Digital rights in your author contracts

Whether you plan to produce e-books or license your content, create apps or clear digital image rights for illustrated titles, you will need to get your author/publisher agreements ready for the rapid developments in digital publishing.

You will want to:

• ensure that you have the digital rights you need;
• be clear about how much to pay in royalties for e-books and apps;
• include other digital forms we don’t even know about yet;
• clear digital rights for your legacy (existing) contracts, as well as for new titles.

Do it yourself?

Adapting your own agreements for digital rights is certainly a practical option for some publishers, although focussing on this in-house may take considerable time away from other tasks. There are some excellent contract examples to be found in the brand new Eighth edition of Clark’s Publishing Agreements (£120 +9% VAT): alternatively, a copyright lawyer could undoubtedly amend the legal aspects of your author contract. However, you may still need to establish royalty rates and revenue splits for e-books, apps, online and mobile use, yourself.

Practical help

As rights professionals with extensive experience in digital rights, we believe that we can help with the commercial issues involved in making your author contracts ‘digital-ready’, having been through a similar process for a number of other publishers. Clare works with a colleague, Mary Hammond, who has wide experience in publishing agreements and particularly in digital rights contracts.

For new titles – Bring your standard author contract up to date

Typically, we would focus on the grant of rights and the subsidiary rights terms in your standard author agreement, looking carefully at the royalty rates and revenue splits. We will review the relevant clauses in detail, making amendments to allow for future e-books, apps, online and mobile uses, and if necessary provide a brief note of explanation so that you are able to describe the reasoning behind this new wording to your authors.

Usually we are able to do this entirely by email and phone. We’d ask you to send the full agreement if possible, rather than just the grant and royalty clauses, and we’d return the document to you with tracked changes so that you can see the alterations.

For published titles – Add digital rights to existing author contracts

Some publishers also need to extend the rights in existing author agreements to incorporate e-books, apps and other digital uses. We can provide a letter addendum designed for this purpose and adapted to work with your own standard agreements.

We try to keep this as straightforward as possible, generally creating a single letter for authors to sign and return to you. In this, we give authors an indication of the greater context of rapid growth in digital publishing, before setting out the digital rights together with royalty rates and revenue splits, as appropriate for your particular list.

Prices

You may need to revise your standard author agreement, or an addendum for legacy contracts, or both of these. Please contact info AT clare-painter.co.uk 01235 528432 for prices and availability.