POD Practices, Part 3: You Gotta Fight For Your Right
Monday, April 30th, 2007Today we continue discussing those publish-on-demand (or print-on-demand) foibles that have given the process a bad name. Our topic for this post is rights reversion.
When an author signs a contract with a publisher, somewhere in that contract there should be a clause covering rights reversion–spelling out under what circumstances the publisher ceases to have rights to publish the book, and the author is free to sell those rights to someone else. This is important. No publisher should be permitted to monopolize rights to a work beyond their ability to utilize those rights. If they can’t publish, they have no business holding publication rights.
Non-POD publishers tend to specify rights reversion based on the book going out of print. Let’s turn to The Author’s Guild for an explanation of that…
Your publisher should only have the exclusive rights to your work while it is actively marketing and selling your book, i.e., while your book is “in print.” An out-of-print clause will allow you to terminate the contract and regain all rights granted to your publisher after the book stops earning money.
So here’s the million-dollar question: When can a POD-published book be considered out of print? Never. At least, not unless you’re very careful how “out of print” is defined. The Author’s Guild defines it as being when the publisher is no longer marketing the book, which is wise, but not self-evident, as you will see.
Certain bad apples of the POD family have developed a reputation for sitting on author’s rights for too long. PublishAmerica famously contracts for seven years, which would be fantastically long even for a commercial publisher, let alone a vanity outfit. Another start-up POD publisher (whom I do not recommend signing with, for all the reasons outlined here) originally used a contract that specifically denied that a work was out of print until such time as it was no longer available for sale. This meant that the work, being print-on-demand, could never go out of print at all, and rights would never revert to the author.
The Author’s Guild recommends negotiating a minimum number of sales taking place during each accounting period for the book to be considered in print, failing which all rights should revert to the author. Another option is to agree to a certain period of time–six or twelve months after the book goes on sale, maybe, certainly not seven years!–after which each party has the right to terminate the contract for any reason.
Part of treating the author fairly is to respect his right to make a living or at least to earn a profit. A POD publisher who strives for respectability should make sure their contract reflects that respect in its rights reversion clause. When the publisher can no longer market the book effectively, it’s time to set the author free.