Contracts can be a fun milestone for authors. They can also be a pain to understand, hard to decipher and horrid to wrap your head around.
However, not understanding them can burn you as an author, whether with an agent or a publisher.
So here are the main three things to look out for before signing on the dotted line.
1. The Rights
The rights you give - or they ask for -, once you've signed - ties your hands behind your back. The rights being granted to the publisher will be seen in territories and formats.
In relation to us, we will commonly focus on the rights to publish paperbacks, hardbacks and e-books within the UK.
The UK is the territory. The formats are the different formats of your work (we don't have the means to create audiobooks right now.
The rights aren't just formats and territories either. They can ask for merchandising and TV rights for them to further sell and make a profit from selling further.
These rights, especially if they have no "publish by/within" clause, the author won't be able to publish their work through any other means in the territory they've got the rights for and the formats they've gotten from you signing the dotted line.
So read them and make sure you know exactly what you're giving away and for how long.
2. Royalties and Advances
They won't be placed together in the contract. They'll be spaced apart. Advances will be towards the beginning, stating the amount, the intervals being paid at and the amounts they'll be paid at each interval.
Royalties are negotiable.
Typically, they sit between 10%-15% for the different formats and 20% for foreign editions.
They tend to be calculated based on the predicted sales figures for the books once they're on the market and how they will cover all their expenses of printing and working on said book. They try to make it as low as possible.
And they can be different for each work and after a certain amount of books have been sold, listed within the clause.
The royalties can also be calculated from the Net Receipt and the Retail Price. These work out as different amounts due to one being what the publisher receives of selling the books to stores and the other being from the overall sale of the book. They will also state how often you should expect your royalty cheques - once a year seems to be the industries standard.
3. Expectations
The expectations should be at the top of the contract. Whether you're going by a pen name or your own, what exactly you're agreeing to write - for example, a YA Crime Fantasy of 90000 words following a girl in a red cape trying to find her grandmother, getting involved with a crime boss called The Wolf and having to steal a jewel and art piece to barter for his help -, the title, whether stated as a working one or not ,and the deadline for it to be received by them.
If you stray too far, go too far over or miss the deadline, publishers will have the choice: either review the contract and amend it or withdraw their offer of publishing your work because it's no longer what they want. Missing a deadline and asking for extensions is quite common in the publishing industry.
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