Are Editors Necessary? - Part 2

The paternalistic treatment of authors by editors in earlier times, however, produced its own set of inequities, for publishers took advantage of many authors who were too ignorant, shy, or well-bred to demand good terms of their editors. Knowing that most authors write for love, publishers tended to assume that they didn't care about writing for money.

Resentment toward publishers over their exploitation of authors created the conditions for the rise to power of literary agents, and though new authors today are still at a disadvantage, the balance eventually shifts when they engage agents and become more successful. Good agents often insist on a large measure of control over the author-editor relationship, holding authors at arm's length from their editors to protect them from being taken advantage of. And what has happened in the four or five decades since this transformation occurred is that the agents have begun to take over the role formerly played by editors.

Today's agents nurture authors, work closely with them in the development of their work, perform a great many editorial tasks, and lend strong emotional and psychological support. And, perhaps most important of all, in a turbulent world of publishing mergers and takeovers and editorial musical chairs, agents have become the islands of stability and reliability that were once the province of editors. So, if the importance of editors in this respect has diminished, the loss has not necessarily affected authors for the worse.

Or, take the tasks of copyediting manuscripts and proofreading galleys. Although these still fall upon the employees of publishing companies, the high costs of running businesses have caused a shift from in-house line editing to freelance work done at home. Many copyeditors are former employees of publishers who have managed to adapt their responsibilities to their domestic schedules. But the pressures of producing large numbers of books annually have forced publishers to overload editors with work or to seek less experienced people to do these highly demanding jobs. Some publishers just can't afford the time or expense to train copyeditors, supervise them closely, review their work, and instill in them a grasp of house style, a knowledge of company tradition, and a sense of pride. English is not even the first language for many copyeditors. And those who are fluent in English may not have the patience, precision, and skill to be good editors.

Whether we like it or not, the responsibility for well-edited books is shifting to authors. Actually, they have always borne much of that burden. In hardcover publishing particularly, most authors are given the opportunity (if not the contractual right) to review copyedited manuscripts and to proofread galleys, and if an author doesn't care enough to double-check every fact, every dubious grammatical construction and spelling, indeed every word of his manuscript and galleys, he has no one to blame but himself for a flawed product.

It is harder for authors to control errors in paperback originals and reprints, however, because tight publication schedules often make it prohibitive for publishers to furnish galleys for review by authors. Also, authors rarely get to see galleys of paperback reprints of their hardcover books. But authors and their agents can and often do demand the right to examine galleys in exchange for a promise to turn them around promptly. Thus, even paperback authors have a chance to bring out unblemished books.

The development of computerized editing and word processing hardware and software promises to eliminate many problems for authors and editors. Although numerous technical, financial, labor, and other obstacles have impeded the automation of some important editorial functions, I'm reasonably certain that these will be overcome in the foreseeable future, making clean copy in both manuscript and galley an everyday occurrence. The same is true for style, design, composition, and other aspects of the publishing process that are now in the hands of a diminishing number of expert craftspeople. In short, emerging technology will replace a good deal of the mental and manual labor involved in producing books.

What do all these changes leave for editors to do? The answer is, just about everything. Unlike those of the older generation, today's editors must master an entire gamut of disciplines including production, marketing, negotiation, promotion, advertising, publicity, accounting, salesmanship, digital technology, psychology, politics, diplomacy, and - well, editing. But into that last designation goes a bewildering variety of activities, many only remotely connected with the stereotyped one of a tweedy pipe smoker sitting in a monastic office hunting for typos.

The dizzying pace and complexity of modern publishing makes it neither possible nor desirable for editors to sit all day reading or conversing with authors. They must be worldly and sophisticated, capable of shepherding the projects they sponsor through a gauntlet of technical, financial, political, and other hazards. Though editors are often criticized for being corporate animals, in this respect at least we should thank our stars that they are. For they and they alone understand how to work their systems, to maneuver, coax, and sometimes ram their beloved books - our beloved books! - through the corporate obstacle course. Today's editors are professional company men and women, and if they don't have a problem with that characterization, I don't see why we should.

There are many editorial qualities that are irreplaceable. Among them are taste, discrimination, personal emotional response, a sense of order and organization, determination, devotion, pride, and tender loving care. In these respects, no one has discovered anyone or anything that can remotely take the place of an editor. Agents can't do it because they're outsiders. Computers can't do it because they're heartless.

But none of those virtues means anything if editors are lacking in courage. The biggest threat to the health of our industry is not mergers and acquisitions. It is failure of nerve on the part of its editors. The evolution of publishing from a profession run by individuals to a business managed by committees has created a population of editors preoccupied with holding their jobs. The pressures they live under are constantly forcing them to lower the common denominator when selecting the projects they wish to sponsor. This means that it is easier to say no than yes.

The way that this attitude manifests itself for me is editors' resistance to acquiring books that are even slightly flawed. It was not long ago that the prevailing attitude among editors was, "This book has some problems, but the author is so talented that I'd like to buy it and work with him." Today such words are rarely heard. A book with problems is a book rejected, and more and more one hears editors say, "Let the author revise it, then we'll decide if we want to buy it." Many of them have confided in me that they would love to buy the book, but the prospect of bucking the system is simply too daunting.

When I asked an agent colleague of mine whether she thought editors were necessary, she quipped, "Of course they are. Who else can take agents to lunch?" If editors are to remain more than entertaining luncheon hosts, if they are to be not merely necessary but indispensable, they will have to continue resisting the pressures toward homogeneity and mediocrity that are arrayed against them by the monolith of Big Publishing.

Maxwell Perkins would understand that.

- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

When Is a Book Acceptable, and Who Says So?

The acceptability provision of a book contract can be summarized as follows: A publisher engages an author to write a book, stipulating in the contract that if the manuscript is not acceptable in the publisher's sole discretion, the publisher may reject it and require the author to repay in full the advance that was paid on signing the contract. Until that advance is repaid, the publisher will not release the author from the contract, thus restricting him or her from entering into a contract with another publisher for that (and perhaps any other) literary work.

Inherent in this provision are three potentially explosive elements. The first is that acceptability depends entirely on the arbitrary editorial judgment of the publisher. The second is that the author is required to repay every penny to his publisher should the manuscript be determined to be unacceptable. The third is that the author is restrained from selling that book to another publisher until the original publisher has been repaid, or at least until satisfactory provisions for repayment have been made. (And if there is an option clause in the original contract, the author may be prohibited from selling any other work to another publisher until satisfactory refund arrangements have been made with the publisher of the first part.)

This mixture has indeed exploded on numerous occasions, and with growing frequency as the stakes in our business have grown higher. But there is a qualitative difference between disputes over acceptability and those over most other items in publishing contracts. Whereas 99 percent of the quarrels that arise between authors and publishers end up being negotiated, settled, or compromised, those over acceptability often end up being litigated to final judgments.

Publishers are loath to spend money on lawsuits, especially against authors, because it is expensive and makes for poor public relations. But when it comes to the question of acceptability, a publisher may be counted on to fight like the devil even though it looks lousy to dun and sue authors and the legal costs exceed the prospects of recovery of the money paid to the author. And authors who might otherwise shrink from the expense of prosecuting or defending a lawsuit have been known to dig in against all reason to wage war over the acceptability provision. Both sides seem anxious to make law on this issue. And when that happens, it usually means that a principle or precedent is involved that transcends money.

Authors frequently balk over the seeming right of life and death accorded in the provision that gives publishers the sole discretion to accept or reject a manuscript. But if the publisher doesn't have that right, who else should have it? The author? Of course a publisher is entitled to that right. As in any other business enterprise, the party that commissions a work is entitled to approval of the merchandise. It's only the potential to abuse the right that makes authors anxious, and there are enough instances of abuse to justify that anxiety.

In defense of publishers, it must be said that abuses occur less frequently than might be expected, and for two reasons. The first is that most publishers are extremely cautious about engaging authors to write books. Before contracting for an unwritten book a publisher will require ample evidence of the author's track record, writing skill, and reliability so as to minimize the possibility that the author will fail to deliver, will deliver late, or will deliver a problem manuscript.

The second reason is that most publishing companies today are run by committee. Just as the decision to hire a writer is not left to one editor, neither is the decision to accept or reject the finished product. Rather, the manuscript is circulated among members of an editorial board. This is particularly true when the sponsoring editor has doubts about the quality of the material. That editor's judgment is on the line, for he was responsible for advocating the company's investment in the project to begin with. If he rejects it, wasting his firm's time and raising the possibility that the money paid the author thus far won't be recovered, he loses face, prestige, and authority with his colleagues and employers. Sometimes he loses his job. Therefore, the editor who feels negatively about a delivered manuscript will seek backup from others on the editorial board, just as he solicited that backup when he acquired the book. And unless the manuscript is truly a stinker, the board may vote to go ahead with publication or revision despite its reservations. So there are fail-safe mechanisms operative at publishing companies that can reduce the potential for arbitrary rejection.

Nevertheless, abuses of "sole discretion" do occur. I can recall more than a few occasions when a publisher contracted for an unwritten book, then rejected the manuscript because the subject was no longer as timely or relevant as it was when the publisher signed up the author, or because the editor who commissioned the project was no longer there to lend support and enthusiasm to it. A notable example of this occurred when William Morrow rejected William Safire's manuscript of a book about Richard Nixon. Safire contended that the real reason Morrow found his book unsatisfactory was that between the time Morrow commissioned the book and the time Safire completed it, Richard Nixon had become persona non grata with the American public.

