Updating Clauses In My Contract Templates

It’s been a little while since I’ve talked about contracts, and since I just made a system-wide change to my templates, I thought I’d mention it.

If you’ve not seen them already, I highly recommend that you take a look at my "Looking at Your Contracts" compendium post, as well as "The Strange Stuff You Find in Contracts" and "Publishers Will Fix Their Contracts If You Call Them On It". They provide a bunch of background to the tweak I just made.

There are three changes that I made. All of these reflect what I meant or intended, but the wording was unclear or contradictory.

Yes, folks, that means if you already have a prior contract with me, this is the understanding that I had then. If you want an addendum, e-mail me, but presume this is what was meant. My contracts are supposed to protect authors as well as myself.

First, I added the words "the author will instruct" to this clause: 

The Author agrees that at such time as the Work is included in any book, whether or not it be entirely composed of the Author’s own work, the author will instruct that *Alliteration Ink* will be given credit as a publisher of the Work and the Work will be cited with its full title(s) as it appears in **ANTHOLOGY**.  

It was pointed out, quite reasonably, that authors cannot always control what publishers do, and the language should reflect that. 

Second, I added "Separate from the author’s personal electronic copy" to this clause:

Separate from the author’s personal electronic copy, electronic versions of the Work may be made available at the discretion of the Publisher or Author for reviewers and other marketing and promotional purposes.

This removes any hint of contradiction between the promotional electronic copy, which an author can distribute for promotional purposes, and the author’s personal electronic copy, which they cannot.

Finally, I added the final sentence to this paragraph:

The Author agrees to be available for publicity and promotion as reasonably requested by the Publisher and subject to the Author’s employment and personal obligations. The Author reserves the right to decline any requests for appearances.

Mostly because I had an author whom I bought a flash work from ask where they were going to have to travel to in order to promote recompose. Um, no. Not my intent at all. In fact, I’m mostly leaving that clause in at all in order to provide a template for others in case they need it.

As always, you can browse my contract templates at https://github.com/uriel1998/ainkcontracts. They are under an MIT license, so you can use them as templates for your own work, suggest them to new publishers as a starting point, or compare the contracts you’re getting to them. 

Also, because they’re on GitHub, you can actually go back and see the changes I’ve made to them: https://github.com/uriel1998/ainkcontracts/commits/master  

SFWAPRO