Serial rights sales

Consult a qualified lawyer in your jurisdiction for all legal opinions for your specific situation. Serialization Rights. A few things to consider when licensing serialization rights: Depending on your publication strategy and whether you are a new or an established author, serial publications of excerpts from your book may help generate interest in and drive sales of the current book and other titles on your backlist.

For this reason, require the periodical to print the name of your book with the excerpt publication, including the publisher, publication date, cost and where to purchase the book if possible. Decide if you want to serialize the complete book or only an excerpt, keeping in mind that if you provide the whole book for free, others may not be inclined to purchase the book once it is available unless you are an established author. However, never say never. License only the publication rights a periodical needs to serialize the excerpts of your book.

Any other publishing rights should be reserved. Be clear about what excerpt is being licensed for serialization, this way you can sell multiple serializations with other periodicals if you want as long as the excerpt is different. Time limits — Make sure the contract has a deadline by which the excerpt must be published or the rights revert back to you. Make sure any deadline for delivery of your excerpts to the periodical is manageable.

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By Randal Maurice Jelks. By Leah Konen. By Robert Lee Brewer. Wednesday Poetry Prompts. Fantasy Agents. Comics and Graphic Novels. If a specially commissioned "work for hire" agreement is signed, the copyright to the work created will belong to the developer of the project. For example, Production Company wishes to develop and produce a documentary film.

Production Company will enter into agreements with independent filmakers, writers, and musicians to create original work to which Production Company will own all the rights.

In order to own the copyright to the finished product, Production Company will enter into specially commissioned "work for hire" agreements with each person who contributes original works to the final film.

The author must realize that if such an agreement is signed, he or she is giving up all his or her rights in the finished product forever. If a confidentiality clause is included in the contract such as in a ghostwriting situation , the author cannot disclose the fact that he or she actually wrote the piece.

Electronic Rights: The licensing of electronic rights to a work in this day of expanding technological capabilities is a hot topic in the publishing industry. The best way to handle electronic rights is to clearly spell out exactly which electronic rights are being licensed and which are not. Electronic rights can encompass the rights to sell and distribute the work on CD ROM, to store the work in a database, such as Lexis-Nexus, to publish the work on the Internet, to archive the work on the Internet and the publishing of the piece on as-yet not invented electronic media.

In a sense, the law of electronic rights is being written now by the writers, editors and publishers. Eventually, the terms will be recognized to have standard meanings in the industry. In the meantime, freelancers who write for online publications should ask the editor to spell out in plain language exactly what rights they are purchasing.

If you don't understand what an editor means by "First Electronic Rights", then ask. Most editors are happy to explain their publication's policies. And keep copies of all the correspondence, whether it is by letter or by email. The correspondence itself constitutes a binding contract if it clearly shows what the parties intended. Freelancers selling to the American periodical market should be aware of the recent court decision in Tasini v.

New York Times , 93 Civ. Y Aug. Judge Sonia Sotomayor based her decision on the U. Copyright Act which allows reprints without freelancer's permission or compensation if the freelance work is part of a "collective work".

There are a couple of important points to keep in mind about this decision. First, the Tasini ruling was in the context of a summary judgement hearing; there was no trial. The ruling has been appealed by the Plaintiff, Mr. Furthermore, the ruling applies only in cases where there is no contract between the freelancer and the periodical.