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Chapter 7. Subsidiary Rights
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Chapter 7 Subsidiary fights But the novelist-and one speaks 11owof the Americanmay sell the same work over many times. -Frank Norris (1902) American authors during the twentieth century have had to recycle their work. That is to say, they and their agents have had to discover ways of exploiti~lgfully the subsidiary or ancillary rights that attach to literary property. These are the rights for republication or representation of the text in other forms, for adaptation of the material to other media, and for reuse of the characters in other story lines. A piece of writing-a short story, poem, novel, or essay-ideally should be made to generate income over a period of years, after the initial act of composition has been completed . The success or failure of an author's career in fi~lancial terms has often depended on how well this principle has been mastered. Labor on a manuscript must be regarded by the author as an i~lvestment. Will the published literary work yield short-term returns only, or will it produce income over a long period? There are advantages to both types of publication , but most authors, given a choice, would probably take the latter. The best thing, of course, is to produce work that pays both ways-with immediate popular success and large initial sales and with subsequent income from other forms of publication, adaptation, or performance. American authors have attempted to realize money on the ancillary rights to their work almost from the beginnings of literary publicatio~l in the United States. Their first efforts to exploit these rights, however, were hindered by an underdeveloped publishing trade. Literary work published before 1790 in the United States went automatically into the public domain, and if it had conmlercial value it was immediately pirated and sold bv other domestic printer-publishers. The U.S. copyright law of 1790was a small beginning: it afforded protection for only fourteen years (later renewable for fourteen more), and it could be enforced only in this country, but it did give the status of property to works of the imagination . In the early days of the republic, however, there were few ways in which a work of literature could be recycled. The act of publication, in Subsidiary Rights I 115 economic terms, was usually a one-time &'air. The market was not large enough or well enough developed to yield long-term sales for any but the most successful works of literature-popular novels like Mrs. Susanna Rowson's best-seller Charlotte Temple,first published in the United States in 1794.Thus Fenimore Cooper had to produce lengthy new novels regularly in order to satisfy his audience and generate dependable income. cooper and Washington Irving were both able to republish their work in second and third editions, but stereotype plating was not yet widespread in America, and each book had to be reset in standing type before republication . For the printer-publisher, this made second and third editions identical in economic terms to first editions, and it discouraged the production of large collected-edition sets for the marginally popular author. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was probably the first American author to exploit successhlly the subsidiary rights to his work. In fact, his astuteness as a literary businessman helped make it possible for him to retire from college teaching in 1854 at the age of forty-seven and live in large part off the proceeds of his pen for the remainder of his life. Longfellow 's approach was sound. For periodical publication, he sold off the first serial rights to his poems. Then every few years he published clothbound collections of his poems, most of which had already appeared in magazines or annuals. Long narratives in verse, such as Evan~eline (1847) and The Courtship ofMiles Standish (1858),were published as separate volumes . Longfellow revised his work for collected appearances, and he spent some time and creative thought in arranging the sequence of poems in each new volume, but the original imaginative acts that had produced the poems did not have to be duplicated. The work of art was thus made to generate two types of income-a fixed fee for its periodical appearance and a percentage of the profits on the clothbound collection. Longfellow's collections were popular enough to be reprinted. Apparently he had envisioned this possibility years earlier, for he had taken the precaution of paying personally for the typesetting and plating of his separate collections. Thus he had...