Agents and authors can cite numerous instances of publishers using the acceptability clause to renege on high-priced agreements. These publishers will agree to whatever terms it takes to get a hot author or property. Then, when the manuscript is turned in, the publisher may decide for any number of reasons that it overpaid. The publisher then threatens to reject the manuscript unless the author agrees to renegotiate the contract. The real reason for rejection may be that the publisher doesn't have, or doesn't want to spend, that much money. Thus far the courts have favored the publishers' argument that they should not be compelled to publish a book that they are certain is going to lose money.

It is extremely difficult for an aggrieved author to prove in a court of law that his publisher acted in bad faith in rejecting his manuscript. The parties cannot ask judge or jury to read the manuscript, because this involves matters of taste that are beyond a court's jurisdiction. So it's incumbent on authors and their lawyers to demonstrate that the publisher was motivated by bad faith, and I'm happy to note a trend toward admitting good and bad faith as factors in lawsuits over the acceptability clause. Admitting those factors in turn opens the door to questions of a publisher's editorial responsibilities, its obligations to furnish authors with editorial guidance, opportunities to rewrite, second opinions by other editors, arbitration and appeal, and other procedures designed to insure that authors are not placed totally at the mercy of publishers whose motives may be impure.

This also means that the stipulation requiring authors to repay their on-signing advance if the publisher rejects their manuscripts is coming under closer scrutiny by the courts. For if it can be shown that a publisher acted in bad faith when it turned a book down, a court may decide that the publisher is not entitled to a refund, no matter what the contract may call for. This very thing happened in a dispute between an author named Julia Whedon and Dell, in which the court supported Whedon's contention that Dell had acted in bad faith by rejecting her manuscript without affording her the benefit of editorial guidance, rewrite instructions, etc. The court not only allowed her to keep the advance Dell had paid her on signing the contract, but even ruled that she had not breached her contract when she sold the rejected manuscript to another publisher before being released from her Dell contract. In fact, the court ruled that when Dell failed to furnish Whedon with adequate editorial help, Dell breached its contract and at that point the author was released with no further obligation to repay her advance.

These developments are extremely promising from the viewpoint of authors even though, at this time, they still have to fight and even go to court to gain protection that should automatically devolve on them in the boilerplate of every publishing contract. At the same time, all this legal wrangling over sole discretion only serves to obscure the real issue in the war over acceptability: Is an advance a loan? Or is it, rather, an investment?

As things stand now, publishing contracts are nothing more than free options on an author's time, talent, and services. If, after the months or years it takes for an author to produce a book, the publisher turns the manuscript down, that publisher is entitled to get its money back in full. The only sum the publisher is out of pocket is the cost of the money - the interest, that is - that it "loaned" to the author while he was writing his book. Now, money-back guarantees are fine if you manufacture soup, soap, or spaghetti sauce. But it's quite something else if you write books. The principle of repayment on which the acceptability clause rests is a thoroughly odious one and deserves to be fought by any means at an author's disposal.

An advance is not a loan. It is a nonrecoverable investment, no different from an investment in a stock or bond issue, a mining or drilling operation or a Broadway show. A publisher reviews an author's "prospectus," - writing credits, sales records, reputation for reliability, and samples of the proposed work. If the publisher determines that a book by this author is a good investment, he puts money on it. As we have seen, publishers truly examines book proposals as carefully as if they were "at risk" investments. Why should they be entitled to get their money back while investors in every other type of offering stand to forfeit theirs? If for any reason the manuscript is disappointing to the publisher, the company has the right not to pay the balance of the advance due on delivery and acceptance. But in my own strongly held opinion, the down-payment must be forfeited and the author automatically released from his contract.

I realize that this is a hard line, but only by taking it will authors force publishers to demonstrate good faith when commissioning books. The publisher that knows it can recoup its full investment is going to have too many escape hatches when the book is delivered. There will be far fewer if a publisher stands to lose money.

To a small degree, publishers have conceded the fairness of this position by modifying the requirement that the author promptly refund the on-signing payment if a book is rejected. Many houses now stipulate in their contracts that the refund may be paid out of the "first proceeds" received by the author from the sale of the rejected manuscript to another publisher. This is scarcely better than having to repay the advance at the time it's rejected. All it means is a postponement of the day of reckoning, an extension of the date when the publisher's "loan" must be repaid by the author.

- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

Are Editors Necessary? Part 1

There's been a lot of talk lately about the decline of editing. These are fighting words.

The problem with evaluating this allegation is that everything editors do today is invidiously compared to the accomplishments of that quintessential master, Maxwell Perkins. Perkins practiced his art at the offices of Charles Scribner's Sons from 1914 until late in the 1940s and midwifed the masterpieces of such immortals as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe. "Where are today's Maxwell Perkinses?" is the plaintive cry of authors who discover horrifying grammatical, syntactical, factual, and typographical errors in their freshly minted books, or, worse, have them gleefully pointed out by friends and critics. Every such erratum is a rebuke to the hallowed memory of that figure who has been depicted as gracious, patient, erudite, nurturing, precise, demanding, polite, and modest, a man whose love of authors was exceeded only by his love of good and well-made books. Let's assume that he truly did possess all of the virtues ascribed to him, and more if you wish. I have no desire to desecrate either his memory or his achievements.

I just don't happen to think that "Where are today's Maxwell Perkinses?" is a very good question. It oversimplifies editing both then and now, and fails to take into account the fact that today's editors simply don't perform the same tasks that their forebears did. I know a number of great editors working today, but they're great in many significantly different ways from the great editors of yesteryear.

Just about every aspect of publishing has changed since Perkins's era. The types of books published are different. Agents exert far more influence. The paperback industry has revolutionized the marketing of books. Computers and digital technology have been created and refined. Bookstore chains and amazon.com have swept countless independent bookshops out of business. Printing technology has improved immensely. Books today are not acquired, edited, produced, printed, or distributed the same way they were earlier in the twentieth century. They are not even written the same way.

We must also define "editors" before we apply the word irresponsibly. Editing is a highly complex set of functions, and no single individual is capable of exercising them with equal aplomb. The editor who wines and dines agents and charms authors may be a clumsy negotiator; the dynamic deal-maker may have no patience for the tedious and demanding word-by-word task of copyediting; the copyeditor who brilliantly brings a book to life word by word, line by line, may be completely at sixes and sevens when it comes to handling authors.

It is certainly easy to wax nostalgic about editing in the Good Old Days (which really ended only about twenty-five or thirty years ago). If accounts and memoirs of that era can be trusted, editors then were steeped in fine arts, philosophy, languages, and the classics. They were a breed of compulsively orderly and fanatically precise individuals who ruthlessly stalked and destroyed typos, solecisms, and factual inaccuracies, and who conducted prodigious debates with authors about linguistic nuances. Their pride in their labors matched - and sometimes exceeded - that of the authors themselves. And when it came to money, they placed literature high above crass commerce, and discussed author compensation with the same delicacy they reserved for childbearing.

Today's editor, industry critics claim, no longer has that pride and painstaking compulsiveness. Indeed, it has been contended, editors today do everything but edit. The nurturing of authors has given way to the acquisition of properties. Editorial taste and judgment have been replaced by the application of success formulas devised by editorial committees. Risk-taking, hunches, and commercial instincts have yielded to the conservative application of bottom-line buying policies dictated by bookstore chain managers and implemented by rigid computer programs. The new breed of editorial animal, it is asserted, looks down his or her nose at line editing and production details. The time and money pressures of today's monolithic and highly competitive publishing business have devalued good book-making. The result is books that fall apart, prematurely yellow with age, and are scandalously rife with typos.

Unquestionably, a shift has taken place in the role of trade book editors from what is generally characterized as line functions to that of acquisitions. The earlier role, the one that we most sentimentalize, combined nurturing parent and stern taskmaster, a person who could get a great book out of an author, then groom and curry the text until it virtually sparkled. Although editors then, as now, worked for publishers whose profit agenda seldom coincided with that of their authors, the editor was thought of as the author's friend, protector, and advocate.

The emphasis today on the acquisition role of editors places them in a more adversarial role with authors. Negotiation often pits them against each other, and the residue of resentment and distrust that remains after the bargain is sealed makes it difficult for authors to feel completely comfortable with their editors.

In Part 2 of this article we'll see how the rise of literary agents redefined the role of editors.

- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

A World Where All Escalators Go Up - Part 2

In Part 1 of this two-part article, we introduced a term commonly heard in discussions of book deals: "escalator." Escalators are additional advance payments made by publishers to authors if and when certain contingencies occur. What are those contingencies? How much are they worth? And what, if anything, is their real value? We homed in on bestseller bonuses. In this concluding segment we focus on paperback reprint, book club, awards, movie and other types of escalators.

One form taken by escalators is book club or paperback reprint, wherein your publisher agrees to pay you additional advance monies if a book club or paperback reprint deal on your book exceeds a certain amount of money. As we've seen, such escalators are almost invariably of the pay-you-with-your-own-money variety, because your publishers are guaranteed recoupment of the bonus out of the money they will eventually collect from the book club or reprinter. The only thing they lose is interest on the prepayment to you of money they would otherwise have paid in the normal six-month royalty cycle.

