The Business Rusch: Rights Reversion
Over the last couple of years, a number of writers have written to me to ask how to get the rights to their traditionally published novels reverted back to them. These requests increased while I wrote the most recent short series, “Why Writers Disappear,” and finally, one of the readers mentioned via e-mail that I should do a blog post on getting rights reverted.
It’s a good idea, so I’m taking it.
When a writer signs a contract with a publisher to have a book published, that contract includes which rights the publisher is licensing and at what cost/percentage of that cost. All of this is based on the copyright, which can be sliced down to minute fractions, and each fraction licensed.
For example, a writer might license worldwide rights to publish the book as a hardcover novel in the English language. The other rights, from e-book to audio to mass market paperback, would not be included in that particular contract.
Some contracts are short, some are ten and twenty pages long. Each contract will delineate what the rights licensed are, what the publisher will pay the writer for the use of those rights, and when the contract expires. All contracts need an end date to be legal, and so you’d think that book contract would have a set time period. It’s pretty convenient: both parties know the contract expires on a specific date. The contract can be renegotiated around the time of expiration or renewed on a yearly basis, until one party decides to cancel the contract, or, or, or…
Before we go any further, I want to make something very, very, very clear. Often, writers in the comments section of this blog ask a question about contracts that assumes that all book contracts are the same. Some writers might understand that contracts differ, but those writers then believe that all bestsellers have the same contract, and all midlist writers have a different one.
Here’s the truth of it, folks. You—one writer—can have twelve book contracts with the same company, and each contract might have different terms from other contracts. In other words, you might have spent your entire publishing career with one publishing house. You might write the same type of book year after year, and you still might have twelve different contracts, with twelve different terms, including twelve different reversion clauses.
I know that’s hard to wrap your minds around, but it’s an important thought, because if you believe that all contracts are the same, you’ll end up signing something that’s bad for you. After all, Famous Writer (who publishes with the same publisher) signed that contract, right?
No, not right. Famous Writer is different from Famous Writer Two. One is a great negotiator who hires an IP attorney. The other is a terrible negotiator with an even worse agent. The great negotiator with the IP attorney might have a better contract. But he might not. Because the terrible negotiator might be too famous to piss off, and the publisher automatically offered terrible negotiator better terms than great negotiator.
You don’t know, and can’t know, and probably never will know.
So you must make decisions based on your own career.
Now, back to reversion clauses. They are not created equal. But there are some commonalities in book contracts that I can talk about in general. Remember, as I discuss all of this, that I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV. Please don’t construe anything I say here for legal advice.
Over the decades, book contracts evolved to avoid the time-limit. Instead, the ticking clock would start once the book was officially “out of print” which was usually defined in a contract (if defined at all) as unavailable for sale. At that point, the author would notify the publisher that she wanted all rights reverted and the publisher either had to do so, or would have a set amount of time (generally six months) to reissue the book.
Of course, there were a dozen permutations of that. I’ve seen some contracts that would not allow a rights reversion for seven years after the date of the contract even if the book went out of print in the very first year. The publisher in that case had no obligation to reissue the book and could sit on the rights for six years. At the end of the seventh year, the publisher would still have the option of putting the book back into print if the publisher did so within a six month window after the writer informed the publisher that she wanted the rights back.
Why would a publisher have this clause? Imagine this: in the six years that the publisher ignored this out-of-print book, the writer went from relative unknown to a bestseller. Even if she became a bestseller under another name, the publisher would want the right to reissue that old book. That’s why you often saw things like Famous Writer writing as Not-So-Famous Writer on book covers, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. Those writers had signed bad contracts early, and were paying for it years later.
In the past, when a novel went out of print, it was pretty obvious. No one could find a new copy of the book in a bookstore. The burden was still on the writer to ask for a reversion. Back in the 1980s, publishers often required a letter from a bookstore along with the author’s reversion request. To prove that the book was out of print, the bookstore letter had to say that the store tried to order copies of the book and failed to get them.
