A publishing contract so breathtakingly egregious was brought to my attention that I’ve taken extraordinary steps to preserve it for your attention. (Note that the publisher has revised this contract after this post was written, and has removed the objectionable clause). Because folks, there are some things we have to talk about in this contract. After a lengthy intro boasting about being transparent – which is very true, that’s why I can show this thing to you – the contract itself is embedded in the post.
There are a couple of poisoned barbs embedded in this contract which would tie an author to this company in ways they do not want to be bound, and which would deprive the author of their IP in perpetuity with, as is laid out in plain language, no compensation made whatsoever for those claimed rights.
Let’s start out with the yellow flag. The thing that I, personally, would withdraw a story from a publication for using this loose a definition, but you might not. There’s a lot of room here for abuse, first of all.
Not defining costs, or building them into the shares of an anthology which relies on royalty sharing to pay authors and contributors, can lead to ballooning costs which are not transparently revealed. This then makes that 100% profit split moot. Somehow, things like this always cost more to produce than they bring in. I’ve seen it happen over and over with small presses, where authors never saw a thin dime for their work. As I said, it’s a yellow flag, but to me it’s a breach of trust and I’d pull my work and put it out myself or with a press I trusted.
The other, big, venomous sting might be invisible if you didn’t know a little about Pubshare. Pubshare is awesome. However, Pubshare doesn’t handle audio. So this next clause and it’s knock-on are where the thing really gets ugly.
Pubshare does not handle in any way the payments for film, television, audio, and other motion picture of audiovisual adaptations. This publisher is making a HUGE rights grab, with a blunt statement that they will not pay the author for any of those rights. Ever. And they won’t give them back.
This, my friends, is suicidal on the authors’ parts. This is how famous authors and composers died penniless on the streets, because they signed over their rights willingly for a pittance. Do not do this. I promise you, your work is worth more than this. It is. Don’t say ‘oh, no one will ever want my story for…’ because you do not know that. This publisher thinks it’s worth grabbing and holding onto for themselves. You need to value your work at least as much as they do!
Please, please, always read the contract. Don’t devalue your work’s worth and sign it away. Honestly, with most tiny presses you can put even a short story out yourself and make more than it will pay you. Some presses pay, and pay well (I’m biased, yes, but Raconteur Press is one of those). Having your name in an anthology with some bigger name authors will propagate your work to their fanbases and may pick you up new readers for your work outside that anthology. Sometimes there are reasons to put work out there knowing direct monetary compensation may not happen – I donate stories regularly to my local library’s anthologies, for instance – but never sign away the rights. Look for a reversion clause, and if there isn’t one, run. Run screaming in the opposite direction, and warn everyone not to trust that person with their life’s work.
F*ck you. Pay me.
As the post, and contract, may disappear when the calling out happens, I’m doing something extraordinary here. I’m attaching the contract as it was published on Substack originally.
Mad Genius Club 
35 responses to “Poison Barbs”
*squint squint*
can’t read it.
Sorry, best I could do with what I had.
I uploaded the copies I made to substack.
Note: zero reason to go there other than to see larger pictures, it’s just a “go read this” quote and link.
thanks. now that io read it, it’s even scummier than i thought.
Again, they did put out a new contract which is far better. They did learn!
This is needful. Too many authors have no experience in legal dealings, and don’t recognize the Gotcha’s.
If it is in the contract, expect it to be enforced. “Oh, that’s a moot point; just boilerplate. We can’t/won’t insist of it.”
As Robert Heinlein once pointed out, no matter how friendly you are with your publisher, expect the contract to be detailed and explicit in all terms. Just in case you and the publisher die minutes after signing, and your heirs totally detest each other.
Or in case the publisher goes bankrupt and your IP is suddenly an asset assigned to a creditor. (I love clauses in contracts that release the rights of the company fails).
I’m not likely to attend any Cons – travel is iffy for me these days. But if I WERE able to do so, I’d LOVE a spirited discussion on Publishing contracts. Also the seemingly built in delays that cause some writers to despair. ( The case of a certain popular author who commited suicide days before a check arrived from his publisher comes to mind. He tired of shooting and eating pigeons he shot out of his Parisian apartment, so used the .22 on himself instead. DAMN ALL ‘Golden Age’ publishers!
Hi Doug,
Could you clarify this story about the writer shooting pigeons in Paris and then shooting himself? It’s PERFECT for an upcoming book project for us.
Bill googled all the particulars you listed and couldn’t find anything!
Any help you can offer would be most appreciated on this marvelous little cautionary tale.
It was H. Beam Piper
Thank you!
Thanks, Mary. I had a brain lapse on his name.
H. Beam Piper was living in a Parisian apartment, slowly starving while waiting on his publisher to pay him for a story. I don’t know if the delay was on the publisher’s part or Piper’s agent; nontheless, pigeons have little nutritional value and don’t reflect a balanced diet.
shortly after he killed humself, a check arrived.
If you have read any of Piper’s works, you see he was a talented and upcoming writer. Lots to be said for Lawdog’s 4-Words concept today.
Thank you!
The clause is void. It’s deemed contrary to whatever the legalese is. Your rights are part of the assets for the bankruptcy court. And you, of course, do not have priority rights to your royalties.
I believe a clause where the publisher no longer can perform its duties may be more defensible.
I was paraphrasing, I’ll have to check, but I think it’s more like what you said.
Remember that the publisher’s good will means nothing without legal knowledge.
Strongly suggest to anyone drafting up a contract and starting a business to run it by a lawyer first.
I honestly thought– given the title of the page, the image at the top, the name “Propaganda Press,” and the flaws in the contract– that it might be a parody.
Nope, dude showed up on Substack trying to tell me that it paid you for everything and there was a 100% rights reversion, and he’d totally copied from “some of” the Indy contracts.
Yup. He got taken to the woodshed and did change the contract up, thank goodness, but it took some time and *several* people telling him to fix it.
I signed a nonfiction contract so badly written that my IP lawyer wondered if it would be upheld in court – outdated language, nothing about electronic rights, had not updated to latest state contract law statute numbers … I didn’t like the contract, but it was part of a larger package, and I had (more or less) already been paid for the work. Would I do that for fiction, or for nonfiction now? Oh [bleep] no.
A few years ago, B&N’s e-book publishing contract had a clause in it that could be used to claim all IP rights, in perpetuity. When people fussed, the company said, “Oh, don’t worry, it won’t be enforced, that’s just boilerplate …” And so on. Nope. The clauses have since been removed but that left a sour taste in my mouth.
I get the feeling of being trapped into something, and I’m glad you wouldn’t do it again. I have seen so many bad contracts, and I’ve even signed a few that were shaky, but there are limits.
And we must never assume that no one will enforce a contract.
I still have Byte Magazines with some of Jerry Pournelle’s commentary on the language used in software contracts/licenses.
“I wouldn’t sign that blind drunk!” was one of the milder ones.
Which brings up something else to be aware of: you need to look critically at the license terms for the AI tools you are using. A lot of this has been covered as word processing software, art tools, cloud storage/backup, etc. have rolled through the market over the years, but AI is different enough that I’d get someone to look not only at the terms for the AI as a stand-alone, but also for how those terms intersect with all the other tools it might touch
The first one off the top of my head is do they consider something produced in whole or part with an AI as actually 100% your work?
I can tell you that artwork produced with AI is copyrightable to *you the creator* but not to the AI (which was idiotic), but best to make sure you’ve edited it and can show your work.
The other one that got me (on top of this) on this is 10. There is NOTHING that says they will actually use Pubshare in a significant way. And explicitly says any OTHER distribution method are excluded from royalty calculations, which means they could upload it on pub share to get authorization but never finalize distribution and then manually upload it everywhere else and keep whatever profit.
I can see “physical sales at conventions remain with the seller. You, as an author retain rights to sell copies bought at cost at conventions as do we and each shall retain the profits thereof.” kind of language, but this is very much not that.
/scratches head
And here I thought the 13th Amendment abolished slavery; well, except for certain crimes not yet specified by Congress. Didn’t know that being a newbie author unaware of all the pitfalls out there qualified as a crime. 😉
I think that if “in perpetuity” appears in any contract ever, it’s time to run away as fast as you can. That is a Rumplestiltskin contract.
The most comprehensive discussion on the legal ramifications of gAI and copyright is the following:
https://www.sternekessler.com/news-insights/insights/ai-ip-year-in-review-the-u-s-copyright-offices-position-on-the-copyrightability-of-works-made-with-the-assistance-of-generative-ai/
The copyright office is still researching and deciding on various gAI questions and has a 3 part report (only 2 parts have been issued so far). It is an ever changing landscape.
That I have found so far….How do you edit these things?!
I don’t think you can! Annoying, wordpress is.
Right? lol
Shortly after that article was written – and you’ll note that copyright is being granted to the human artists who disclaim their involvement and show their work, but not to those who attempted to copyright to the program (which is absurdity) – there was another ruling on Ai art created with editing done in the program. https://www.invoke.com/post/invoke-receives-copyright-in-landmark-ruling-for-ai-assisted-artwork
Frankly at this point I assume that anyone saying generated art cannot be copyrighted to the human who created it and edited it, has ulterior motivations.
After reading that, I agree that it can be done —- provided you use a certain type of image-generating AI, and provide an obsessive level of documentation. The logs of the AI should be able to give you the required level of detail, but the size of the log file looks like it will be larger than the art. 🤔😏
Hopefully another AI can assist any publisher in going through this goat-gagger.
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