When I had an opportunity to move from self-publishing to traditional publishing years ago, I didn’t think I needed a literary agent. I landed contracts through personal connections and highly-targeted queries. With my entrepreneurial background, contracts shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve written and worked on many of them.
As it turns out, business contracts in the microelectronics world and book contracts are very different things. “Gotchas” in my contracts that I didn’t understand at the time have cost me far more than the 15% of royalties I would have paid an agent, which is why I’m shopping for one now for my upcoming YA fantasy novel.
I’ve already written about some of those contract issues in “Book contracts, textbooks, and going out-of-print,” and I’d like to share some more of them with you now.
High Discount Books
I thought I was being pretty clever on one of my early contracts by negotiating a flat royalty amount rather than a percentage. It took a lot of the variables out of the equation, especially if the book didn’t sell.
I owned a bookstore at the time, so I knew that book distributors and publishers typically offer a 40% discount on books. Quantity purchases and seasonal deals may bump that to 45%. So when I saw this exception in the contract, it didn’t bother me at all:
On copies sold at a discount of 60% or more of the retail price, 8% of the amount the Publisher receives.
That’ll never happen, right? After all, why would the publisher want to sell books with discounts of 60% or more? So I didn’t do the math.
My flat royalty is $1.00 per copy sold. The retail price of the books was $9.95 when the contract was signed, so my royalty was 10% of cover price. Not bad! Since then, the cover price went up to $11.95. Still well over 8%. Now here’s where it gets ugly (I’m going to round the cover price to $12 to keep the math easy).
At a 50% discount, the retailer pays $6 for the book. $1 goes to me, and $5 goes to the publisher.
At 55%, the retailer pays $5.40. I still get a buck, and the publisher gets $4.40.
At 60%, the retailer pays $4.80. I get 8% of that, which is $0.38, and the publisher gets $4.42.
If the publisher discounts the book 60% instead of 55%, they get more money, and all of the retailer’s savings come straight out of my pocket. I’ve lost tens of thousands in royalties because of that one clause in the contract.
Non-Competing Work
There’s a pretty standard clause in my contracts with one of my publishers. It’s similar to many contracting agreements I’ve seen:
The Author agrees, during the term of this agreement, not to print or publish, or cause to be printed or published, any other book on the same theme that might compete with or reduce the sales of the Work covered by this agreement.
Reasonable, right? They don’t want to pay me for a book and then have me write a competing book for a different publisher. The problem is that it isn’t bilateral.
I’ve written 20 books for that publisher, all with the same series title. They hired two other authors without telling me to write books with the same series title on the same subject. One of those authors was my original editor on the series. They even used the same illustrator that did my books.
In the future, I’ll make sure that I have first right of refusal to write books based on my concepts and ideas.
Titles
In the case above, my initial contact with the publisher was by phone. I was actually talking to them about a different book and mentioned this idea I had. The editor asked me to send in a proposal.
Later, that editor released a book using my series title, claiming that it was her idea and she had given it to me in our phone conversation. I had no written records to disprove that. Another publisher had rejected the book, but by the time this problem arose, years had passed. I hadn’t saved the rejection letter and the person who wrote it had moved on.
I should have made sure my title was protected in the contract.
Gary D. Robson 