Note that even though it was the publisher’s responsibility to print and distribute the book, the author had to prove that the book was no longer in print. Needlessly adversarial? Not really. The problem was that then, as now, the publisher seemed to be the only one in the equation who understood that the control of the rights was the important thing. Writers, for the most part, just wanted to get published.
In fact, back then, only weird or pushy writers would ask for rights reversions. In the 1970s and earlier, rights reversions were important because other publishing houses would buy backlist, but by 1990, that concept was disappearing. So writers just didn’t ask. Or they’d instruct their agent to get the reversions, and the agents either wouldn’t do it at all or wouldn’t follow up.
And getting reversions, even then, required a lot of follow-up.
By the late 1990s, printing technology changed, and print-on-demand books became easier to do. Publishers started using print-on-demand suppliers to do second, third, and fourth printings of backlist titles. Those printings might have been as small as 100 copies. By the mid-2000s, such practices were common.
As usual, writers and their agents were behind the curve on this thing, and only recently started adding the phrase along the lines of “the availability of a print-on-demand edition of the book does not count toward the in-print definition in this contract.”
The only reason I can’t get my rights back on my last remaining title with Simon and Schuster is because my very old contract with them does not have that line, and S&S counts the POD availability as “in-print.”
If contract terms can be bent or stretched to the publishing house’s favor, the publishing house will do so.
The print-on-demand technology changed the in-print calculation. At that point, the bookstore letter became irrelevant. If the bookstore waited long enough, it could get an edition of the book.
So agents and authors tried to define the end of a contract by sales velocity. If a book sold fewer than 500 copies in a six-month period (for example), then that book would be considered out of print, and would, for the sake of the contract, be eligible for reversion.
The problem here? The only way the writer knows what the book’s sales are is through the royalty report generated by the publisher. And, as we’ve seen in other blog posts, those reports are rarely accurate. Plus, if the book sold fewer than 500 copies in a six-month period, the writer would have to wait until the reporting time after that period ended. Which gives the publisher even more time to hang onto the rights.
For example, the six-month period from January 1 to June 30 royalty reports arrive from many traditional publishers at the end of October. That gives the publisher an extra four months to goose sales, if goosing is needed.
At that point, the end of October, the writer can then request a reversion, and will probably have to wait for six more months for a reply. If there’s any chance the book will sell well, the publisher has plenty of time to remedy any out of print or sales issues. Too much time, in fact.
Why do I say that? Wouldn’t a writer want a book to stay in print?
Not always. Sometimes the reason a writer wants a rights reversion has nothing to do with book sales and everything to do with mismanagement in the publishing company. Earlier this year, when I posted “A Tale of Two Royalty Statements,” saying one royalty statement from one company was accurate and a royalty statement from another company was an unmitigated mess, many writers wrote me privately asking who the good company was.
I didn’t tell them. My problem was this: the company with the accurate royalty report had also provided me with my worst-ever editor experience (in a career filled with bad editing experiences) and I wanted the hell out of that company because of the editor. The company with the god-awful royalty reports had an excellent editor and editorial support staff. Companies the size of most traditional publishers are not all good or all bad. They’re a mixed bag, and that bag might be different for different writers.
So, back to our overall reversion topic. At the dawn of this new century, it became very hard to get rights reversions. It became even harder in the past five years as the e-book revolution hit traditional publishing.
If an old publishing contract contained e-book rights, and that e-book was available, did that constitute in-print? Traditional publishers said yes; writers and their advocates said no. The courts will eventually decide a lot of these cases.
Writers and agents again tried to close the barn door after the horses got out by trying to define e-book velocity as out of print. If, for example, the e-book sold fewer than 100 copies in a six-month period, then the book would be considered out of print. But that barn door remained wide open, since most writers and agents did not exclude free e-books from the sales figures. So if a publisher wanted to hang onto rights, he could offer the book for free for a few days, the “sales” would go up, and the book would not revert.
