Negotiation Tips For Writers

Close the Deal

Anyone who has dealt with an agent, a publisher, or a producer knows that negotiation is part of what makes the writing life possible.  As organizing principles go, this is pretty straightforward. While we have plenty to think about in negotiating representation, publication, and (hopefully) production, one goal should remain clearly in focus: close the deal.

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Remember a Few Key Points

Robin Davis Miller, General Counsel of The Authors Guild, offered some advice on contracts and the negotiation process at a seminar in Los Angeles. I have benefitted from her counsel. I hope you benefit, too. Here are a few notes:

  • Publishing is a moving target. Change is constant.
  • NEVER accept assurances for marketing of your book on the website or anywhere else.  Get it in the contract.
  • Avoid the OPTION Clause.  Agents tend to leave it in because it ensures their commission even if you leave your agent and place the book yourself.
  • As the author, you deserve to know the publisher’s printing and circulation figures.  Publishers don’t release this information easily.  They fight it.  Remember – by the time they make an offer, they know precisely how many copies of your book they will print.
  • Research your agent’s and publisher’s reputation for using sub-rights.  Has the publisher executed for others?  Has your agent executed for other clients?
  • Time is your ally.  The more time that an agent or editor or publisher invests in you and your work, the more reluctant they are to let you go.
  • Books are a business.  Think and speak from a business point of view.
  • Insert an out of print clause anywhere the publisher attempts to punish the author for underperforming sales.
  • Always insist on receiving a statement. Have them e-mail it if they are reluctant to invest in postage. How else are you to know they are doing their job?

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More Advice

Ernest Bevin (1881-1951), British politician and statesmen, offered:

The first thing to decide before you walk into any negotiation is what to do if the other fellow says no.

 

Novel Opening Lines

List-in-progress

One of the immeasurable benefits of novels is travel to other places and times with characters who begin as strangers and rapidly become part of our experience. How the author introduces us to a setting, a character, a premise, and occasionally even the designing principle of the literary work as a whole in a single sentence is a key moment.  Does the author establish a contract with us in that first line?  Or does s/he need a paragraph or a chapter to accomplish that?

Here are some distinctive opening lines.  There is no possible way to fairly represent all literature.  These are from my own reading, which scarcely scratches the surface.  I’m working on catching up, and hope that you will add suggestions from books you admire.  In that way, we can assemble a reading list for us all.

Opening Lines

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

Ernest Hemingway – The OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1952)

 

Call me Ishmael.

Herman Melville – MOBY DICK (1851)

 

 

A soft fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air.

Sebastian Junger – The PERFECT STORM (1997)

 

One day in the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems in a bookshop in Soho, and as she reached the second poem on the first street corner, she was knocked down by a car.

Carlos María Domínguez – The HOUSE OF PAPER (2004)

 

In that last winter of the war, she knew to use point blank ink.

Ivan Doig – HEART EARTH (1993)

 

Fedor Mikhailovich Smokovnikov, chairman of the Bureau of Fiscal Affairs, was a man who took pride in his incorruptible honesty and who was dismally liberal in his views; not only was he a freethinker, but he despised all form of religion, looking upon them as nothing but the relics of superstition.

Leo Tolstoy – The FORGED COUPON

 

The is the saddest story I have ever heard.

Ford Madox Ford – The GOOD SOLDIER (1915)

 

I started off this morning looking for a lost dog.

Gretel Ehrlich – Looking For a Lost Dog, from ISLANDS, The UNIVERSE, HOME (1991)

 

Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface.

Wallace Stegner – CROSSING TO SAFETY (1987)

 

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

Virginia Woolf – TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927)

 

In some distant arcade, a clock tower calls out six times and then stops.

Alan Lightman - EINSTEIN'S DREAMS (1993)

 

To Teens, Knowledge is Infinite

Child is Father/Mother...

Despite the rancor at town hall meetings across an increasingly stressed America, there is some very good news coming from a hopeful source: high school students and rising college first-year students.  While so many adults are indulging in anti-social rage against change, their children are quietly learning, preparing, observing and developing their personal life plans.  From the look of things, they are choosing change, seeing promise in lifelong learning, knowledge as infinite, and following discovery where it leads as long as it results in good - for themselves, their families, their communities and their planet.

In a related article by Tamar Lewin about the rapidly diminishing importance of textbooks in high school education, there is an intriguing subtext that made me sit up and pay attention - students are relating to the world they are inheriting in a productive way that contrasts with their elders' approach.  If you get a moment, read In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History (NYT, 9 Aug 2009).

e-Publishing Opens Doors for Authors

Good Times

Just as when the IBM personal computer arrived (1981), Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh with GUI (1984), the venerable Selectric and Selectric II became obsolete, and a universe of entrepreneurial and artistic opportunities opened to writers, the Kindle, Sony Readers, iRex, Lexcycle's Stanza and other downloadable readers have opened doors to a new world of publishing possibilities. While the major players sort out the e-Publishing landscape, engineer the infrastructure, and build the new e-pub world, we writers are exploring, beta testing, and blazing new entrepreneurial paths ... all while continuing to write, write, write. This is a good time to be a writer, don't you think?

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Kindle UPDATE - Kindle vs. B&N Free eReader:  See David Pogue's PERSONAL TECH column, "New Entry in E-Books a Paper Tiger," in the August 6th edition of the New York Times.  Barnes & Noble's new e-reader offers PC access to e-books.  The eReader tablet itself is promised for later.