Beyond Book Royalties

The potential sales of a book are your real leverage when it comes to negotiating a contract. Think beyond royalties.  Never ignore the income that may be generated by resale of all or part of your book. Even when the advance and royalty schedule agreed on are better than you'd dared hope, keep your negotiation aggressive—suggest to the editor that he make up for your concessions by giving you a better deal on subsidiary rights.

Subsidiary rights specified in the contract determine, among other things, your share of any money resulting from a resale of the book to a paperback reprint house, book club, or as an ebook. A standard contract usually provides for a 50/50 split between you and a hardcover publisher. But the amendments you're looking for may change the contract to provide you with an increased percentage if the resale exceeds a certain dollar figure—for example, 55 percent for a sale over $50,000 or 60 percent for a sale over $100,000. You may not expect such a bonanza, but neither may your publisher. So nail down your chance at the lion's share from the start.

Every writer dreams of a big sale to the movies or for TV dramatization. While such possibilities are remote or the odds so great for either nonfiction or fiction, neither you nor your publisher may be motivated to bargain for the division of the spoils should there be a miraculous stroke of such luck. But no matter how conservative your expectations, it would be foolish to ignore such possibilities from your  contract negotiations.

It used to be that publishers would give you 90-100 percent of all movie rights without much fuss.
But that was before film producers began asking for the rights to non-fiction books—In Cold Blood is a good example—and short stories such as “Legends of the Fall” and even articles. Today, everything depends on the particular book, short story, or article. If you think a filmmaker might be interested in your work, then you ought to make sure you get your share of the film rights.

Since options for possible film use are considerably more common than outright sales, a good contract will spell out not only the percent of the proceeds that you’ll receive from selling the film rights but also whether you or your publisher will have the right to negotiate the contracts with potential buyers.

You should also follow the same process when negotiating foreign reprint rights. Make an educated guess about the potential market for your work in the countries not covered by the basic contract. Ask for anything up to 100 percent of all foreign sales, and be sure the contract specifies who will have authority to negotiate with foreign publishers.

Other subsidiary rights include permission to use all or part of your text in magazines, newspapers, and  on the Internet. First serial rights refers to publication in such outlets before the book appears while  second serial rights refer to reprint after book publication. You should receive 100 percent of first serial rights.

Most book contracts grant you only 50 percent of the sale price for second serial rights. But when your track record or expertise help gain such a sale, the contract should be amended to provide an escalating percentage for you as sales multiply.

Generally, publishers handle the disposition of subsidiary sales through departments set up to manage them. They especially consider resale for paperback reprint their prerogative, and some may even resent your interference in their transactions. You may or may not be informed of the attempts by your publisher to find secondary markets.

It's important not to duplicate your publisher's efforts to get part of your book into a top selling magazine or to sell the whole thing to a reprint house, even if you believe your publisher isn’t looking out for your best interests.

However, when it's clear that the publisher isn’t pursuing secondary rights as aggressively as you would like, then you might consider pursuing them yourself. If your book has drawn heavily on the expertise you've acquired in the course of writing shorter pieces, chances are you have a network of markets and potential markets for this kind of material. So when your book is in print, you're in a good position to contact other markets that may already know you. Among these may be a publisher who may be familiar with your work but never considered it.

Let's assume your book has received some good reviews—especially on book review or social networking sites. Collect and copy all the good notices as they appear and package them to promote your efforts at resale to magazines or newspapers.

Create a small brochure of quotes from the reviews of your book and mail it along with query letters to a broad range of regional publications. It may bring a number of requests from editors to see a copy of your book, and a good number of reprint sales may follow. However, before randomly sending out copies of your book to editors, see which ones are interested, then mark the section of the book you think particularly suited to the needs of each publication and send them off.

Do You Need an Agent?

It’s true, a writer gains a certain amount of prestige by having an agent. But before you go there, you need to pay your dues. And an agent can’t help you with that. It’s all up to you.

An agent is for a writer who is too busy to sell his or her work. And even if you have time to market your writing, an agent can seek out better paying markets for you. But having an agent doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get more money or that you’ll even get published. So if you’re a beginning writer, forget about getting an agent and get to work.

If you’ve been writing and publishing for a while, this may be the time for you to seek out the services of an agent. But do you really know what an agent can do for you?

A good agent knows which publishing houses are in the market for what sort of book or writing project. They know which publisher will pay which advance and whether, when the time comes, which will release which rights. Often an agent will know just who to send a proposal to and which ones are likely to go forward with it.

A good agent also is in constant touch with those who buy ideas, books, movie treatments, scripts for TV shows, and subsidiary rights. To many writers, an agent is also their best friend and professional confidant—part father, part salesman, part lawyer, and part literary critic. But most of all, an agent can lend a sympathetic ear. He or she understands how a writer feels.

Agents save editors time and money. They save them the hassle of going through piles of terrible manuscripts by directing them to the good ones. In essence, an agent acts as the first reader—as a person who has the experience to tell the great from the terrible. And then, of course, there’s the growing tendency for publishers to refuse to read anything that comes in unsolicited. They often give preference to material coming from an agent to manuscripts that come in cold.

Generally, while agents negotiate book contracts and subsidiary rights, they also negotiate lots of other deals for busy writers—deals that the writer may never have thought of. Depending on the arrangement you make, your agent may handle all of your work, only your books, or only certain kinds of writing. Some agents will tell you up front what they will and won’t deal with.

Agents usually don’t handle short pieces of writing like articles and short stories. They’re in it for the big bucks. Let’s face it, after you’d pay an agent his or her 10-15 percent commission, you’d be left with much less than if you sold your shorter pieces yourself.

Your agent can also act to resolve conflicts between you and your publisher. They push for timely advances—they don’t get paid until you do. And, more importantly, they’ll help you sort out hard-to-read book contracts which if not understood properly can cost you dearly.

So do you need an agent? Yes and no. Writers sell nearly a third of all literary works by themselves, without the help of an agent. By negotiating your own contract, you may just walk away with more money and more perks. But that’s only after you’ve been in the business awhile and understand the nuances of contractual agreements. An agent can help you wade through the contractual mindfield. They know what to look for and you don’t.