As the writers and agents have changed the contracts again, the publishers are now discounting e-books to 99 cents or less and counting those sales toward the on-sale total. (Such discounting is often not counted the same way as full-price books in the print part of the contract.)
Slowly, traditional publishers have realized that backlist titles are worth a lot of money. Traditional publishers are doing everything they can to make these old publishing contracts (and even the new ones) into contracts that exist in perpetuity while seeming to follow contract law. It’s a dicey proposition which will take a lot of legal wrangling to settle.
Which is why I’ve started recommending to writers that if they want to have a traditional publishing contract for their book, that contract has to have a limited term. The contract can exist for ten years from the date of the contract (or seven from the date of publication, which may not be unreasonably delayed), and can be renewed at the same or more favorable terms.
That’s how all of my foreign contracts work and most of my Hollywood contracts have worked. In fact, all of my subsidiary rights contracts work like that. But my former traditional book publishers in the United States have all balked at that suggestion—so I walked.
I dealt with these issues and more in the Deal Breakers 2012 series I did this summer. And I spent some time on reversions, but I didn’t explain how to get those reversions on existing contracts.
I’ll explain now.
First, why should you get a reversion letter from your publisher? After all, if the sales go below 200 copies or whatever that agreement is in the contract, don’t the rights revert to you? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not. It all depends on your contract. Besides, most publishers, as I mentioned above, reserve the right to “cure,” meaning they can try to repair the damage to the book’s sales and put the book back into print.
So it might look like your rights have reverted, but you don’t have full legal title to those rights until you have a release letter from your publisher.
A note here: I’m dealing with book contracts, but many short story contracts also have rights reversion issues. Each contract is different. If you’re going to reprint a short story that you’ve previously published, then you need to make certain that the rights you’re about to exercise belong to you.
If you didn’t understand that paragraph (or other parts of this post), then get a copy of The Copyright Handbook and start learning copyright. Remember, you’re not selling a book when you sign a contract. You’re licensing part of the copyright.
Okay. So…you want to reprint one of your backlist titles or put up an e-book of an out-of-print novel or sell the Japanese rights to your first novel.
Time to haul out the contract and read it. See what the terms are, what you signed, and what you still own. If the contract is old enough, you might not have licensed e-rights at all. They might not have existed. Make sure you didn’t sign an addendum to the contract in the last few years granting e-rights, either.
If you believe you own the rights you’re about to exercise free and clear, if you’re sure that there are no existing licenses on those rights, then proceed.
But if you’re in doubt, then you need to do some research. You might even need to hire an IP attorney to help you figure out what you own and what you don’t.
Let’s assume, though, that the book is out of print by whatever standard is set in the contract. Then you have to go through the hoops that the contract establishes for rights reversion.
Generally, those hoops are pretty simple. You must write a letter asking for the rights to revert to you.
The letter should be formal. It should cite the contract, its date, the clause that pertains to reversion, and the proof you have that the book meets the definition of out of print. Then you should ask for a letter reverting the rights to you.
Send this letter to the legal department at your publisher by snail mail with a delivery confirmation attached. Also send it to the legal department by e-mail.
You probably won’t get a response. Usually, they’ll just put the reversion letter into a pile and deal with it at a biannual meeting on rights reversions.
I would avoid both your agent and your editor in this process. They both have a vested interest in keeping that book under contract. In fact, contacting your editor before writing the letter might get that back-in-print process underway before your letter even hits the desk at legal.
If you get no response in a month, go through this process again. And then do so a month later. By then, someone will respond. They’ll be pretty irritated and they’ll probably tell you that they will get to you when they get to you.
Remind them that they have six months from the date of your original letter to put the book back into print, or they lose the right to publish the book. (If, indeed, that clause is in your contract. If it isn’t, simply state that they must respond to this legal request in a timely manner.)
What you want to do is get them to release your rights. You want to be that annoying person they grant the release to because they don’t want to deal with you any more.
