Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts
This guide from the Authors Alliance identifies clauses that frequently appear in publishing contracts, explains in plain language what these terms (and typical variations) mean, and presents strategies for negotiating author-friendly versions of these clauses. When authors have more information about copyright and publication options for their works, they are better able to make and keep their works available in the ways they want.
This Authors Alliance guide helps authors understand rights reversion, or the process by which a publisher returns copyright to the author. Is a book you published not selling like it used to or not being made available in a format you would like? Maybe it has fallen out of print or is no longer being marketed by the publisher, or you would like to make it openly available online. Use this guide to determine if you are eligible for rights reversion, request rights reversion from your publisher, and work with your publisher to revive your book without reverting rights.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that gives you the legal tools you need to grant others permission to use your work under the conditions of your choice. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright but work alongside it, allowing you to keep your copyrights while permitting others to make certain uses of your work. You can choose to permit or deny commercial (for profit) uses of your work, the modification of your work to create a new work, and whether or not any new works that use your work have to be licensed under the same terms that you chose.
Once you have learned more about the licenses Creative Commons offers, you can select the license you want for each of your works. Using the license chooser tool, you can generate code that you can easily embed into a web page. Creative Commons also has tutorials for marking your works with a license notice in a variety of other formats.
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