Then there are movie bonuses, which are usually payable upon national release by a major distributor of a theatrical motion picture based on your book. There's a mouthful of contingencies crammed into that sentence, so let's analyze it. First, the movie has to be released. Of course! you say, but many authors believe that merely signing a contract for a movie deal ought to be enough to garner them a handsome bonus from their publishers. I'm sorry to tell you otherwise. Although there is some promotional value for a publisher to be able to boast, "Acquired for motion pictures by Universal," it scarcely does a thing for sales. Thus, escalators are usually not payable when movie rights to your book are optioned, or even when the option is exercised. In fact, they are not even payable when your movie goes into production. Publishers have seen too many movie deals fall through to get excited when a star actor or producer takes an option on a book property. They have learned to their sorrow that many movies that go into production are not completed or released.

So, in order to trigger that escalator, your film must actually be distributed. And it must be distributed by one of the big distributors, Universal or Warner or the like, rather than any one of the thousands of little ones that service the movie community. And finally, the movie must be released nationally, as opposed to locally or regionally. The premiere of a film, even a high-budget one made by a great director with superstar actors and actresses, is not going to boost sales of the book from which it is adapted if it's shown only at a few elite showcase theaters in New York and Los Angeles. In order for the film to have impact on mass market book sales, it must be shown at hundreds or thousands of theaters around the nation.

Again, the prices for movie escalators vary widely, from modest - in the low five figures - to very large in the case of authors with long track records in the area of books made into hit films.

Related to theatrical movie bonuses are television-movie escalators. But while the market for television adaptation of books is a very active one, the stimulus to book sales is usually minimal. Even though the exposure is tremendous, far greater than that of a theatrical movie, it is also ephemeral: an evening or two (repeated once, six months or a year later) and it's gone. For publishers this presents serious problems of distribution and promotion. The books must be in the stores precisely on the day of or the day after the airing of the film, and the film must be so heavily publicized that consumers will be motivated to buy the book at the time of the airing. This is expensive, inefficient, unpredictable, and usually, therefore, unsuccessful.

For a television movie to mean anything in terms of tie-in value, it must first of all be an event, one absorbing a minimum of four hours, but preferably spanning a whole week of evenings or, like the blockbuster miniseries Rome, a season of Sunday evening. It should also be based on a bestselling book so that viewer recognition of both the book and movie stimulate each other: you've read the book, now see the television movie, you've seen the movie, now read the book.

Because very few books are converted into television events of a enormous magnitude, the prices for escalators in this medium are considerably lower than they are for release of a major theatrical film adaptation of your book. The conditions are that the TV film be of at least four hours, run over an extended period of time, and be aired originally on a major television or cable network.

There are other contingencies that may trigger escalator payments. Some contracts call for bonuses to be paid if a book wins a major prize or award that has promotional value: Pulitzer, National Book Award, and the like. In some science fiction book contracts, I have negotiated bonuses for winning Nebula or Hugo awards, and in a few cases I even worked in bonuses for nominations for those awards. To science fiction fans the words "Nebula" or "Hugo" on the cover of a book are powerful inducements to buy that book, even if the word "Nominee" is printed beside them.

Obviously, not all books are suitable for escalators. Midlist books, most genre books, and books in category series seldom have escalation provisions in their contracts. For the occasional wunderbuch, the midlist novel that becomes a word-of-mouth bestseller and gets made into a hit movie, the author who did not have escalators in his contract can nevertheless look forward to royalties in the usual course of things. Of course, the next contract he or she negotiates will, you can be sure, contain more escalators than Macy's department store.

There's no harm in your trying for escalators when you negotiate your next contract, because it's no skin off your publisher's nose to give them to you: they only have to pay them to you, as they say in Las Vegas, "on the come." So what the hell; go for it. That way, you too will be able to brag that you have sold your book—with escalators—for a million dollars.

- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

A World Where All Escalators Go Up - Part 1

A term commonly heard in discussions of book deals is "escalator." For instance, "Her book was bought for an advance that, with escalators, could exceed $1 million." Escalators are additional advance payments made by publishers to authors if and when certain contingencies occur. What are those contingencies? How much are they worth? And what, if anything, is their real value?

Escalators were created, among other reasons, to bridge the gap between author and publisher when negotiations reach an impasse. You strongly believe your book will be a bestseller or will be bought by a major book club or made into a motion picture, and you feel that your advance should reflect the same optimism on your publisher's part. Your publishers, on the other hand, hope and pray you're right, but they've seen many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. They cannot afford to overpay authors on the strength of hope alone. Of course, if your track record justifies it - if your last five books have soared to the top of the bestseller list; been main selections of major book clubs, and been made into hit movies - they will be greatly disposed to pay you a lot of money up front. But let us say, for the sake of argument, that this is not the case.

The answer is for your publishers to offer you escalators. These bind them to pay you scheduled sums of money if, and only if, your optimism turns out to be justified; if it doesn't, they owe you nothing beyond whatever royalties your book may earn over its original advance.

Although the terms "bonus" and "escalator" are used interchangeably in Publishingese, and I'll use them that way here as well, these extra payments are not really bonuses in the usual sense. They are always recoverable from royalties and subsidiary income generated by a book; they are, in other words, additional advances. If your original advance was $50,000, say, and your contract calls for a $10,000 escalator to be triggered by the release of a movie adaptation of your book, then your advance becomes $60,000. The $10,000 escalator is, in effect, a prepayment of royalties that your publishers hope your book will earn as a result of the movie.

It would seem, then, that you are being paid with your own money, and in certain cases that is true. Suppose you sold your book to a publisher for a $25,000 advance, and your contract calls for a $10,000 escalator to be paid if your book is sold to a paperback reprint house for $100,000 or more. Further suppose that the book is auctioned off and sold to a reprinter for $150,000. If the traditional fifty-fifty split on reprint money applies, your share of the reprint money will come to $75,000.

Okay, the reprint deal triggers your $10,000 escalator. Now you've received a total of $35,000: your advance plus your escalator. But it is no hardship for your publishers to pay that escalator to you, because you are guaranteed $75,000 as your share of the reprint deal!

Other escalators are riskier for publishers and can end up losing money for them. Take another hypothetical case where you sell your book for a $100,000 advance, and the contract calls for a $25,000 bonus if a movie is made from your book. Let's say that both book and movie flop, and your book doesn't even earn back its original advance, let alone the advance plus the escalator. This is a case where the publisher was not paying you out of guaranteed monies, but is genuinely out of pocket.

Escalators fall into a number of categories. The most common is the bestseller bonus. The best-seller list usually used to determine escalators is the one in the book review section of the Sunday edition of the New York Times, though sometimes the one in Publishers Weekly is also used. There are several ways to structure bestseller bonuses. One is the length of time that a book is on the list, another is a book's position on the list. It is desirable for a book to be on the bestseller list for a long time, of course; it is also desirable for a book to be high on the best-seller list. Bonuses can be structured to reward length or position or both. A long run on the list, even at the bottom, can be significant, both because it means the book is selling strongly over a long period of time, and because it enables the publisher to boast, " _____Weeks on the Bestseller List!"

Just as important is position on the list. The higher your book rises, the better it is, naturally. But the book that reaches the number one position causes a quantum leap in promotional value, even if it drops down or off the list the very next week. Therefore, many escalator schedules in book contracts are heavily weighted in favor of the number one slot. A typical arrangement might be $2500 per week for New York Times bestseller list positions 11-15, $3500 per week week for positions 6-10, $5000 per week for positions 2-5, and $10,000 per week for the #1 slot.

The actual sums paid at the various stations of the list can vary widely. I have negotiated bestseller escalators for as little as a few thousand dollars and as much as high six figures.
There are a couple of other features of escalators I should mention. Almost all such provisions place a limit (called a "ceiling" or "cap") on the total bestseller bonuses payable to the author, so that no matter which position your book is on and how long it stays there, the most you can earn is, X thousand dollars in escalators.

The other aspect is that escalators, or escalator installments, are payable within a short period of time after the event that triggers them. Thirty days is as long as it should take for most bonuses to be paid, otherwise your publishers will be taking back in interest what they owe you in bonus money. If a publisher waits until royalty time to pay you your escalators, that's not much of a bargain.

In the second part of this article we'll focus on award, book club, movie and other types of escalators.

- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

Writers-for-Hire

If one were to compose a Bill of Rights for authors, ownership of copyright to their works would certainly be close to the top of the list. We hold self-evident the truth that if a person produces an original book-length work, he or she is entitled to proprietorship under the law, and to full benefit of its commercial exploitation.

Yet, it has not always been so. The piracy of literature by printers, publishers, and booksellers has been common practice throughout the world from the dawn of the printed word, and was prevalent in this country until well into the present century. Until the establishment of the first International Copyright Convention in 1891 and its refinement after World War II, respect for the sanctity of copyright was largely a matter of gentleman's agreements based strictly on self-interest—don't steal from me and I won't steal from you. There are still vast areas of our globe where publishers think nothing of stealing and distributing works of literature from authors and publishers of law-abiding countries, and the emergence of electronic and online media have made it a big business. Piracy of books, videotapes, music, and other intellectual property in some foreign countries is tolerated, condoned or even sponsored and supported by their governments.

