Contracts

Sandrabbit has a new publishing contract. Hooray! Hopefully this one will work out better than the last, which seems to have been a bit of a nightmare.

Now apart from fuming with jealousy, this whole contracts malarky got me thinking. Once, a long, long time ago, I was offered a publishing contract for my first novel, Running Away. I even had an agent back then, though we soon parted company after what they were recommending to me as a very good deal.

I'm a bit of a magpie, always collecting shiny things and hoarding them away. So it wasn't too difficult to track down the filed away contract. I was intrigued to see if it was as bad as my memory suggested. If anything, it was worse.

Running Away is a fairly straightforward SF adventure - nothing special requiring strange marketing or expensive production. The contract I was offered runs to eight pages, and if I could get hold of some decent OCR software and a scanner I'd post the whole thing for people to see. As I can't, you'll have to settle for the edited highlights:

'The AUTHOR grants to the PUBLISHER the sole right to publish and offer for sale the WORK and the sole right to negotiate in respect of subsidiary rights as set out in subsequent paragraphs.'

note that they don't say here what those subsidiary rights might be. You have to wade through a load of other old dogwank first.

'The PUBLISHER shall cause the WORK to be set out in clear modern type and shall have absolute discretion as to format, typeface, style, binding and printing of the WORK and the number of copies from time to time to be printed and bound.'

and:

'The PUBLISHER undertakes to provide the AUTHOR with Six copies of the WORK, completely free of charge.'

so laser printing a half-dozen copies on A4 and binding them with a plastic comb binder would fulfil this requirement.

There were no advances offered. Instead, I was asked to contribute £4500 to the costs. According to the agents: 'The publisher has assured me that he will meet all costs of promotion, sales and marketing, and that your contribution will allow a larger print run to be made than would normally be possible.'

So what was I getting in return? Royalties of 30% of the net sales price on the first 2500 sales, reducing to 15% of all net sales beyond that. 25% of net sales price of Export Sales; 25% of Royalty Inclusive Sales for Export (though no-one took the trouble to explain what the difference was); 20% of Small Reprint Sales (again, what are these?). It was all dressed up to look fancy and impressive, but given the amount of money I was being asked to contribute to the production, a bit pathetic in reality.

Then we got to those subsidiary rights mentioned earlier. Bear in mind that if I'd signed, then the publishers would have had exclusive rights to negotiate these sales. I would have lost all control:

'Upon the publisher arranging subsidiary rights in respect of the said WORK, he shall pay to the AUTHOR the following percentages of the gross amount he receives.

Quotations Rights - 50%
Anthology Rights - 50%
Translation Rights - 50%
English Language Reprint Rights - 50%
Mechanical Reproduction - 30%
Electronic & Software Rights - 30%
Sound Broadcast Rights - 40%
Television Reading Rights - 50%
Dramatisation Rights - 30%
Film Rights - 30%
Documentary Rights - 30%
Performance Rights - 50%
Non commercial rights for visually handicapped - 0%'

Bear in mind that's how much they're going to give me, not the cut they take.

Most of the contract is written in what a lay-person might mistake for legalese, but which is in fact a load of old codswallop. What was most galling about the whole thing wasn't that this was quite obviously a pile of pants, but that it had been recommended to me by my supposed agent. As he wrote at the time:

'I have read it[the contract] carefully and all seems in order.'

We parted company not long afterwards, and I am left with the distinct impression that the whole thing was a scam. Perhaps I should have realised earlier, when I paid £40 for a reader's report on the manuscript. I'll post that report some day, if I can find it. But Mr Stuart will tell you what a waste of space it was.

The agency called itself Millstone Lit. I've googled it and it no longer seems to exist. The publisher called itself Hamilton & Co (Publishers) - notice there's no Ltd on the end there. I've no problem with naming it, as it too seems to have disappeared into the ether. I can safely say that it never had anything to do with Hamish Hamilton, the publishing house now part of the Penguin group, but the name was no doubt chosen to fool the unwary.

But just how unwary? How desperate would you need to be to fork out £4500 to such obviously crooked people? How stupid would you need to be to do that? And how many people did the whole ruse fool?

It's a vicious world out there, people. Be careful when the offer comes.