Barbara Doyen

Archive for the Author Rights Category

Protecting your rights

Allowing your work to be published without a copyright notice can be like allowing squatters to build themselves permanent dwellings on your land. As in real estate, where someone using your property, even without your knowledge, might set a legal precedent for them to continue to do so, so can the author lose or compromise his literary rights by not properly protecting them. And you cannot sell what you do not own. Read the rest of this entry »

Electronic Media Rights

Publishers are including clauses to cover rights you may not even think of. Some of these, like computer and other electronic media rights, may seem worthless when you are selling your book, but may prove to be quite valuable in our high-tech future. Read the rest of this entry »

Foreign rights

Foreign sales and translations don’t always go with the sale of the book. Foreign sales can involve selling the American edition “as is” (in Canada, for example) or it can mean selling the rights to publish another edition in English or translations into other languages. Read the rest of this entry »

Serial rights

These excerpts can be marketed to American periodicals, or you can offer them abroad, in which case you’d be selling the foreign serial rights. The excerpt can come out either before publication (first serial rights) or after publication (second serial rights.) Read the rest of this entry »

Revised edition rights

Somewhere between 10 to 20 percent of the books published in the U.S. are revised or updated editions. If the author makes a few changes to keep the text current, the book is republished as an “update.” If at least 30 percent of the text is new material and the book has been republished with a new cover, a new ISBN and new promotion, the book is called a “revised edition.” Each update or revision should bring the author another advance. Read the rest of this entry »

Article commissioned by Writer’s Digest Books for inclusion in their directory, Guide to Literary Agents1993, 1994, and 1998. Read the rest of this entry »