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6 Book Contracts How to Read and Negotiate Them YOUR FIRST BOOK CONTRACT IS LIKE YOUR FIRST DAY OF school and your first home mortgage rolled into one. The language is strange, the terms vague, the demands stringent, the threatened punishments harsh. Even most local attorneys are hard-put to make sense of the legalities and terminology peculiar to the business of writing and selling books. In fact, the most valuable talent literary agents offer is their specialized understanding of contracts, gained through years of servicing authors. (That’s why, in general, an experienced agent is preferable to a beginner.) Most book deals are made orally before the contract is prepared. The editors and you (or your agent if you have one) agree on the figure for your guarantee against royalties and on the percentage of the retail or wholesale price you’ll receive for each book sold. You agree on the manuscript deadline, the length of the book, and whether you’re to supply illustrations. Perhaps you discuss one or two other points. But when the contract finally is mailed to you (or your agent) it will contain at least a hundred other points on which you and the publisher must agree. Lots of negotiation should take place after the contract has been sent to you or your agent, since any contract prepared by the publisher is naturally slanted very much in its favor. The revisions you are able to write into the printed contract may be the most rewarding words you will ever write. We can’t make you a crackerjack negotiator in one chapter, but we can offer you a cram course in understanding a contract and dealing with an editor. We can give you the benefit of our experience on twenty-two contracts and the experience of our colleagues who shared their successes and sticking-points with us. Armed with all this, you’ll be better equipped than most beginning agents. As befits a romantic industry, contract negotiation in the publishing world has the aura of moonlight and mystery. Authors often share the results of their negotiations with close friends, but they don’t want posterity to know how well—or poorly—they came out in their book deals. We’ve used our friends’ experiences by promising anonymity, and that’s why you won’t see any one author’s name mentioned in this chapter. 75 We do make frequent reference to the Authors Guild, which has done more for getting authors’ protections into contracts than anybody, including literary agents’ trade associations. The Guild prepared its own model contract and sends it free to members of their organization or, for ninety dollars, to nonmembers (see www.authorsguild.org for ordering details). Some of the author-protection clauses the Guild fought for were later adopted in most publishers’ printed contracts. With your help, we’ll get more model clauses accepted as industry norms within the near future. To that end, we include them in our discussion. The Art of Negotiating a Contract Simply stated, negotiating is demanding what you want most while being prepared to give up in exchange the things you want least. All publishers’ contracts contain a few clauses you can expect to get changed with little effort and some that Swifty Lazar, the fastest-talking agent ever spawned, would be hard put to alter were he alive today. If you know which are which, you’ll spend your negotiating energies more efficiently. Whether you do it yourself or negotiate through an agent, your aim should be to get as much as you can while wrapping up negotiations within a reasonable time so you can start writing while the editor is still excited about buying the book. To understand the basics of book negotiating, you have to know some basic publishing economics. Theoretically, you will be paid a royalty for every copy of your book that’s sold. Depending on the kind of book (hardcover or paperback ) and publisher, that can range from 3 to 20 percent of the retail price. Since your first royalty statement (and therefore your first royalty check) will arrive no sooner than four months after your work is shipped to the bookstores, you could work for at least two years without seeing a penny for your labors. Since few of us could manage so frugal an existence, the publishing industry developed one of its greatest misnomers: the advance. In poorly drafted contracts, the advance amounts to...

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