Are You Smarter Than a Publishing Contract?

This week, we’re starting a new Wednesday blog series on publishing contracts and understanding legalese. Each week, I’ll be taking a paragraph (or two) from a publishing contract, explaining what the language means and how the terms can be written to favor the publisher, the author, or both. It’s my hope that this series will help both independent and traditionally published authors understand the standard legal terms used in publishing contracts (and publishing “terms of use” for online publishers) in order to facilitate negotiation and positive business relationships between authors and publishers (small and large). The language I’ll be using

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Monday Blog Game: Happy Halloween!

It’s Monday, which means another installment of the Monday Blog Game.* This week’s topic: HALLOWEEN! This week, I’m not offering my own take on the subject (you can find my mass-murdered pumpkin post here, if you want to know the weirdness that passes for Halloween fun at my house). Instead, I’m turning the stage over to friend and author Marci Jefferson, who has BIG Halloween news this year: A Bewitching Halloween Treat Fall has always been my favorite season. Bonfires and kaleidoscope leaves. Hot cider and pumpkin carving. Giving up trick-or-treating was more difficult for me than relinquishing my belief

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Thursday Thoughts From Tesla

I spent much of this week “alone” at the office, so Tesla decided to come along and keep me company there. Yesterday morning we received a filing back from the Sacramento courts in one of the self-addressed, stamped envelopes the office sends along with mail-in filings. Its delivery prompted Tesla to ask whether we made a habit of mailing official letters to ourselves. (In a tone which implied my intelligence might be in question.) When I explained the situation – that the letter was actually a SASE sent along with a standard filing – he pondered the envelope with a

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Leaving a Literal Legacy

Today’s Wednesday post deals with a topic of great importance to authors: How to to address intellectual property rights in your will or trust. Intellectual property rights – including an author’s copyrights in his or her works – survive the author’s death. Under U.S. law, copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years –  the term is the same for unpublished works as it is for published ones. Every author needs an estate plan, including a properly drafted will or trust, which addresses and disposes of copyrights held at the author’s death. Step 1:  Create an estate

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… It’s Full of Stars

I’ve previously posted about the micro brittle stars that inhabit my aquarium – from their tendency to go walkabouts to their habit of living in every available crevice. Two nights ago, however, one of them did something new – and entirely unexpected. I typically feed the seahorses on top of one of the filter intake motor casings. The motor housing has a large flat place on top that makes a perfect “table” for the food and the upright flow tubes offer a perfect hitching post for the horses to grab while they eat. A number of brittle stars live in

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Piggy Saves the Day

A guest post by Marci Jefferson* Piggy Saves the Day Maybe it’s because I’m an Air Force Brat and moved around a lot, but sometimes I had no one to play with at recess. There were times I resorted to just swinging by myself or chasing boys because I couldn’t break into any of the girl circles. Well my first grade daughter has had that problem this year, saying girls just don’t want to play with her at recess. They play with their toys and ignore her. What has she been doing instead? Chasing boys. But when she broke into

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The Erasers Fly High at Midnight

Welcome to the second installment of the weekly blog game. Today’s topic? SCHOOL. Here’s my take, and I’ll be linking in other contributors’ pieces as they come: Ninth-grade me thought herself pretty clever, particularly when it came to practical jokes. We had a brand-new English teacher – freshly graduated (from Yale, if I remember correctly) and eager to share her knowledge with our devious bright little minds. Unfortunately, she wasn’t much larger or much older-looking than many of her students. She was also fairly easily distracted. One morning, a couple of friends and I arrived early to class to find

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Counting the Costs of Publication

The final section in the author’s business plan is the budget (in a standard business plan, this would be called “Financial Factors and Statements). The author’s budget may be simple or may be very complex, depending on a number of factors. Among them: whether the author decides to publish traditionally or independently and on how much of the marketing work the author intends to do on his or her own. When preparing the budget section, you should list each cost you will or may incur in the publishing, distribution, marketing and sales process, a date when each expense must be

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My Son Told Me Not to Post This*

…but I’m doing it anyway. Yesterday morning I checked in on my aquarium before work (I always do, to see the fish and make sure everything is running smoothly before I head out for the day) and saw this: For the most part, that looks like a photo of my aquarium without the lights on. The purple sea fan (the branching tree-like structure in the middle of the frame) is at rest, so its polyps are retracted, leaving the branches “bare.” The oddity is the object hanging from the central branch to the upper right side of the sea fan.

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