Lest you become too smug that such barbarities cannot happen here, I am compelled to report my observation that the appropriation of authors' copyrights by publishers and book packagers seems to be on the upswing. Nothing so gross as piracy, mind you. More, I would say, like extortion. But the effect is the same: the deprivation of authors' rights to enjoy the fruits of their labors. The fruits of an author's labors include such bounties as royalties on copies of books sold, participation in reprint income, and revenue deriving from the exploitation of serial, translation, dramatization, electronic, and other subsidiary rights. Not everyone shares the conviction that the enjoyment of these monies is a natural and God-given right, however. Indeed, not everybody behaves as if the enjoyment of these monies is protected by statutory law.

The engagement of writers for flat fees falls into a category of employment known as "work-for-hire." Work-for-hire is a doctrine defining the relationship between a copyright owner and a writer. Note that the owner may or may not be an author; he, she, they, or it may be a corporation (like a movie studio or television production company), a syndicate of investors, or an individual who is not a writer. These entities hire writers to perform a service in pretty much the same way a homeowner hires a cabinetmaker, a painter, or a gardener, except that in this case the task is writing a text for the "boss"—the creator or owner of the idea. The owner is then free to exploit the text in any way he desires with no further obligation to the author.

Some provisions of the 1976 Copyright Act attempt to define the work-for-hire concept, but they do not do so very clearly and have left the door open to unfair exploitation of authors.

I hasten to make clear that all work-for-hire is by no means exploitive. Authors sometimes voluntarily sell all rights to their copyrighted work. And there are numerous situations in which work-for-hire may be considered reasonable and acceptable by normal ethical standards; for instance, the engagement of writers to do articles for an encyclopedia. The copyright holder of the total work is the publisher, and because it would be impractical and uneconomical to pay a royalty to each contributor, the normal arrangement is a one-time fee. As long as the fee pays for the time and effort, the author is usually content, particularly if he or she gets byline credit, for a contribution to an encyclopedia bears great prestige that helps the author endure the low wages.

Another application of the work-for-hire concept that most of us accept unquestioningly is ghostwriting. Authorities or celebrities who cannot write well or are too busy to write their own books engage writers to draft books for them. Although the principal author may agree to share some of the proceeds of the book with his ghost, the principal is the sole signatory of the contract with the publisher, thus making him the copyright owner. He then signs a separate agreement with the ghost, removing that person from claim to copyright and direct participation in revenue generated by publication of the book. Occasionally, what may have seemed a fair fee at the time it was negotiated with the ghostwriter may not seem so if the work demanded of him turns out to be excessive, or if the book becomes a runaway best-seller. Under ordinary circumstances, however, the ghostwriter accepts his lot as a worker-for-hire, and may at least secure more work for himself by telling publishers, "That book was actually written by me."

If all this seems a bit remote to you, let me point out that many garden variety authors employ other writers on a work-for-hire basis. Take the creator of a popular fictional series who, growing bored with his characters or too busy with other projects to turn out new books in his series, farms them out to other authors. He signs contracts with his publisher, then negotiates separate agreements with ghostwriters to produce first drafts or even final ones for him, which he passes off as his own. In some instances the publisher is aware of the existence of these subcontractors, in others it is not. But seldom is the subcontractor a signatory to the publication contract, and though he may receive a piece of the action as part of his deal with the principal author, it is not strictly a royalty in the sense we usually understand it, and of course the ghost forfeits any claim to copyright ownership.

Although I'm not at liberty to detail the many instances I know of authors who farm their work out, fans of those authors might be shocked to learn that their favorite books are produced, as it were, in a shop. There is in particular one best-selling male action-adventure series whose creator, to my knowledge, no longer writes his own books at all. In conjunction with his publisher, he puts the production of his books on an assembly line basis. A series "bible" describing the characters and general story line of the series is issued to writers, who submit plots for the approval of the creator and/or the publisher. Upon approval, a contract is issued to the writers. At first glance it looks like a typical publishing contract, but closer scrutiny reveals that the copyright is owned by a corporate entity; the advance is not called an advance (it's simply called a "sum"); and the royalty is not called a royalty (it's called a "bonus payment") and is expressed in cents rather than as a percentage of the list price of the book, presumably to further remove the writer-for-hire's labor from any association with creation of the work. I estimate the payments to the writer-for-hire to be approximately one-fourth to one-third of the traditional royalty that might normally accrue to him if he were the original creator of the book. I assume that the balance of the royalty is shared between the originator and the publisher.

In the above example, the originator of the series is in effect a packager. Packagers, as I have stated elsewhere, are sui generis. They are not exactly authors even though they frequently create the ideas and story lines for books; they are not exactly agents even though they take a kind of commission for their roles as go-betweens among authors and publishers; and they are not exactly publishers even though they buy the services of authors.

I've never been comfortable with packagers either in theory or in practice. Packagers are both buyers and sellers at the same time (so that "broker" might be the most apposite synonym), and there is inherent in their function the potential for mischief, abuse, and downright dishonesty. Some book packagers are as honest, open in their business dealings, and caring about authors as is possible under the circumstances. But a number are little short of rapacious, hiring authors for the smallest fees they can get away with and paying them no royalty or participation in subsidiary rights revenue whatsoever, while selling their books to publishers for very large multiples of what they pay the writers for them.

Furthermore, while these packagers manage to sell publishers on the concepts of books or series, they often contribute little or nothing by way of editorial input or guidance. An author is given the most general ideas ("How about a Dirty Dozen set in Bosnia!"), then is required to create characters, situations, and plots—create, in short, the entire series. The packager's argument is that were it not for his initiative in creating an idea and selling it to a publisher, writers would have no work and no pay. As the level of pay is all too frequently subsistence, the cause for heartfelt gratitude frequently escapes the writer-for-hire.

Because many publishers don't particularly care where their product comes from as long as it is good, is delivered on time, and is not too expensive, they provide fertile ground in which packagers can flourish. That is one key reason for my concern that the packaging phenomenon, with all the implications of author exploitation that it represents, is on the rise. The other reason is that some publishers are taking their cues from packagers and doing the same thing. They cook up series ideas in their offices, produce a series bible, then hire writers to write books in the series under a house pseudonym. Because such publishers maintain that they created the series, they have been scaling back advances, royalties, and author participation in subsidiary rights for those books, and their contracts are, in fact if not in actual language, work-for-hire agreements. In many instances, the publishers offer flat fees to authors interested in writing books for publisher-originated series, take it or leave it.

Of more recent vintage, but a phenomenon that will grow to major proportions as time goes by, is the use of writers-for-hire for electronic and multimedia works, where text is but one element along with still and moving pictures, music, animation, etc. And the exploitation without compensation of electronic versions of stories and articles for magazines has become a source of bitter warfare between writers groups and newspaper and magazine publishers.

You might infer that I refuse to do business with the more exploitative of packagers and publishers, but that is not the case. Some of my clients are hungry, and occasionally some are desperate for any kind of work, and though I may judge certain packagers and publisher-packagers harshly, practically speaking I don't feel it is fair for me to turn down, out of hand, work for clients who might be grateful for a few thousand dollars and a job that gets them through a financial squeeze or crisis. It's easy for an agent to tell an author, "I'd rather see you starve than accept that deal"; it's not so easy for an author to agree with him. If, after a writer has weighed all aspects of a work-for-hire deal, he or she still wants the job, then the only thing an agent can do is negotiate what few safeguards he can, such as making sure the writer is not legally liable for changes or additions to his text rendered by the packager or publisher. The quality of help an agent can render in these cases is the equivalent of telling the tenant of an avaricious landlord, "You have two choices: sign the lease or don't sign the lease."

Because packagers prosper from a supply-and-demand dynamic that is clearly—at this time, anyway—in their favor, there is little that individual authors or agents can do to roll conditions back. It must be done through collective action. Sad to say, authors and literary agents are scarcely closer to effective collective activism than they were when I started advocating it years ago. So if you've been holding your breath, let it out.

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

Is Fast Writing Good Writing?

I have a standing bet with many publishers, backed by one thousand dollars payable to the charity of their choice. The bet is that a professional author can write a book faster than a publisher can write a check.

So far nobody has taken me up on this wager, and I doubt if anybody will. But if someone wants to, just make your check payable to Doctors without Borders.

There is no gimmick here. At least a dozen professional writers on my client list are capable of turning out a novel in two to four weeks, even less if their publisher is desperate. But I know of scarcely any major publisher capable of routinely preparing contracts or, once contracts have been signed, cutting a check in that period of time. Unless it's an emergency, in which case it takes about three weeks longer.

I don't believe my clients are unique in this respect. Many agents handle or know of authors capable of turning out genre fiction, male adventure, westerns, romances, and the like, within weeks. In fact, many writers would go under if they were not capable of producing at least a book a month.

But are the books good? What is the relationship between the quality of a book and the time it takes to produce it? I'll be exploring these questions in a moment. But I'm not quite through with publishers.

The contracts and accounting departments of most publishing companies are extremely burdened with work and, under the best of circumstances, move with maddening bureaucratic casualness. Absent, it seems (to authors and agents), is the sense that the papers being shuffled have any bearing on the basic needs, the food and clothing and rent and car payments and college tuitions, of the human beings "hereinafter referred to as Authors." One agent, in a frothing fit of frustration, likened the process to the admitting office of a hospital emergency room, where the life fluids of victims trickle out of their bodies while the admitting clerk takes down their address, Social Security number, and mother's maiden name. I don't know if I would go that far, though I do remember a case of one crazed client who informed his editor he had just had his cat destroyed because an unconscionably late contract and check had made it impossible for him to pay for the poor creature's medical treatments. But I might, if I were of a cynical turn of mind, be tempted to suggest that the torpid pace of the contracts and accounting departments of some publishing companies is yet another example of how publishers cling to money as long as possible at the expense of authors. Luckily, I am not of a cynical turn of mind.

