Home > Amazon and Kindle, Contracts, Ebooks > Before You Sign That (Book Publishing) Contract

Before You Sign That (Book Publishing) Contract

It is really hard for first time authors to get a foot in the publishing door, which can make them really desperate to be published. I should know. I almost got conned into signing away all my rights. Luckily, I backed off at the last moment.

When you’re ready to sign a contract (and this is especially true if you’re dealing directly with the publisher), don’t sign away all rights. For example, if you wish to give only print rights to the publisher, specify just that. Never sign away all rights. After all, five years ago who’d have thought to keep electronic rights for ebooks?

Royalties is another area writers need to watch out for. Click here for a great article by Patricia  in epublishabook.com.

BTW, if you like this site, please consider clicking on the ‘Like’ button on your right. I need at least 25 likes before I can get a vanity author page (i.e. http://www.facebook.com/pages/AuthorRasana-Atreya instead of http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rasana-Atreya/134736126622525). It’ll help when I finally get my book out. Thanks!

About these ads
  1. successbmine
    November 3, 2011 at 10:52 am

    I’m glad to hear you stopped before disaster happened. The author always has the right to negotiate with a publisher to get the contract they want. And if the publisher won’t agree and both sides can’t compromise, then it’s probably time to seek another publisher. It’s good to let new authors know these things. I have not had a book published yet, but I have been reading a great deal about publishing and learning before coming up against things as you did. Thanks for posting this info.

    The article by Patricia is also an eye opener. Who would think of the weight of a little three-letter word? Authors need to be marketers, negotiators, diplomats, detectives, sales people as well as writers. Wow! That’s a load to carry.

    • rasanaatreya
      November 3, 2011 at 10:59 am

      I’m glad I stopped, but it wasn’t easy, I tell you. I feel for other first timers who are so desperate to be published that they’ll sign away their first born. The fact of the matter is writers have so many more options now. Ebooks are the best thing that happened. Leveled the plying field for writers.

      • November 3, 2011 at 10:05 pm

        Fortunately the book I got ‘caught’ on wasn’t a work of fiction but a short work of poetry mixed with journal entries and scripture verses, and I have now rewritten it with a lot more ‘stuff’ added and have given it a new title. I may just go the e-book route with this one once it has been edited.

  2. rasanaatreya
    November 3, 2011 at 10:07 pm

    Good for you. Better late than never.

  3. madhavi sood
    November 7, 2011 at 12:19 pm

    Thanks for the eye opener. Will be careful. I too am trying to get my poetry book Published and still searching for the right publisher for the same.

    Good luck to you 4 ur venture,
    Regards

    • rasanaatreya
      November 7, 2011 at 6:36 pm

      Glad you found it useful. Good luck!

  4. November 8, 2011 at 6:19 pm

    Thanks for posting this, Rasana. I’m not even close to publishing, but it’s never too early to start educating oneself on what’s important to keep in mind. Glad you pulled out before it was too late!

  5. rasanaatreya
    November 8, 2011 at 6:23 pm

    You’re welcome. And thanks for ‘liking’ me, Guilie! :-)

  6. November 19, 2011 at 6:57 pm

    Great advice for us newbies. So much to learn! Phew!

    • rasanaatreya
      November 20, 2011 at 8:42 am

      Appreciate hearing from readers, Morgan. Good to know my posts are helping.

  1. No trackbacks yet.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,168 other followers

%d bloggers like this:
https://rasanaatreya.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/before-you-sign-that-book-publishing-contract/
rasanaatreya.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-22
82280
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:EN3AYB27FM4RMHPBRZQJT66B5IKPLAGX
<urn:uuid:5c790910-f290-49fc-929f-7545303d25b9>
2015-05-27T09:32:28Z
192.0.78.12
sha1:XXPB4EW4R2KJU3PJCFNBLQRUYTLW3MIR
<urn:uuid:d51fb51b-fcb7-4b5a-878b-e36b2899693a>
https://rasanaatreya.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/before-you-sign-that-book-publishing-contract/
length
response
<urn:uuid:61d7711d-163d-4a29-8295-4ff6119e7b2e>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-206-219.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-22
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf