sàds

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware I'm down to the wire on book revisions (hope to have them done and dusted by Friday afternoon), so this week, I'm re-purposing (with some updating) a blog post from 2007 on the interminable agency clause in author-agent agreements. I'm not just doing this to spare myself a bit of time. I'm seeing such clauses in agents' contracts more frequently these days, and they are definitely something for writers to watch out for. An "interminable agency clause" (sometimes called an "interminable rights clause" or a "perpetual agency clause") is language inserted into an author-agency agreement whereby the agency claims the right to remain the agent of record not just for the duration of any contracts it negotiates, but for the life of copyright. In other words, once your agent sells your book, the agency has the right to represent that book for as long as the book is in copyright (currently, in the USA...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Plagiarist Redux Last October, I blogged about David Boyer , a self-styled author and publisher who was discovered to be committing extensive plagiarism, publishing stories and books both under his own name and his many aliases. Despite being publicly exposed , generating quite a bit of online discussion , and inspiring an anti-plagiarism blog devoted largely to mocking him, Boyer did not, apparently, give up his borrowing ways. And he got ambitious. Not content with filching fiction from non-famous members of the horror community, he decided to plagiarize (using one of his aliases) someone really famous: Dean Koontz. For this, there may be consequences other than mere ridicule. The evidence--including an excerpt from Koontz's original story, an excerpt from the plagiarized version, and a letter from Koontz indicating that he's considering legal action--can be found at The Horror Zine , along with a list of Boyer's known aliase...

by Michael Capobianco Judge Chin’s recent ruling that that the Google Books Settlement was not “fair, adequate and reasonable” was a victory for authors everywhere who depend on copyright, and particularly for those authors and their heirs whose works were inappropriately labeled “orphans.” It’s gratifying to see so many of the objections raised by authors and authors’ groups cited in the judge’s ruling. From the beginning, the settlement raised fundamental questions about copyright and the rights of authors to control who uses and profits from the books, stories, and articles that they’ve created. The settlement would have given Google the right to use and profit from millions of books simply because they had digitized them, as well as the exclusive right to publish out of print “orphan” books. The settlement was widely regarded as “audacious” because of its casual disregard for the rights of authors, and rightly so. It attempted an end-run around copyright law for the benefit of Go...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware The London Book Fair is in full swing right now. Book Expo America is coming up next month. Throughout the year, book fairs draw crowds of publishers, agents, and industry professionals of all kinds to promote their products, take stock of the competition, and make rights and other business deals. Authors are drawn to book fairs too. Some come to view the scene, soak up the atmosphere, meet with their friends or their agents or their editors. Some self-published authors buy space to sell and promote their own books. Many aspiring authors come in hopes of making connections and maybe even landing that elusive book deal (though this is largely a pipe dream; book fairs are for the book industry, not for authors). Some come at their publishers' invitation, to help promote their most recent works (for instance, Disney Editions has arranged for Ann to sign her new book next month at BEA ). If you're a big name, or a hot debut author, you...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Once upon a time, a motley crew of knights, hobbits, and assorted elves--all members of the Fellowship of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America--set out to prank a certain publisher of ill repute. This publisher, you see, was an author mill --it accepted pretty much any manuscript that came its way. Yet it held itself out as being selective, just like a "real" publisher, the better to lure unwary authors into its Mordor-like embrace. And the motley crew thought that wasn't proper. A kindly wizard was the project's mastermind, and he decreed the parameters of the quest: create a manuscript so wretched, so mind-numbingly awful, that no sane publisher--not even a slightly selective author mill--could possibly accept it. Calling his unlikely band of adventurers into conclave, he conferred upon each a solemn task: create a chapter based on three characters, their one-sentence descriptions, and a single writing promp...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware My fantasy novel The Arm of the Stone is this month's free ebook from Phoenix Pick . For the entire month of April, you can download it free by clicking this link and entering Coupon Code 9992593. In April only, you can also download the sequel, The Garden of the Stone , for half-price--just enter Coupon Code DIR06579 at checkout. Long ago, when the worlds were one...So begins the Tale, the ancestral legend Bron's family has guarded for a thousand years. Once, they were the keepers of the Stone, the most sacred object on earth, from which all the powers of Mind are drawn. But when the conflict between Mind and Hand split the worlds apart, the Stone was seized by an ambitious sorcerer. To keep the new world from contamination, he created rigid Limits circumscribing which tools might be made and which knowledge might be pursued—laws brutally enforced by a group of Guardians known as the Arm of the Stone. For centuries, Bron's fam...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware This blog post was inspired by a recently-seen "acceptance letter" from a fee-charging publisher (which doesn't admit its fees on its website; writers don't find out about them until they've actually submitted). The arguments below are commonly used by less-than-honest fee-chargers to distract authors from the fact that they're being asked to pay several thousand dollars for publication. --------------------------------- We aren't a vanity publisher because we don't publish every manuscript we receive. Many fee-charging publishers make this meaningless claim. Sure, they probably do reject manuscripts, if only to keep their output in line with their production capacity, or for logistical reasons--mss. that are too long (and would reduce the profits from fees), that conflict with stated goals (for instance, if the publisher self-identifies as Christian), or that are written in crayon on construction paper (di...

In a perhaps not unexpected move, Google/Youtube has placed itself in the position of betting its future on the results of the Google Broccoli Kitten Settlement. Miu-miu, a.k.a Broccoli Kitten , sued the billion-dollar firm shortly after its birth in 2010, along with other cats that have been misrepresented on the Internet. An attorney for the cats, which do not speak, claimed that Google had profited from advertisements on searches for “broccoli kitten” and other extremely cute cat videos, appropriating the cultural ur-gestalt embedded in the DNA of the domesticated feline without first seeking permission. Cats sued, filing for a class action representing all mammals and amphibians in videos that had been exploited. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, the parties negotiated a Settlement, rather than seeking a judgment from the court. The Settlement would cover all animal videos that had been placed on Youtube from its inception until March 29, 2012, and would allow cats to collect 50...