In fact, one's heart might almost go out to the gallant minions of the contracts and accounting departments. Anyone who has actually seen them in action, or inaction, must appreciate that the choreography of procedures for drafting a contract and drawing a check is highly complex in even the most efficiently run publishing houses. Once an editor has concluded negotiations with an agent or author, he or she draws up a contract request enumerating all of the deal points plus any variations in the boilerplate language that the author or agent may have requested. This contract request joins the many others awaiting action by the contracts department. The terms in the contract request are then transferred onto contract forms.

These forms must now be reviewed, sometimes by the original editor, sometimes by department heads, sometimes by the chief executive of the company, sometimes by all of them. The contracts are then submitted to author or agent, and if, heaven forbid, there should be but one or two minor items to be negotiated or renegotiated that the editor or contracts person does not have sole authority to decide, approval of those changes must be secured from someone at the company who is in authority. I have seen a contract held up for a month because I requested upping the number of free authors' copies from ten to twenty, or extending the delivery date by one month. Some contract department heads are fanatical about initialing alterations, requiring weeks of additional back-and-forthing. Some agents have become quite masterful at forging their clients' initials on contracts, and though this is a potentially dangerous practice, it seems like the only practical tactic to counter massive delay. One of my colleagues grinningly boasts, "If I spent a day in jail for every set of initials I've forged, you'd never see me again."

Once the contracts have been signed by the author, the machinery for procuring the check begins to grind. The contracts department issues a voucher instructing the accounting department to draw the check due on signing the contracts. Such vouchers must in the normal course of things be reviewed by the comptroller or some other executive in charge of financial affairs. Once the check is drawn, it will be examined by that executive and possibly by the publisher before it is signed by one or both of these officers. Needless to say, it is not as if these folks have nothing else to do.

If, therefore, you wonder why a publishing company can't just type up a contract the way you might scribble a thank-you note, and dash off a check the way you dash one off to pay your landlord, now you know, and perhaps you'll feel a bit more compassion for the clerical staffs of publishers.

I do. But my bet still stands.

Despite this lengthy digression and a muffled tone of querulousness, this chapter is not about how slow publishers are. It's about how fast writers are.

Outsiders—by which I mean people with little firsthand experience of the creative and technical aspects of writing—have difficulty making peace with the idea that any kind of book, let alone a good one, can be turned out in thirty days or less. But I know of several professional writers who have written full-length novels over a weekend, not because they wanted to, but because they had to in order to accommodate publishers in a jam. A tightly scheduled manuscript had not been delivered on time, covers were printed, rack space reserved, the printer's time booked. "Can do," these heroes quietly said, and on Monday morning, looking like The Thing From The Crypt, they dragged into their publisher's offices with a manuscript.

Ah, you murmur, but were they good manuscripts?

This annoying question arises again and again whenever prolific writers are mentioned. It's easy to understand how the public at large would classify such feats as belonging to that end of the spectrum of human accomplishment reserved for flagpole sitting and marathon dancing. It's harder to understand why many editors feel that way too. But a large number have the attitude that the quality of literature rises in direct proportion to the time required to produce it. Publishers, even those who publish lines of genre fiction that call for short and rigid deadlines, are quite suspicious of prolific authors. They can't believe a book written that fast can be that good.

I have always felt that in order to qualify to practice their profession, editors should be required to write a novel. They would then undoubtedly discover that many of the skills they now consider dismayingly hard are actually quite easy, while many they regard as a cinch are inordinately difficult. One thing they would appreciate, I'm certain, is that an experienced professional writer working an eight-hour day and typing at average speed can produce five thousand words daily in clean first draft without pushing. That's a finished book in twelve to fifteen working days.

But one draft? How can a writer produce a first draft that is also a polished draft?

One reason is that he has no choice. The author who writes a good book in one draft will earn twice as much money as one who writes the same book in two. And when the pay scale is twenty-five hundred to five thousand dollars per book, one simply cannot afford to write a second draft.

It is also a matter of training. Many professional writers reach a level of craftsmanship where whacking out clean copy is as natural as hitting balls is for a professional baseball player or dancing en pointe is for a ballerina. The amateur who writes fast usually writes sloppily; the professional who writes fast will most likely write masterfully.

And let us not forget inspiration. It is not uncommon for writers to talk about writing as if in a trance, or feeling like a channel through which a story is being poured from some mystical source. Some writers rehearse a scene or story so often in their heads that when they finally commit it to paper, it all comes in a rush, as if they're writing from memory rather than from a sense of original creation.

All this is helped by the development of computerized word processors, which enable their owners to write two drafts in the time it used to take writers working on conventional typewriters to write one. But now that the technology is at hand, will the prejudice against prolificness finally be overcome? I'm not too sure.

For, in the last analysis, it isn't the editors or public who cling most tightly to the myth that fast writing is poor writing. It's the writers themselves. Almost all the professional writers I know equate speedy writing with money and slow writing with love, to the point where their personalities actually bifurcate and the halves declare war on one another. Authors capable of knocking off a superb genre novel in one draft will agonize over every sentence of their "serious," "important," "literary" novel as if they were freshmen in a creative writing course. They seem to believe that anyone wishing to cross the line between popular entertainment and serious literature must cut his output and raise frustrating obstacles in his own path, and that legitimacy may be purchased only through writer's block. It is futile to point out that Dickens, Balzac, Dostoyevski, and Henry James wrote as if possessed, in many cases with scarcely a single emendation, yet turned out a body of sublime classics. And they did it in longhand, by the way.

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

- Richard Curtis

There Are Outlines, and Then There Are Outlines

Many excellent works are available about how to write, but there is one category of writing that even topflight professionals struggle with, and that's outlines. I have seldom seen outlines covered adequately in the how-to literature I've read, probably because most writers who write about writing have never seriously examined why we need outlines. If you think we need them only to help us write books, you're probably doing something wrong.

Too many writers dismiss outlines as unworthy of serious attention, or not essential to the practice of their trade. "I'm a good writer, but a lousy outliner," I frequently hear, and the statement often sounds like a boast. "What does it matter?" goes another typical remark. "My finished books don't resemble my outlines anyway, so why bother?" Still others say, "The outline is in my head, and as long as my books turn out well, why should I have to outline them on paper?"

These scoffers have failed to understand the critical truth about outline writing: publishers are less interested in what's going into your book than they are in what's going onto your cover.

From what I know about publishing history, the use of outlines to sell books to publishers is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before World War II, it was de rigueur for authors to submit completed manuscripts to their publishers. Even established authors wrote their books before seeking contracts with their regular publishers. They might consult with them in the formative stages, but it was pretty much taken for granted that the author knew what he was doing and where he was going with his book, and that editors served to help shape or tidy up the finished product. The purpose of outlines was, as you might expect, to help authors conceptualize and develop their books. It didn't matter if the outlines were long or short, well written or scribbled, highly compressed or elaborate (Henry James composed forty thousand word summaries of his later novels, declaring the process "The divine principle of the scenario"): an outline was a working sketch for the sole use of the author. It was not designed for display, particularly to publishers.

After World War II, the nature of publishing changed dramatically, affecting not only what kinds of books were written but how they got sold. Not the least of the transformations was that of the outline from writing tool to selling tool.

With the emergence of publishing as big business, with the acquisition of publishing companies by conglomerates or their absorption into immense entertainment complexes, a schism was created between the editorial and the business functions. Tremendous tensions were created as publishers demanded better justification for the purchasing of books. Profit-and-loss statements and market projections had to be drawn up before submissions were accepted. Editorial and publishing committees replaced the judgments of individual editors whose rationales for acquisition were often no more than intuition, enthusiasm, or personal pleasure.

In order to crack this increasingly formidable system, authors were required to produce detailed and polished presentations that answered not merely the question "What is it about?" but such questions as "How does it differ from similar books?" "What is the target market and how large is it?" and "Can a publisher make a profit on it?" It no longer mattered if an individual editor was wild about a book or a proposed book, because he was no longer the only person making the decision. Indeed, many of the people now making the decision might not have read the work at all, and not a few of them weren't particularly interested in books except in terms of their bottom line value as merchandise: how to "package" them, how to position advertising and promotion for them, how to price them, how to "move" them. Some writers realized that in order to satisfy this growing cadre of specialists, they'd have to learn a kind of writing very far from the sort of thing they'd been doing until then—not synopses but sales pitches cunningly contrived to subdue the anxieties of publishing personnel ranging from art director to head of sales to subsidiary rights director to publicity chief to vice-president in charge of marketing to editor.

If you piled all the outlines I have read in my lifetime on top of each other, they would reach the summit of Kanchenjunga. So I can say with some authority that few writers have grasped this crucial distinction between outlines designed to guide oneself through the complex terrain of plot and character and those written to turn on the staff of a publishing company. All too often I see chapter-by-chapter outlines of fifty or a hundred pages describing every twist of story and every nuance of character development, outlines that are 95 percent longer than most editors have the time or inclination to read, and that are deficient in many elements that are tempting to potential buyers. Such outlines should go back where they belong: beside the author's typewriter, helping him construct his book. But they don't belong on an editor's desk.

