The Passive Guy in his great blog The Passive Voice talked this morning about how an author is taking on one of the worst clauses in any author’s contract. And the one that Kris and I warn all authors to change or walk away from the contract.
Worth the read folks. http://www.thepassivevoice.com/08/2011/author-sues-publisher-for-restraint-of-trade/
Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith has written more than one hundred popular novels and well over two hundred published short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he is the coauthor of The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom. He writes under many pen names and has also ghosted for a number of top bestselling writers.
Dean has also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and has done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made.
Over his career he has also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He is now an executive editor for Fiction River.
WMG Publishing Inc. is now my major publisher of all my coming novels, collections, and short stories.
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$2.99 electronic and $4.99 trade paper editions available.
Just click on the image for more information and links.
Interesting that Saatchi’s married to Nigella Lawson, who’s had a number of bestselling foodie books — so presumably she knows something about the publishing biz. Either they don’t talk about business at the dinner table, or he just wasn’t listening to her.
The really, really sad thing is, I had to explain to my co-workers why this is a problem. Even after everything, describing anti-trust laws and what not, they still didn’t quite get it. So this isn’t just a “writers are clueless” thing. This is a “people in general are clueless about their rights” thing.
I’ve seen “land grabs” like that in employment contracts back when I was a software developer (which is, after all, a kind of writing — and any good programmer should have at least a basic understanding of copyright law). I crossed them out, or specifically excluded anything that wasn’t directly related to the job at hand. Never heard a peep out of HR about it, but perhaps they didn’t read what I’d turned in — I didn’t make a big deal out of it.