Last time I introduced this series, about the ways that digital possibilities affect the way publishing operates. This time, I bemoan ridicule discuss some of the things that are holding us back from getting excited about it.
Contracts. Contract language. One of the top reasons writers need agents. (The others being: so you have someone to whom to send cupcakes, for their rolodexes Gmail contact list. Psychotherpay. A drinking buddy.)
Contracts are evil, vicious things. They are tangled webs of nasty waiting to snag writers by their skipping feet and drag them to a rightsless hell. Boilerplates, negotiated between a publishing house and an agency, form the bedrock of all deals done between those entities. BedROCK. It’s not flexible. That was okay before. But the digital stuff doesn’t lend itself to rigid definitions like, say, foreign translation rights (involving a specific language and a specific territory).
Yet when people start talking about apps and ebooks, rights and contract language are pretty much the first topic of interest. How do we define “multimedia rights,” for instance, so that there is a boilerplate-ready understanding of what one sells when they fork over the multimedia right clause? It’s a serious (hopeless?) pain in the ass undertaking.
Even defining ebooks vs. apps vs. enhanced ebooks is contentious. What differentiates them? How much of the original content blahblahblah I’m bored with this conversation.
Who cares?
Who cares what “multimedia rights” “really” "MEAN""?" (yes, I'm mocking your quotey fingers) It clearly has no intrinsic meaning. It’s a catchall, and it's not functional anymore. Let it go. (See? Psychotherapy)
The cool stuff that can be done with books today is literally boundless. An idea that used to have a terminal life as one thing: a book (nothing wrong with that, put the pitchfork down) can be reincarnated. It means we are going to have to treat every contract like it’s new. We’ll be adapting the language every time to accommodate the plan for each project. Publishers are playing hardball, so it's going to be hard. That’s okay, guys.
We've got to make a plan for each project (topic of the next post, on Wednesday) and get educated on these technologies. It’s a lot of information. But so was learning all the Big Six imprints. If agents are going to continue to advocate well for authors, it means knowing about this stuff, or knowing the people who do. Let’s drop the semantic debates and get started.