You must remain polite but firm. And if you can’t do this comfortably, after the first letter, hire an attorney to do these letters for you. Believe me, that will pay off in the end.
If the publisher says no, but doesn’t put the book back into print, then repeat this process six months later. If the contract calls for them to put the book into print six months after the notification, and they haven’t, they’re in breach of the contract. Notify them of that—or better yet, have an attorney do it.
I know most of you are afraid to hire attorneys, but attorneys aren’t very expensive, especially for something that won’t take a lot of their time. These days, agents really aren’t fighting to get rights reverted and have never been good advocates on this issue. They’re the wrong people to ask for help.
Most publishers are hanging onto publishing rights these days because it’s easy. The publishers believe the rights will be worth money down the road. Writers generally don’t push to get books reverted, so publishers have had free reign over this process for decades.
If you want your rights reverted, then you need to be proactive about getting them back. You have to show the publisher that this is important to you, and you will continue to push until you get your way.
Because publishers have so many writers and so much backlist, they won’t push back against a squeaky writer unless they believe that writer’s book (reissued) will make a lot of money. In most cases, the publisher won’t even do enough research to learn that the book would make money.
If you push consistently and politely, you will succeed more times than you’ll fail. But it’ll take a concerted effort on your part.
Remember: Don’t reprint your book if you’re in doubt about whether or not you own the rights. The key to success in rights reversion is this: read your contract, follow the law, be polite, be consistent, and don’t give up.
Good luck.
I’ve been doing a business blog every Thursday for more than three years. In the first few months, the blog became interactive—the readers suggested topics or expanded on my thoughts in the comments section. Sometimes the readers changed my opinions on things. And many, many times, readers have led me to links and stories I wouldn’t have found on my own. Thank you for all of that.
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“The Business Rusch: “Rights Reversion,” copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
27 responses to “The Business Rusch: Rights Reversion”
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Someone recommended I check out this post due to a question I posted on another blog (Seekerville – 10/30/2012). Thanks for the education.
You’re welcome.
“If you get no response in a month, go through this process again. And then do so a month later.”
I used to do this. These days, I would advise doing the opposite. That is, send the first letter, and then do nothing until the reversion period expires. Precisely because publishers are clinging fervently to rights these days, EVEN in contracts where they did NOT makle any provision for ebook/digital rights (see my above comment about publishers increasingly clinging even to print-only rights, possibly because they’re hoping HarperCollins will prevail in its lawsuit against Open Road), I think the best way to get old rights reverted right now is to count on the traditional intertia and disorganization of publishers and their rights departments.
If you keep reminding a publisher that you’re trying to get your rights back, these it’s likely that you will just inspire them to find a way to prevent reversion.
You’re in a much stronger position if, instead, they stick your reversion letter in a stack which falls behind someone’s desk, and the next time they hear from you or think about this matter is when you contact them AFTER the reversion period has expired in order to NOTIFY them that it has expired and under the terms of the contract, automatic reversion has occurred, and you’re just writing to them to advise them of this and ask them to acknowledge this fact. (At which point, yes, if you want paperwork from the publisher acknowledging reversion–which it is a good idea to get, to keep things clear and simple for you in future transactins–THEN you will indeed need to follow up regularly.)
Good advice, Laura, if indeed they have a period of time to “cure.” If not, then you have to stay on them, and wait until they revert, because you have no other option. Again, it all depends on the contract.
Kris you’re doing a real service on this blog.
Question, assuming you’re in a position to feel comfortable answering.
A lot of what you and Dean write strikes people as “anti-agent”. Having reading all your posts I understand there are nuances to your position and neither one of you have ever made blanket statements–and have, in fact, gone out of your way to say some positive things about agents or certain types of agents.
However your hammering home the points about all the things agents aren’t doing and how, in many contract cases, they’re way way behind IP lawyers and accountants (and also how agents with mid-listers might actually be more loyal to the publisher) have got to be driving some agents crazy given your level of exposure and following.
