Ask HN: I am getting invited to write books, what terms I should request? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I am getting invited to write books, what terms I should request?

8 pointsspeeder13 comments

Hello!

I am getting invited repeatedly (it was not only one instance) to write books about programming, specially related to Lua.

Upon reading the contracts that I was offered, clearly all of them have the intention that the author haggle his way, or get a horrible contract if they don't, in plain words the contracts I get offered are always:

You hand the publisher all your rights (including copyrights, and moral rights).

If the publisher get sued because of your content, it is your fault.

I am not a experienced writer, in the sense I have no books published, although I am the person being invited, I cannot behave like if I was Bjarne Stroustrup, but what is reasonable to demand of a publisher?

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"If the publisher get sued because of your content, it is your fault."

Absolutely - that exists in every book contract and always will. You are being hired as the "domain expert", not the editors. You are putting yourself on the line and saying, "This is a 100% original work." You can't expect a $10/hr copy editor to know whether what you've written is copyrighted somewhere else, thus the clause.

Many (if not all) of the larger book publishers will have a standard contract for first time authors. You might be able to change a few things here and there but, by and large, if you don't like it, then that's that.

I've done a few book deals years back and I just have to say - it makes no sense, for me or to me, why one would not self-publish. I can think of only two reasons to not self-publish: (1) ego, and (2) time. Some people have this need to have their peers recognize "Hey, he wrote a book for O'Riley. I wish I could be like him." That's 100% ego. The "time" reason is that some people don't have the time to do all of the smaller work - submitting to Amazon, learning the formats, testing it on various devices, etc.

"But Scott, you can't speak at so and so conference unless you are a big publisher guy." Ego

"But Scott, you can raise your consulting rates." You can do the same with a self-published work

"But Scott, you only need to sell 5% of the books to make the same amount of money if you self-publish." I know.

There are certainly more reasons. Perhaps the biggest one is cachet.

Despite cachet being poo-pooed by many self published authors, writing a book that's published by a major publishment still carries a lot of weight with things like immigration authorities (I've known people whose authorship for major publishers helped them get O-1s into the US) and university admissions (particularly for mature students). These things are not "ego" but practical considerations for meeting requirements in certain areas of life (at least, it's no more "ego" than getting a degree is).

Another reason is skill. It's like how everyone could fix their own car or build their own house. While it's theoretically possible, some people seem to lack certain skills that are necessary to produce a good, high quality book and they're not necessarily easy to learn (although they could be outsourced if you self published, but then there's a money argument.) I could build my own house but it'd be crap unless I outsourced most of the work because I have no practical ability whatsoever.

The key thing to remember is they want you a lot more than you want them. This is true even if you're desperate to write a book with a major publisher, simply because there are so few talented people saying "yes" to writing programming books right now and there are enough publishers to take them on.

Now for the bad news.. in my experience, while you can certainly try and negotiate, you won't get a particularly long way on things like royalties and rights (i.e. if their starting rate is 10%, don't expect to negotiate up to 20%). You might do better on the advance, timeline, title/content, and 'softer' areas.

If you think writing a book for a respected publisher is a good idea, I advise writing your own proposal and submitting it to publishers who are known for offering good deals out of the gate (such as Pragmatic Bookshelf and No Starch) or publishers who are both good and of a level of prestige you might be willing to compromise for (potentially O'Reilly or Addison-Wesley types).

You need to be careful with signing away your copyright. It's "done" but it's not universal. Also, look out for non-compete clauses. You might be able to get those changed.

Last but not least, some reading on the topic from O'Reilly: http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/ch03.html

How people handle their copyrights?

Every contract thrown at me so far request copyright AND moral rights!

I'm not quite sure of the question, but in most cases I suspect people sign them away. It's worth trying to negotiate over, however.

FWIW, Apress's contract - which you can see at http://www.apress.com/files/Apress_Contract.pdf - is clear in that the author retains copyright other than on things they paid to produce (such as the index, cover, and certain artwork).

My publishing focused startup will be decloaking very soon, I've worked in the fiction side of publishing quite a bit. Non-fiction authors have it rough, they don't have the associations that educate writers about the business and contracts.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of America are very active and have a lot of resources, such as sample contracts read it and you'll learn a lot http://www.sfwa.org/category/sample-contracts/ They also run writer beware, which is the publishing worlds version of the BBB. http://accrispin.blogspot.com/

What I will say is this, almost all publishers have you assign them the copyright for the entire term. Rights to a publisher are broken into specific blocks and some of those blocks can be carved out, others you'll never get. Indemnification is possible for fiction but rare in non-fiction because you know more about the topic than the publisher they can't know if you're giving bad advice.

Really I'd suggest you get an agent, they've invested thousands of hours understand how the publishing system works and know what is possible to push for in dealmaking. If you're getting invited to write books you can get an agent. I know of one older agent near the valley that was an engineer for DEC in the 1970's.

be sure to head over to Charles Stross' page and read his set of posts on the publishing industry. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

It's very readable Stross specific background knowledge for the publishing industry and knowing it will help you in dealing with publishers.

I know this thread wasn't very well-visited, but your comment ought to be MUCH more highly rated. These are EXCELLENT articles; thanks for posting them!

With Amazon's KDP, if you self publish, you get to keep 70% of the profits, if your book sells between 3 and 10 USD - otherwise 35%. Naturally, you'd need to handle all of the editing and other stuff, so it's not like there's no benefit to traditional publishing.

KDP is kindle-only, and I think that is terrible, I dislike kindle DRM, dislike digital-only stuff that you cannot download if the content server get shutdown, and dislike even more digital-only stuff that can be deleted remotely, and finally, Kindle is so expensive here in Brazil that if I saw 5 of them on my whole life, it is already a lot.

But the terms are fair I guess...

Oh, traditional publishing also can pay you advance royalties, I don't think you get that with self-publishing :)

You don't have to enable DRM on your books via Kindle.

If you think those terms are 'fair', wait till you see what the traditional publishers offer you:-)

Considered http://leanpub.com ?

It is pretty easy to use the Kindle App for Windows or Mac to download your ebooks and find them on your harddisk. If the publisher hasn't enabled DRM, you can use the files as you like and even convert them in other formats (think: Calibre). In addition, there is no need to buy a Kindle e-reader or Kindle Fire to read Kindle ebooks - odds are you already own a couple of devices with an available Kindle app waiting for you for free. There is even a webbased reader.

That said, the Kindle platform might not be the best choice for complex non-fiction titles.

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