Let's look at the components of a solid outline. Naturally, we have to divide proposals into two categories: those for nonfiction books and those for novels.

Nonfiction books are both easier to outline and easier to sell from an outline. A nonfiction work lends itself to easy encapsulation because its subject is finite and usually defines itself. A war, a biography, a history of a period, a murder case, seventeenth-century Dutch art, Greek cooking, traveling through Japan - all are limited by the factual information available, at which point it becomes a matter of selection and arrangement of that information. It is relatively easy to convey in an outline an author's familiarity with his subject, his enthusiasm for it, his authority, the uniqueness of the proposed work, its organization, and so forth. It is even possible to convey in an outline how good a writer the author is. A good nonfiction outline is a pleasure from the viewpoint of publishers. It takes five minutes to read, requires little imagination to grasp, and enables an editor (or anyone else at a publishing company) to make his mind up quickly and decisively. It is hard for most writers to visualize the joy it gives an editor to be able to reach a clean, fast decision, and this factor may have contributed in no small measure to the increased predilection for nonfiction at most trade publishing companies over the last few years.

A solid nonfiction outline should follow these basic precepts:

· Establish your authority. At the very outset you must show the publisher your credentials. It has become extremely difficult to sell proposals by writers who do not have a Ph.D. or M.D. after their names or cannot otherwise demonstrate long and vast experience in the field in which they are writing. As you might do with any other resume, if you have great bona fides, pile them on; if you don't, then stress the next best thing, to wit: "Although I am not an M.D. I have written about medical subjects for leading national magazines for the last twenty years." And if you cannot even boast that much, I strongly advise you to write a large piece of the book so that your authority and familiarity with your subject shine through by virtue of the writing itself.
Present your thesis dramatically. The best outlines read like the best short stories, and like great stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In enunciating the subject, you should present a disturbing problem that cries out for resolution: "The teenage suicide rate has tripled in the last ten years." "As the First Continental Congress convened, the American colonies seemed very far indeed from the unification we take for granted today." "Although there are many books available on Jewish cooking, to date there is no comprehensive work on cheese blintzes."

You now have the editor worried: how did the teenage suicide rate get to be so bad, what is the profile of a potential teen suicide, what can parents do about it? Here is where you display your intimacy with your subject, for as these questions occur to the editor considering your presentation, one by one your outline answers them satisfyingly and, if possible, entertainingly.
Like a good short story, your outline should rise to a satisfying climax, and here is where your writing skills must be displayed in all their splendor, for editors know that an author's interest and energy tend to flag in the final stages of a book and they want to see whether you can sustain the same level of intensity in the finale as you did in the opening stages of the work. You should therefore describe in vivid detail the culmination of your book. Whatever it was that originally inspired you to write it must be communicated here, and whether you're writing a biography, history, medical self-help book, or even a blintz cookbook, you must demonstrate in these final passages of your synopsis your intense absorption in your material. Depict in full dress that final battle, that cure, that turning point in the life of your biographical subject. Let your editor know you're in love with this idea and will live in a constant state of torment until you have gotten it out of your system.

· Furnish a table of contents. Each chapter of your proposed book should be summarized in a short paragraph. Although a table of contents would appear to go over the same ground as your synopsis, it actually serves a different purpose. A synopsis is a narrative summarizing the topic and exhibiting the author's grasp of his material and writing skill. A table of contents demonstrates the author's organizational abilities and conveys the "feel" of the final book. It may seem redundant, but editors demand it. Don't leave home without one.

· Anticipate a publishing committee's questions. However masterfully you have synopsized your book, some important questions will probably linger in the editor's mind, and others will be raised by non-editorial staff members of the publishing committee. What competitive books exist or are in the works? What is the potential audience, and how can a publisher be sure that that audience will buy the book? Could a Big Name be induced to write an introduction or endorsement? Can you state with assurance that this organization or that society will approve the book, recommend it to members, purchase a minimum number of copies?

It is unfortunate that authors must do the sort of research that is the rightful province of publishers, but because publishing people have so little time and money to spare for market surveys, library searches, legal investigations, profit-and-loss evaluations, and the like, any author who does the publisher's homework for them will definitely raise his chances of landing a sale. So go the extra mile. You've always said you could do a better job than a publisher: here's your chance to prove it.

The outlining of fiction is an entirely different ball game. None of the criteria that enable editors to make quick and easy decisions about nonfiction book proposals applies to fiction outlines, for almost everything is subjective. Although it is even more important for a novel outline than it is for a nonfiction book outline to read like an enthralling short story, even wonderful novel outlines don't necessarily demonstrate convincingly that the writer is a good storyteller, has fine descriptive abilities, is capable of capturing subtleties of emotion, or knows how to build character and relationships. And, paradoxically, any attempt to portray such elements in an outline often results in a long and tedious one that is excruciatingly dull. Furthermore, nothing in an outline can demonstrate whether the author can go the distance or will falter or lose energy or inspiration during the writing of the novel. It is far more common for novelists to slump in the midst of a book than for nonfiction writers, whose inspiration derives from already existing material rather than from anything they have to create. And while editors who have the novelist's track record to go by can say, "See? He finished six novels, what makes you think he isn't going to finish his seventh?" a novel proposal must be judged by a lot of non-editorial people at a publishing company. Many of them are a little suspicious of, or even downright hostile to, the creative process, and therefore skeptical that a novelist will be able to stay the course. What is worse, they can relate many unfortunate experiences bearing their skepticism out. Resistance to fiction outlines runs extremely high at most publishers, and that's why one finds prodigious piles of them on so many editors' desks.

There are important exceptions, of course. The well-established novelist can land a contract on the basis of an outline, and often a brief one. And writers doing novels in a series or proposing books for a particular line, will of course have to do outlines. But authors who have no solid fiction track record are going to get nowhere in their quest to raise funds to complete their books. Or if they do, miraculously, get an offer, it will undoubtedly be a stingy one, because the publisher is being asked to invest his risk capital, and the costs of risk capital are extremely high.

I therefore advise anyone in that position to write a long, boring, detailed outline of his novel-to-be, take it to his word processor, and sit down and write the novel. Not a third; not a half; all of it. Shift the risk from the publisher to yourself - because it means shifting the rewards as well. Give an agent a finished novel that he likes and watch him do his thing: he can auction it, set a tight deadline for decisions, get a high price, break the author out.

What's that you say? You can't afford to write that novel on speculation? I'm afraid you'll have to do what the novelists of yore did: they begged, borrowed, stole, got day jobs, or married into money. One of my colleagues, a very tough lady agent with a tongue like a trash can, was once visited by an author who presented her with a portion and outline of a novel. She read it that night and next day summoned him to her office. "It's great," she declared. "It's brilliant."

The author was thrilled. "So?"

"So?" Whaddya mean, so?"

"I mean, what happens now? Are you going to hold an auction or what? Are you going to seek a high floor or solicit a preemptive...?"

"Hold on. I said it's brilliant, I didn't say I could sell it. For me to sell it, you have to finish it."

The author turned pale and started to sputter. "But...but...how am I going to support myself while I'm finishing it?"

"Drive a f*****g taxi," she said.

He drove a f*****g taxi and returned, eight months later, with a great novel, which she sold for a lot of money and which established him as a leading commercial novelist.

Applications for chauffeurs' licenses are now being accepted.

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback - Part 2

Efficiency Strikes the Distribution Business

While the mass market book book business appeared to be healthy, in the early 1990s the infrastructure of paperback book distribution was undergoing significant changes. The dramatic rise and expansion of bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble siphoned business away from wholesalers’ franchises, both in cities and suburban malls. Computerized sales information enabled publishers, wholesalers and retailers to better track the performance of categories and identify winners and losers among specific books and authors. And the stunning advent of amazon.com leveraged the awesome power of the Internet to link supply and demand.

Assessing these patterns, paperback distributors began asking themselves why they needed to employ human labor when they could more efficiently and economically service bookstores and other outlets by shipping books directly to the retailers. Yes, it would mean that the human element -- the guy in the station wagon who knew which towns loved historical romances and which preferred contemporary ones, which adored westerns and which were big on science fiction – would be removed from the equation. But -- well, that was progress!

The big agencies pulled the plug in that summer of 1996 when whole fleets of drivers were discharged, and in the following years the wholesale distribution workforce was reduced to a fraction of what it had been in its heyday.

The Bottom Drops Out

Most publishing executives were slow to recognize the implications of the nosedive in the wholesale paperback distribution business, dismissing it as one of those occasional and inevitable shifts to which the industry had always adapted. What was the big deal? Fewer romances and other genre novels would be published, wasn’t that all there was to it?

In fact, the consequences were nothing short of calamitous. The impact was felt in every sector of the publishing business, from what got written to what got published to what got read. It wasn’t long before customers in west Texas or Nebraska or South Carolina discovered that many books by their favorite authors were no longer being stocked in their local stores. When customers or store owners complained, they were told to take it up with the distributor – in Vancouver or some other far-flung location reachable only by an 800 phone number.

The Rise of the Airport Model

A key result of the shift in distribution patterns was the streamlining of the way retailers ordered books from publishers. Why pick and choose among thousands of titles that might sell only a handful of copies? Wasn’t it better to follow the formula that worked so well at airports, ordering only the top fifteen or twenty bestselling books by branded authors like Nora Roberts, Robert Ludlum, John Grisham and Stephen King?