And you touch on some of these points again in this very blog. Have you ever gotten any emails from agents protesting your view and did any of them ever really offer what you consider a good rebuttal to your view points on any matter?
I ask because agents not helping with reversions is just another example about how the occupation is letting down people and I just have this vague hope that there maybe someone somewhere trying to change the industry from the inside.
There are some good people and good agents out there, Nathan. The problem is that the business model has changed significantly, and the good ones are having a tough time making a living among all the changes. I’m actually afraid they’ll leave the profession. I recently asked one of the good ones, a friend of mine, if he had a law degree. I knew he had gone to law school. He replied ruefully that he had quit law school for agenting because it seemed to be a better career opportunity at the time (the late 1980s). He said, “If only I knew then what I know now…”
Mostly, though, I hear little from agents except for the ones who are my friends. I don’t know what the others say about me. Certainly none come here and add their two cents worth. But I have no idea what, if anything, they say on their blogs.
“Slowly, traditional publishers have realized that backlist titles are worth a lot of money. ”
I’ve lately heard several reliable accounts of publishers preventing reversion, when it’s requested, by printing (or at least claiming to print) a small number of books… in cases where the publisher did not license e-rights, in contracts where e-rights are not even alluded to.
I’m assuming this is because they want to retain rights to as many old titles as possible while awaiting the outcome of HarperCollins’ lawsuit against Open Road Media, in which Harper is claiming that the phrase “in book form” in a 30+ year old contract inherently meant/included ebook form.
This strikes me as magical thinking, and it will be outrageous if the court agrees with Harper that an edition never mentioned anywhere in the licensing language should just be “understood” to be included. Hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, large print, etc. are all spelled out in the licensing language. eBooks are also spelled out in licensing language since they became a viable publishing format. Whence comes this wacky notion that editions NEVER MENTIONED are also inherently “included” in licensing?
If Harper (or any other publisher) wants e-rights which it had never signed for, the obvious solution is to go to those rights holders and negotiate for those rights. But rather than do so, Harper has instead chosen to launch an expensive lawsuit by claiming it ALREADY holds rights it never actually licensed. (This explains a lot about how it wound up in that idiotic antitrust mess. I’ve eaten vegetables with better business sense.)
HOwever, if the judge who reviews the case is suffering from undiagnosed ministrokes and rules in Harper’s favor, that would mean that publishers are suddely sitting on a gold mine, in terms of holding onto old print rights for which they never licensed e-rights. So I assume these instances I’m hearing about, wherein publishers are clinging to rights for titles on which they CANNOT currently make plans for e-editions, may be their way of stalling reversion while they await the outcome of that lawsuit (though my impression was that lawsuits can take YEARS).
Actually, there’s a better reason to jump all over HC’s suit: It’s inconsistent with HC’s own actions and logic of contract interpretation.
Older publishing contracts that do not explicitly state that electronic editions are “books”… also do not cover “licensing” of books to end-users, as HC is demanding (and not just for libraries). If the judge resolves the one issue in HC’s favor, he’s also going to have to resolve the licensing-income split; and that, my friends, is something that HC does not want to have happen, because if the judge actually reads the form HC contracts from the 1960s and 1970s he’s going to find that the author’s share of licensing rights to e-books is either 50% or 75% of gross receipts, not the 25% of net income that HC has been imposing (and that only grudgindly and with dubious accounting). The contracts do set a default rate for licensing of rights to third parties, usually in a separate section that covers things like film rights and so on… and if HC acts like the actual e-book transaction is a license and allows Amazon to “withdraw” copies from readers, then that’s how it should be interpreted, right? <vbeg>
Ultimately, though, the real problem is the arrogance of the NY-based IP bar, which continues to believe that:
* the common law approach to copyright rights embodied in the 1909 Act continues to be the law of the land; and
* the New York common law of contract — as of 1963 — continues to govern all contracts related to IP, even when those contracts explicitly select a different jurisdiction
* the Uniform Commercial Code and Restatement (2d) of Contracts have no authority, not even persuasive authority, in interpreting contracts
* the party with the most money before the dispute starts is the only one that deserves to, or will, win
I have to grant the last point, somewhat, on realpolitik grounds…
Thanks for the thread, you two. Yeah, we’re all watching that case…
Given the scope of the matter and the amounts involved, I see that going to the SCOTUS. A circuit split would not be hard to arrange given the vast differences in technological sophistication among judges on the Federal courts.
