How Publishing Contracts Work

I recorded this several weeks ago. So, these thoughts are actually from a few weekends ago.

Hi everyone. Well, I have to tell you, I had the most eye-opening weekend. It would appear that we are sorely in need of a course on publishing. Publishing. I’m not even talking about self-publishing at this point.

We need to understand publishing. This is the problem, and understanding publishing involves understanding copyright. Copyright is at the heart of all of this.

And if you don’t understand the nature of your own copyrights in a work, what it is you actually own and can control and have literally a monopoly on … it is a monopoly, a legal monopoly. You control this content yourself. It is yours. And understanding that will give you a better understanding of what you’re actually doing when you sign a contract with a publisher. You are licensing your content to them. Got that? Okay, you’re with me so far. So if you’re with me so far, a course on understanding publishing is something that you might want to think about.

I might want to think about giving it or writing about it. I’m still thinking, because I’m so focused on screenwriting that sometimes I lose touch with the fact that I’m also a publisher. I am a publisher. I have published myself. I have published ebook collections with other authors, that I’m a publisher as well as an author, so I can decide what to do about that from here on out. And one of the things I can do is teach you about publishing, what I know about it as a person who has observed from the outside, admittedly. The way Big Five publishers treat genre authors—not well, but there are reasons for that and maybe you need to understand the reasons so that you can really understand what’s going on here. That’s it. That’s all I’ll say for now and I’ll talk to you later. Oh no, the other thing I was going to say was, let me just give you, read you something.

I had inquired about possibly switching from the KDP platform to getting my work distributed to Amazon through one of the third-party distributors. Here’s the response they sent. “I don’t recommend doing that. I never want to speak poorly of a vendor partner.” Oh, that sounds promising. “But Amazon goes out of their way to keep authors direct with their service. For a book previously published on Amazon, once you submit it through our service, even after you’ve delisted it on your direct account, Amazon will claim they see the book published by another publisher, your prior KDP account (???), and ask that we prove we have the necessary rights to publish the book.” (Um, seriously, WTF?)

This is so wrong on so many levels, I won’t go into that. “This involves paperwork which Amazon may or may not reject, and they request everything from signed reversion letters to signed contractual agreements.” Whatever the fuck that means. “It can take weeks or even months to work through the back/forth with Amazon, where they tend to reject everything outright at first and we have to request repeatedly for consideration and review before they will finally look at the documents.”

Okay, tell me this is not predatory? Ridiculous? Potentially illegal? It is certainly, it’s bewildering to me. That’s all I’ll say. That’s all I’ll say for now. Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.

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