As paperback publishers awoke to the new buying patterns, they were forced to choose between star authors and those whose sales performance fell below a minimum level. At first the triaging was restricted to marginal genres like westerns, but as the last decade of the twentieth century progressed the definition of “marginal” broadened to embrace every category of book that fell below an ever-stricter definition of commerciality, a process akin to the lowering of the bar in a limbo dance. Limbo indeed: authors who had made a living for years from sales of ten or fifteen thousand copies of their paperbacks were now being dropped by their publishers as the minimum sales quota increased to twenty or thirty thousand copies or more.

Like the men and women who distributed their books, a lot of authors were thrown out of work, and the grim truth finally dawned on publishing executives. It wasn’t just genre titles that were affected by the seismic shift in book distribution; paperbacks of every kind were being hit by the pullback.

“What’s the Author’s Platform?”

As the publishing industry entered the twenty-first century, book industry executives began requiring editors to produce elaborate profit and loss projections and other corporate-style analyses of the potential viability of books and authors. What was the sales performance of previous books? Did they “sell through” satisfactorily or did returns cross the threshold of unprofitability according to the latest formulas devised by bookstore chain number-crunchers? The mantra of “The Bottom Line” was invoked ad nauseam at every editorial committee, and editors were constantly reminded, “We can only afford to publish hits. If you can’t project a big profit on a book, turn it down.”

Editorial financial projections were aided by an Orwellian innovation called BookScan, instituted early in 2001 by Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems, the world's leading provider of airplay tracking information for the entertainment industry. BookScan offered subscribing publishers weekly analyses of sales by most major book retailers. Within moments, editors could access vital sales statistics on previously published books and authors, elevating performance parameters over traditional but less quantifiable values like compelling storytelling or stirring prose.

And what about the author? Was he or she attractive and mediagenic? Did he or she have a “platform” – an organizational base such as a hit television series or chain of fitness centers capable of promoting the sale of books? Was the author willing to buy large quantities of books for giveaway or resale by his or her franchise?

More and more, the importance of traditional literary criteria has taken a back seat to “The Numbers” and “The Platform.” Promising but modestly successful novelists have discovered they cannot get their second or third books published, and aspiring newcomers find that they cannot sell their books at all. As for nonfiction, no matter how compelling a memoir or business guide or social commentary might be, publishers are disposed to reject it because the author was not “branded.”

Faced with these grim options, authors have resorted to increasingly frenzied measures to get published. Established novelists are writing under pennames to disguise the poor performance of their earlier books, or strive to produce blockbuster “breakout” novels long on sex, violence, and plot but short on craft and characterization. Without supportive publishers to carry them while they developed their talents over four or five books, new novelists resort to gimmicky concepts with “log lines” that can be pitched like movie scripts. Nonfiction authors plump up their credentials or hire public relations specialists to burnish their images and enhance their media exposure. Others subsidize the purchase of large quantities of their own books to drive up their “numbers.” Literary agents are besieged by writers frantically seeking the advantage of representation by successful dealmakers. Self-publication has soared now that electronic and print technology and Internet promotion have brought the costs of vanity books down to proletarian levels.

As much as authors would dearly love to bring back the robust mass-market paperback era, it’s no likelier than a return to steam locomotives. More and more, the mass-market paperback is becoming a manifestation of blockbuster publishing, where economies of scale enable publishers to make a profit on immense shipments despite high returns. Because retail sales have shifted from racks to bookstores and the Internet, new and midlist works are increasingly being released in trade paperback.

The shift to trade paperbacks may help save midlist books. A major advantage of the trade paperback format is that it is the preferred size for print on demand reprints. “POD” takes all the guesswork out of bookselling, and the publishing industry can no longer afford to guess who will buy its products. Dismaying though it may be for old publishing hands to contemplate, the future of book distribution belongs to print on demand.

The end of the old mass-market paperback distribution system coincided with the birth of a new method of delivering books to readers. Though e-book technology has encountered innumerable obstacles, its potential to reach a vast readership is no longer seriously disputed. What sort of literature this new medium produces, and how it will make money for authors and publishers, are fascinating sources for speculation. And speculate we shall continue to do as the 21st century unfolds with its technological wonders and fascinating business model.

Copyright © 2004 by Richard Curtis. This article was first published by Backspace, the online forum for writers, editors and agents.

The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback - Part 1

For many publishing people, the world as they had known it ended in the summer of 1996. On a warm brilliant day I sat down at a table in a Spanish restaurant for what I thought would be a typical lunch with the publisher of a mass-market paperback company. I found him slumped head in hands over a seriously stiff drink. “What’s the matter?”

He looked up, miserable. “You haven’t heard? The wholesale independent distribution business is imploding. Hundreds and hundreds of drivers have been let go.”

I groaned, beckoned to the waiter and pointed to my friend’s glass. “I’ll have the same.”
The collapse of the distribution system that fueled the mass-market paperback revolution was a trauma from which the book industry has not recovered to this day. To appreciate its impact requires a brief description of the way books were distributed after the post-World War II paperback revolution that swept the U.S. publishing industry.

By long tradition, trade or general interest hardcover books have been offered to bookstore buyers by publishers’ sales representatives. The store buyers select which titles they order and the number of copies they will stock in their stores. Though released year-round, hardcovers are offered on a seasonal basis in publishers’ catalogues, which are issued several times annually. Whatever the reality may be, the theory is that they will have a decent shelf life and, if popular, remain on display for months or longer. This business model has not changed fundamentally from the last century to the present time.

Mass-market paperbacks (as opposed to the larger trade paperback format) are a very different matter. Introduced in 1939, “pocket books” took hold in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but publishers soon realized that the hardcover distribution approach didn’t work. They needed a different sales model and turned to the one used for magazines.

Every month, magazines were shipped to depots – “agencies” – around the country. Drivers picked up the magazines at the agencies and visited stores on pre-assigned routes in towns and cities. Most of the stores were not bookshops but rather supermarkets, candy stores, newspaper stands, and bus, train or airport terminals. Each month, these salaried employees collected the previous month’s unsold publications and replaced them on the store’s racks and shelves with new stock.

To paperback book publishers, this existing distribution network was the perfect vehicle for delivering their product to a far-flung readership. Thus it came to pass that paperbacks began hitching rides with magazines. And that too is how they came to be released on a monthly schedule. After 1956, when the leading magazine wholesaler went out of business, a number of entrepreneurs set up shop as independent wholesale distributors (“ID’s” or “rack jobbers”), handling mostly books.

Because they were a monthly phenomenon, paperbacks did not enjoy a long shelf life; the exigencies of returning paperbacks, when the distributor cleared the racks to make room for the next month’s releases, made for an ephemeral existence. What is more, the unsold copies were usually not redistributed or remaindered. Because paperback publishers had to pay freight for returned copies, many of which were dirty or damaged, the stores found it more efficient simply to strip the covers off the unsold books, send the insides to be pulped, and return only the covers to the publishers for credit when settling accounts.

Since paperbacks were returnable, distributors delayed paying publishers until unsold stock was returned. To account to authors for the gap between copies sold and royalties released, the paperback publishers took a page from the creative accounting systems devised by the hardcover industry, holding large amounts of royalties for long periods until returns were finalized. Royalty reports to authors were deliberately fashioned to omit information about the number of copies printed, shipped, and returned, or about the amounts of royalty reserved pending finalization of returns. This suppressing of vital sales data gave publishers carte blanche to retain royalties that might have been remitted to authors. Some publishers got too creative and held royalties forever. Until the 1990s, when pressure from agents and from writers’ organizations forced publishers to reveal significant details, mass-market houses reported only net sales with no information as to how they arrived at those net figures. As I wrote at the time, it was like reporting batting averages to baseball fans without revealing how many at-bats or hits the players had had.

The Paperback Industry Blossoms

Unlike retailers of hardcover books, paperback booksellers seldom had much say over which titles were stocked on their racks. They passively received the current month’s selection and passively watched the unsold stock loaded into the distributor’s vehicle a month later. The authors of those books watched the process too, but some of them figured out ways to influence the wholesalers to promote their books. A number of leading authors, on their own initiative or sponsored by their publishers, began visiting the wholesale agencies and pitching their books at executives and ingratiating themselves with the jobbers. Some of the more energetic writers went so far as to drop in on drivers as they loaded their vehicles, bringing coffee and donuts and promotional material to inspire them. This technique was particularly successful with romance fiction, which sold most abundantly in the supermarkets that women visited two or three times every week. It did not hurt if the authors were attractive. Many a lovestruck driver stocked extra copies of a title after a pretty novelist shared a pre-dawn breakfast with him on the tailgate of his station wagon.

Although a growing number of traditional bookstores stocked mass-market paperbacks, it was the wholesale distribution network that fueled the huge growth of the book business in the last quarter of the twentieth century, spawning a thriving industry and a generation of bestselling authors. Even when those authors graduated to hardbacks, paperback reprints of their books drove sales overall. In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, mass-market paperback revenue made the difference between feast and famine for hardcover publishers. Income from romance fiction alone contributed 25% of the cash flowing into the trade book industry.