So yes, it will take YEARS.
Excellent post!
I came to writing from the IT / business contracts world, and I was blissfully ignorant of what was not acceptable for writers, so I made sure to get my rights back 5 years after publication.
(5 years from contact signing or the book out-of-print, whichever came first)
This is a bit more than a year from now, so I’m wondering when I should remind my publisher that their clock is running out.
I think I’d negotiate for a fixed date if I was to do it again.
Steven, I would remind your publisher about six months in advance. What you have in that contract is unusual in publishing, and very good. A fixed date is better, of course, but what you have is great.
Kristine –
Thank you.
My publisher didn’t want to let me keep copyright the first time we negotiated the book which caused the initial deal to collapse (they came back a year later)… apparently, it is common in a lot of technical books for the publisher to have the copyright. Madness!
Having spent 25+ years reading contracts for a living, I was singularly appalled by my publishing contract.
You’re welcome, Steven. Yes, textbook/technical publishing is one of the blackest of black holes in publishing. It makes trade publishing look cuddly and friendly. I started over there as a Sweet Young Thing (all of 23 and naive), and I was appalled at what I saw, and what the authors signed! I could tell you even more stories. Professors in particular must publish or perish and would sign terrifyingly bad deals to get that one little book out to save their professorial jobs. Talk about a Catch 22.
I always followed up and requested reversion as soon as my old books were eligible for it, throughout my career. Sometimes I asked for reversion –before- the book was eligible, and got it (in special circumstances, such as the publisher was going out of business, or if the publisher had dumped me after one sole book which it had let go out of print within a year of release, etc.).
I always figured that –I- was far more likely to find a use for an old title than was a publisher which had let it go out of print and never thought about it again. I also always figured that if my old publishing rights ever became worth real money again, then –I- wanted to decide the book’s fate, not have it decided by a publisher that had forgotten its existence but which still legally held the rights.
So throughout my career, I’ve always made a point of getting my rights reverted as soon as I could. Consequently, I hold the publishing rights to every book of mine that was released 1989-2007. (Every book of mine traditionally published since then is currently still in print.)
And, yep, getting rights reverted has usually required a lot of follow-up.
I remember reading about Dean Koontz owning his backlist decades ago, and it was a very unusual story at the time, at least for a general readership (I was writing stories back in the late 80s, but extremely uneducated about the industry, and I’m pretty sure that the Koontz story and Danse Macabre were at that time about the closest I got to awakening to the business aspects of art).
This link wasn’t the article, but it does touch on some of the things did back in the day.
Thanks for the link, Paul!
You are FABULOUS! Thanks so much for this. I will be sending it on.
This post echoes perfectly with my own experience. I had to buy back at a discount rate 50 of my SF short story compilation paper books in order to get the reversion letter from my small publisher, but i did handsell them in a few months, and now I have one more asset when I go on signing sessions (and 7 more ebooks, 6 short stories, the compilation plus a permafree ebook). So I’m very happy there.
“As the writers and agents have changed the contracts again, the publishers are now discounting e-books to 99 cents or less and counting those sales toward the on-sale total. (Such discounting is often not counted the same way as full-price books in the print part of the contract.)”
I did write recently an entry on my blog on this new phenomenon of publishers discounting ebooks. It’s named “Les trois sacrifices de l’auteur” (http://emmanuelguillot.over-blog.com/article-les-trois-sacrifices-de-l-auteur-110969212.html).
