would be and what the reporting schedule would be, and how they’re going to pay those funds. And if you agree with having funds paid that way, we don’t have it baked in that we do it via Pay Pal or anything predatory. But some places do insist on doing it in ways that that the authors ended up being charged for it. And that can be like some places charged for wire transfers, some places charge for echecks. Some places do royalty payments via PayPal, we don’t do that. Although we do do we pay for short stories through PayPal. But we don’t do royalties through paper unless an author request that that is available. So pay attention to how those those royalties are going to be paid. And and think about what is the most economical way for you to be paid.
K
I also think it’s important to look at things like author copies, how many author copies are you going to get, we don’t give out a lot of author copies. Because we do such a big promotion in terms of how many copies we give away to reviewers that we just find it to be a more efficient way rather than sending it to sending them to the author. And we have had when we were we used to do a large number of copies to the author. And we had reports that the authors were just left with copies that they didn’t know what to do with. And so we allow our authors and this is in the contract as well. You can buy the buy books from us at cost. As I said earlier, sometimes it’s cheaper to buy it through Amazon or Barnes and Noble if they’re having a great sale. And then you can use those, those copies for whatever you like for any events that you have. And you can sell those copies and all of that. So understanding how many author copies you get, that’s something you can negotiate with us. We we don’t negotiate. I also think it’s important to look at the competitive Works section of it and pay attention to like what, what is their view on what a competitive work is? What is the timeline for a competitive work? And when will you how long will they hold you in that bubble? So that there’s not a competitive work? How is competitive work defined And how long are you obligated to not publish anything that compete? So competitive works go both ways they competitive works. What? What does the price view as a competitive work? And what do you view as a competitive work and a competitive work is published by the author, about their book in their universe. So a comparative work would be anything that exists in the same universe, or with the same characters to republished in within two years of the book is what we do. So we don’t let another author come in and write in your universe, and publish other books in that universe not written by you. And you agree not to write anything from that universe or with your characters, without letting us know first and without getting our okay. And that sort of right of first refusal, and making sure that you really understand what the press views as a competitive word, when you go in and understanding the body of your work, if you’re working on a series, or loosely connected stories like for we have an author, Chad, who is Chad music, who’s writing a bunch of different books, all based on the Tarot, but you would not know that they’re related in any way, if you read them, they read as such different books, but they are all actually related, and sort of like American Horror Story, or they don’t seem related. And then you can stick them all together in the end. But we are not just because it’s that loose concept right of them all being based on the Tarot. If they’re not from the same university, not the same characters, just because they have the same inspiration. That’s not a competitive word, making sure you really understand what that is for yourself, when you’re writing it so that you can express that clearly that you have the right to shop other works. And it’s not, it doesn’t offend me, we have authors that are published with a variety of publishers. And that’s sort of the name of the game, right? Because we’re only going to publish one of your books a year, if you have a bunch of books I need to be published. Once you get that first deal, it’s easier to get other deals, you can say I have this published work with this press. And then other presses will also be interested in also you can have books included short stories, including anthologies, or, and magazines and such.
K
Once you have that first book deal, it does sort of elevate you in a way or once you have that first book published. It’s proof of concept. Unless people know that, hey, yeah, you can get a publishing zone. If you’re a self publisher, let people know, yes, you can finish a book. Because not everybody can finish a book, we have about three or four authors a year, dropped out from feeling from finishing their books. And we account for that, and we have sort of authors in reserve, and we manage that and let them know, Hey, you’re an author and reserve. Is that okay? Because we don’t want to keep people hanging on. We reached out to them, Hey, is your book still available? You know, we read a book and we just don’t have we can publish it in the next two years. We let them know that that’s the case. If they don’t want to wait, wait on us, then we say okay, we’ll circle back if anything opens up sooner. And so I think it’s really important to understand what you want from the contract, what are your goals? What are the things that are most important to you to hang on to and have the rights for? And what rights are you willing to give away for the sake of of the contract and the sake of the deal. And I really advise authors to take the time and look over the author, the Authors Guild model contract, and go through and read all of the sections. It’s about I want to say 30 or 40 pages worth of really dense legalese. And I think the way that they’ve set it up is really easy. Just go to the website, you just click on the click on the link in the description. The first link that I put down there is just do the Author’s Guild announcement that they’re making their model contract available, because it does kind of sort of set the stage for what you’re about to look at. And then the link below that will be the Authors Guild model contract link where you can just click straight through to the contract, and each section has its own page and once you read it, you can just click and go to the next section. I think it’s very digestible, very straightforward, very clear cut and just really well written and well explained. So I hope that kind of demystifies the author’s contract and the art of the deal so to speak for for books. And if you liked this video, be sure to hit that like button and subscribe for more content like this. And yeah, I want to thank all of our beautiful cinnabar moss for listening. You don’t have to be a cinnabar moth you can be any kind of moth you’d like to be or even a butterfly, but I’m not Mariah Carey, and I’m not trying to bite her rhyme. Bye