Smart publishing executives recognized how heavily they depended on mass-market income for their profits. But that message did not always filter down to their editors. Many of them, possessing only a hazy idea of where the money for their acquisitions came from, spent profligately and ended up taking a bath on books and authors that flopped miserably. Or they simply acquired whatever they pleased without giving much thought to the bottom line, failing to realize that they were indulging in a luxury largely subsidized by paperback book revenue. Many lived in denial that their beloved first novels, short story collections, poetry anthologies and other elevated forms of literary endeavor were financed by romances, westerns, thrillers, horror novels and space operas.

In the concluding installment, you'll read how efficiency came to the paperback distribution business. It was not an entirely welcome guest.

Copyright © 2004 by Richard Curtis. This article was first published by Backspace, the online forum for writers, editors and agents.

Getting Back the Rights to Your Books - Part 1

One of the most remarkable changes I’ve witnessed in the time that I’ve been in the publishing business is the shrinking of the life span of books. When I entered the field, a book of any quality at all could be expected to be available to consumers for several years. Today, we project the age of many books in weeks. If you put a recently published book and a recently picked tomato side by side on a shelf, there’s a good likelihood that the book will rot first.

The change has triggered a pole-reversal in our attitude toward books. Whereas the thinking of authors used to be, “How can I keep this book in print as long as possible?” today it is, “How quickly can I get the rights back?” This shift is reflected in pressure exerted by agents on publishers to install language in their contracts enabling authors to recapture their rights the moment their books are removed from the marketplace. Publishers, too, fight to curtail the term of license they in turn grant to reprinters and other licensees. The idea is for the rights owner to take the dead or dormant property away from a publisher that is not exploiting it and resell it to one that will put it back into play.

Although one can get very nostalgic about the good old days when writers wrote for posterity, it would be foolish not to play by the rules that govern the modern-day game. If a publisher is committed to a book and works to keep it available to buyers, there are usually contractual provisions for retaining the rights or extending the term. But if a publisher can’t or won’t support that book, it stands to reason that the property should be recovered and recycled.
Most often new authors are so excited about selling their first book that they seldom look beyond publication date when they contemplate its fate. They cherish the perfectly understandable fantasy that it will remain in print for years and years and will be available in bookstores for the foreseeable future. That it might go out of print one day, considering it isn’t even in print yet, is a matter of very remote concern to them. And that the book might go out of print within a year or less after publication is so shocking that our first impulse is to dismiss the suggestion with a (nervous) laugh. Most books, however, do go out of print eventually, few being relegated to the status of deathless classics. Even more disturbing, an increasing number of them go out of print in a very short time.

The reason for this lies in the ferocious competition among publishers for shelf space in bookstores. Thousands of books sweep into the stores every month, enjoy their moment in the sun, and are swept out again on the tide of next month’s releases. None but the hardiest survive the deluge. Though you may receive royalty statements for years, the actual activity of your book can often be measured in days. The “sales” reported to you every six months may not really be sales at all, but merely released reserves – sales revenue held by your publisher until it is clear that the books shipped will not be returned for credit. Although your publisher lets a little of that money go every six months, it may actually have been collected during the first few months of your book’s existence.

One day, then, you may wake up to the realization that your book has had it. After a suitable period of mourning, your thoughts will turn to recovering the rights to it in the hope that one day you can sell them to another publisher. It is wise to try to recover them, for if you are normally ambitious, assiduous, and talented, you are going to become popular if not famous, and your earlier books may be in demand. They can be an asset of tremendous potential, and so you are well advised to look hard at the out-of-print and termination provisions of your contract when you are negotiating it, however difficult it is to conceive that you will need them.

Most publishers have some such provisions in their contracts as a matter of course. In some instances the termination clause calls for automatic termination of the contract and reversion of rights after a fixed period, generally three to seven years. From an author’s viewpoint this is highly desirable, as it completely eliminates debate over the definition of “out of print,” a debate that can hang you and your book up for years.

Naturally, if something is highly desirable to an author, there must be something seriously wrong with it from a publisher’s viewpoint, and that is the case here. The way a publisher sees it, even if a book is long out of print there is no telling when the author may be exalted to bestseller status with some future book, at which point those dormant early books take on tremendous value. Publishers will therefore try to bargain for an ambiguous out-of-print clause that will enable them to hold on to the rights for as long as possible. Something along these lines:

The book shall be considered in print if it is on sale by Publisher or under license granted by Publisher, or if any license for its publication remains in effect.

In other words, your book will be considered in print as long as it is available to the consumer in any edition controlled by the publisher, including its own and those licensed to other publishers such as reprint houses, book clubs, and foreign publishers. But the above wording raises more questions than it answers. What does “on sale” mean? Copies in the bookstore? Copies in the warehouse? Three copies in the bookstores? Ten copies in the warehouse? And what about those licenses to other publishers? Does your publisher have adequate termination provisions in his contract with the book’s Turkish publisher? And how do you ascertain the number of copies in stock, anyway? Visit your publisher’s warehouse? Visit your Turkish publisher’s warehouse? The nightmare potential here is very high.

The advent of electronic publication produced a solution to many of these issues. Publishers Weekly reported in the fall of 1998 that as soon as he saw a print on demand press, one publishing executive exclaimed, “Now, we can keep books in print forever!” Many agents, including yours truly, reacted very badly to this remark, because print on demand and e-books clearly gave publishers an excuse to hold onto rights in perpetuity. A book could be out of print for decades, yet its publisher would be under no obligation to give back the rights because the text was still in the memory of its computer, where it could be summoned to fulfill an occasional print on demand order or deliver the text to an e-book buyer.

Agents and authors began promoting a new definition of “out of print” that would no longer be as vague and ambiguous as the one that had prevailed up to then. The prevailing model now is that as long as the publisher reports X copies sold every year or pays the author Y dollars annually, the publisher may keep the rights to the book. This becomes a sort of annual rent on your property.

Though I staunchly advocated this arrangement, I was skeptical that publishers would spring for it, and I wrote, “As this solution is imaginative and simple, I cherish little hope that it will be adopted by American publishers.” I’m happy to report that my pessimism was unjustified. Almost all American publishers have adopted it, or at least will accept it when an author or agent demands it. However, the X’s and Y’s must still be negotiated. Obviously, your strategy is to bargain for a threshold defined as the lowest number of copies sold or fewest dollars reported annually.

Bear in mind that your publisher doesn’t necessarily have to reprint the book to maintain control. It can also license certain rights to other publishers. Suppose your Random House book is out of print and you serve notice that Random must either print a new edition or revert the rights. Rather than opt for either alternative, Random could sell paperback rights to Pocket Books or Berkley or some other reprint house, and would be within its rights to do so. Of course you might be glad to see your book back in print; you might also die a little every time you contemplate Random House taking its 50 percent share of that paperback reprint money.

Is there any way you can prove that your book is out of print? One simple but time-honored way is to get a friend, or a friendly bookstore, to order a copy of your book from the publisher. If the book is out of print, a clerk at the publishing company or warehouse will send back a written notice to that effect. You now have written evidence straight from the horse’s mouth. However, the publisher might state not that the book is out of print but that it is out of stock, which is not quite the same as out of print. “Out of stock” means your publisher has exhausted its inventory, a state of affairs that may be temporary, for the stock can be replenished either by returns from bookstores or by new printings. A book can therefore be out of stock without being out of print. But frequently, “out of stock” is a prelude to a book going out of print, so it can help your case to ascertain from your publisher that the book is out of stock.

Sometimes the only thing that prevents a publisher from declaring a book out of print is a large stock. You can therefore expedite a declaration of out of print by offering to buy back the remaining inventory. Having determined that your book is no longer active, you should then serve notice on your publisher that you want your rights back. Even if your contract provides for automatic termination, it’s a good idea for you to get the company to send you a letter declaring the contract terminated and reverting the rights to you, so that you will have written evidence that you are free to enter into a contract with another publisher.

The clock starts ticking from the date your publisher receives your request, and though your publisher may respond promptly, it’s more likely that you won’t hear for many months, if at all. There are two reasons for this. The first is that many reversion requests are accorded extremely low priority by publishing houses. Each publisher has a procedure for evaluating such requests, but because many factors go into making a determination, as we have seen, the decisions are by no means cut-and-dried. I find that getting action from most publishers on reversion requests is much harder than getting money from them, so we’re talking hard, my friends. One publisher told me that its committee for reviewing reversion requests meets only twice a year. But there’s another and more disturbing reason why publishers balk on handling reversion requests: they may want to stall for time while preparing the book for e-book or print on demand editions, which would in effect enable them to keep the book in print in perpetuity. A degree of tenacity, then, is called for in following up reversion requests.

It is not always desirable to go by the strict letter of the contract, however, and a certain amount of common sense, compassion, or both, comes into play. There have been occasions when, after I pounced on a publisher with a request for reversion, I’ve received a call pleading for more time to evaluate the situation. “Look, we know the author’s first book is out of print and you have us dead to rights. But if you could extend our deadline until we bring his second book out, we’ll do a new printing of the first to tie in with publication of the new one. And as long as you’re being so literal about the wording, may we remind you that we haven’t canceled her contract even though her new book is three months late. So, how about cutting us a little slack?”

In such circumstances (and even if the new book isn’t late), I sometimes counsel my author to grant the publisher that extension, for in the overall picture such a course may be of greater advantage than recapturing rights that are of little value at the present time.

- Richard Curtis

This article is an expansion of a chapter in How to Be Your Own Literary Agent, Houghton Mifflin Company, copyright (c) 1983, 1984, 1996, 2003 by Richard Curtis. All rights reserved.