As you said, contracts may differ, and that blog post I did is based on the standard contract offered to the newbie. The first sacrifice is giving 90% of your rights to a publisher for the paper book (and 75 to 85% for the ebook). The second sacrifice is the discounts being made by your publisher. And the third sacrifice is the promotion the publisher ask his authors to do on social networks related to the discount operation (and the promotion generally speaking), and the time authors spend doing it.
As a self-publisher, you also have two of the sacrifices, but for the third, at least you just have to give 30 to 50% to retailers (for the moment, in any case).
The comment section of that blog entry of mine is also worth reading, I think.
Very informative – thanks!
This isn’t legal advice for any particular circumstances… but I’ve successfully gotten many publishers to sign off on a slight variation on the “number of books sold” definition for in-print:
with the x tailored to the particular work, usually between $300 and $1000.
The advantage of this approach is that giving away free copies, or having big cut-price promotions, is that it’s based on the income accrued to the author to keep the work in print. The downside is that over a sufficiently long period of time, inflation could make that $300 seem like $1.37.
But the big advantage is that if you’re tied to a publisher (e.g., a continuing series for which there’s a difficult-to-evade option clause… I’m sure that circumstance sounds familiar to someone here), the publisher may be nonetheless willing to change its reversion language this way. I’ve cajoled all of the Big Six publishers into this at one time or another over the last decade… and I’m just a cuddly cartilaginous ichthyoid, not a big-name author or agent!
Note: I am a lawyer. Tis is not legal advice. You are not my client. Always seek legal advice from an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction and familiar with the relevant law before making legal decisions.
This is what is generally known in licensing as a GMR – guaranteed minimum royalty. The beauty part of a GMR is that the publisher has (assuming it’s in the agreement) one and only one way to cure: make up the difference between the actual royalties and the GMR. If they want to keep the rights, both parties know exactly what it will cost. If not, they revert. And yes, I have seen licensees make up a GMR because they wanted to keep the license. Happens all the time.
Licensees hate these because it completely negates their ability to deploy what I call the Mystery Date stratagem, which is to keep a small quantity of licensed products on hand and sell six of them a year to some collectibles dealer in Paraguay, then claim the licensed products are still on sale so the rights do not revert. I usually represent licensors and I fight tooth and nail for them. In publishing you have the added wrinkle that the worth of the licensed products might suddenly go up as a result of extraneous factors (e.g. In the meantime you wrote a bestseller) but if you have a GMR and a volume floor, at least you’re protected somewhat. After that you’ll have to start building in some kind of windfall clause. Which I have done, but which an average not-already-a-bestselling author is not likely to get.
Thanks, guys. An interesting thread. I have a publisher right now who, even though the contract does not call for it, is paying me e-royalties separately. I think this might be a company-policy work-around on that clause you suggested, C.E., and they’re paying all of us that way. Technically, the royalties should go to the unearned out advance, but they’re not. I’ve been dealing with this–unexpected money is nice, but the company is not following the contract (in oh so many ways)–and I find it really, really odd.
Long story short, I worry that others might try the same thing to pay off a writer to keep a book in print, even when it shouldn’t be. I think an end date (firm) is a better way to handle reversion.
Marc, I love the phrase Mystery Date. My problem with the guaranteed minimum royalty (as I mentioned above) is that it is a version of the Mystery Date strategy. I often want out of a contract for reasons other than payment, and that would simply make it harder. A fixed date gets me out if I’m just patient.
While you are welcome to interpret it as seems most entertaining to you, I call it that because of a real-world situation related to the actual board game of that name. 🙂
And there’s no reason at all not to have ALL THREE – and in fact, I usually do (or at least have a fairly expensive renewal option separate from the GMR.) This is why I insert my little disclaimers: there’s no way I could bring up every consideration that goes into this kind of thing in the real world.
I looooove tight contracts with little wiggle room. All three is a great idea. 🙂
And you just made me realize that all of traditional publishing is one big game of Mystery Date. I hated the board game version of the TV show as a little girl. Make of that what you will. 🙂