Charlie Stross explains publishing contracts

Charlie Stross has posted the third in his series of “Common Misconceptions About Publishing” posts, and this one is a must-read for anyone who wonders about the terms of publishing contracts.

Stross takes one of his old contracts and dissects it in extreme detail, explaining what provisions it has and what each provision means. Of particular interest to e-book fans will be the discussion of contracting books separately by geographic region, and how this relates to e-book editions.

My UK publisher has the exclusive right to sell ebooks in the UK and associated territory, and my US publisher has ditto in their regions. This is why, as often as not, if you go to somewhere like Fictionwise or Diesel and try to buy an ebook edition of one of my books, it’ll let you get as far as proffering payment then tell you to sod off because you live in the wrong country. This is stupid, sucky, and serves nobody’s best interest (not even the publishers), but as I mentioned in the first of these posts, group-wide policy on e-rights is set by executives so high up the totem pole they can’t even see the ground, much less the realities of ebook publishing. Discussion of how things should be arranged, as opposed to how they are arranged, is deferred for another posting.

In the comments that follow, Stross promises to devote a future entry expressly to how and why the e-book market is messed up and what might be done to fix it—and perhaps provides a bit of a preview when he explains that to do e-books properly, Tor would have to amend literally thousands of existing contracts that were made before e-books.

Another interesting note has to do with Stross’s discussion of copyright, since Stross lives in the UK where copyright laws are subtly different from in America. In particular, UK copyright law recognizes “moral rights,” the right of an author to have his name associated with his work and not to have his work mutilated, whereas America does not as such.

This is the best post yet in Stross’s series on publishing misconceptions, and I look forward to reading future installments.