As I learn more about traditional publishing I’m becoming less inclined to seek out that route and more inclined to stay indie. The only benefit there seems to be in traditional contracts is the advance, no matter how small it may be, but rights grabs like you’ve written about in this and other posts take away any bright spot that may have been.

When I first starting reading about how to become published–back when I was in high school, aka in the Jurassic age –I would have signed bad contracts without a thought, because I didn’t know there was any other way. Now, with the Internet and so much more information available, it would be foolish for anyone to just sign their rights away like this.

Keep up the good work. You and Dean are my go-to people for writing information and advice.

Anywho… why I’m here is to comment on what you call the basket clause. If you’re looking through your own contracts, look for something called cross-collateralization, which is the technical term for this kind of thing. It’s what lawyers do when they want to protect their company from a situation where one book is a runaway hit but the other ones are duds: they can avoid paying royalties on the hit until the duds are paid off. Great for the company, crap for the author, like you’ve noted.

And you’ve (accidentally) noted the best way not to get screwed with one of these which is to publish your books with different companies each time, but there’s possibly others. Another thought is maybe to create a separate bank account for each book you write and specify payments for each book into a each account. Even more protection: put each book into an LLC and sign the publishing contract between the publisher and the LLC. That way you’ll have a quick and easy breach of contract: failure to pay the money into the right bank account or to the right LLC. After all, companies are people ever since Citizens United, so they can’t cross-collateralize between different people…

Then I saw the agreement itself, which had words to the effect that … all creations, inventions, works of authorship … created by the employee during the term of employment … are works of hire and the property of employer…

What? Wait!

All acts of authorship starting from the the first moment of the first day I was hired (months before the agreement was presented to me) to the end of the last day I’m employed here are… Um–no. You see the problem.

Happily, my employers were aware I am a published writer of speculative fiction before they hired me, and speculative fiction is not a part of their product. It made the conversation wherein I said I needed protection for my own intellectual property less awkward.

This experience underscores the importance of reading contracts and imagining how they could affect things that are–or should be–unconnected to the subject matter at hand.

Thanks, Kristine–I’m sure reading your column helped me make the immediate mental leap from how these words applied in my day job to how they might be applied to my creative work.