Clause I
The grant of rights
The sentence that matters most in the whole document. It names exactly which rights you are giving: the right to print and sell the book, and usually a list of others alongside it. Everything you do not grant, you keep.
Read it for the word "exclusive" and for the phrase "all rights". Exclusive is normal for the edition a publisher is investing in. All rights, in all languages, in all formats, in all media now known or later invented, is a land grab.
! Ask for: exclusive rights to publish the book in the formats and languages the publisher can genuinely deliver. Everything else stays with you until someone shows up who can use it.
Clause II
Territory
Where the publisher may sell. The usual shapes are single-market (North America, say), open market, or world. A publisher who sells well in one country and nowhere else should not be holding world rights, because those territories then sit unused and unsellable for the length of the term.
✓ Match the territory to the publisher’s actual sales reach, and ask what happens to a territory they never exploit.
Clause III
Term
How long the grant lasts. "For the full term of copyright" means your lifetime plus seventy years, which is the industry norm and the single clause most worth pushing on. A fixed term of seven or ten years, renewable, keeps everybody honest.
If the term is life-of-copyright, then the reversion clause below is the only door out of the room. Read it twice.
Clause IV
Subsidiary rights
Everything that is not the book itself: translation, audio, film and television, serial, dramatic, large print, book club, and the newer ones about training machines on your text. Each is a separate asset and each can be granted or withheld separately.
✓ Reasonable to grant: the formats the publisher produces in-house, and the ones their agents actively sell.
! Worth holding back: film and television, and any A.I. or text-and-data-mining licence. Those get granted cheaply and regretted expensively.
• Split of proceeds: when a publisher sells a subsidiary right, the author’s share is usually 50 to 90 percent depending on the right. Check the number for each line, not the average.
Clause V
Royalties and the advance
An advance is a loan against your own future royalties, paid in instalments and not repayable if the book underperforms. The royalty rate is the real number: a percentage of either the cover price or of net receipts, and those two are very different things.
Net receipts means after the retailer’s discount, so a percentage of net on a deeply discounted sale can be a fraction of what the same percentage of cover price would pay. Ask which basis is being used, and ask for the discount thresholds where the rate drops.
• Also check: reserve against returns (how much of your royalty they hold back, and for how many statements), and whether statements come twice a year or four times.
Clause VI
Reversion, and out-of-print
The clause that gets your rights back. Older contracts said rights revert when the book goes out of print, which meant something when print runs ended. Print-on-demand and ebooks mean a book is technically never out of print, so that wording now keeps your book hostage forever at zero sales.
What you want instead is a sales-threshold reversion: if fewer than a stated number of copies sell in a stated period, you may give notice and take the rights back. A number and a date, not a phrase.
✓ Ask for: reversion on written notice if sales fall below an agreed figure in any twelve-month period after the first two years, with rights returning within ninety days.
Clause VII
Option on the next book
A right of first look at whatever you write next. Fair enough in principle; unfair when it is open-ended. Cap it: one book, in the same genre, with a fixed window to respond, and no obligation to match another publisher’s offer.
Clause VIII
Warranties and indemnity
You promise the work is yours, original, and not defamatory, and you agree to cover the publisher’s costs if that promise turns out to be wrong. Push for the indemnity to apply only to claims that are actually upheld or settled with your consent, and ask to be named on the publisher’s insurance.
