I want to write a non-fiction book - part 6 - the contract

By Brian Clegg

This is surely one of the most exciting points of the writing journey. Your book proposal has been accepted by a publisher and they send you a contract. Woo-hoo!

You might be tempted to immediately sign on the dotted line but you do need to check it out carefully. Publishers’ contracts can be littered with ‘interesting’ clauses that you need to query – and just because they have made you an offer doesn’t mean you have to go for it in its initial form.

A starting point is the kind of book deal they are offering. Broadly, they tend to be either flat fee or advance-and-royalty based. In the case of a flat fee, the publisher offers you a fixed amount, often divided into two parts (usually one on signing the contract, and on acceptance of the manuscript). The more traditional publishing approach is advance and royalty. Here you get offered a smaller amount up front – the advance. You will then get extra payments (the royalty), but only once your part of the earnings from the book exceeds the advance. Again, the advance will typically be split, most often three ways between date of signing, date of acceptance and date of publication.

There is one big advantage of advance and royalty – you may end up earning many times the initial advance (and you don’t have to repay anything, even if the book never earns enough to produce any royalties). However, there are some plus points from the flat fee. As mentioned, it will usually be more than the equivalent advance, and if you don’t like the whole business of publicity (more on that in the next post), there is far less obligation with a flat fee book, because (frankly) you don’t really care how many copies are sold.

I’ve written quite a few flat fee books: what it comes down to, primarily, is how you feel about it as a journalism job. Work out realistically how long it will take you to write the book (including any edits). If the flat fee will pay you an acceptable wage for that period of time, it’s acceptable. If not, don’t go for it (unless this is spare time activity and it’s more important to you to get published). Incidentally, you can always say it’s not enough – many publishers (though not all) will move on their initial offer. This obviously applies to the size of the advance in advance and royalty too. The amount is always potentially negotiable.

However, though I’ve written flat fee books, I much prefer advance and royalty. Partly because I feel more invested in the final book, but mostly because there is more opportunity for income. (Yes, I love writing, but there’s nothing wrong with wanting a good income: don’t feel embarrassed by this.) One of the big potential opportunities is translations. With  flat fee book, you don’t get paid anything extra for translations unless you can negotiate that as a special case, which is rare. With an advance-and-royalty book, earnings from translations will be part of the contract. I’ve had books where a single translation deal has paid off the entire advance, meaning every single sale counts towards extra royalties.

I can’t cover everything to check in a contract (and I’m not a lawyer). One really big piece of advice here is, if possible (and you are UK based) join the Society of Authors. It’s relatively cheap, and they offer a free contract-checking service, pointing out dodgy aspects for you to get back to the publisher on. For full membership you need to have a book published, but there are various degrees of membership (e.g. you can get ‘emerging author’ status as soon as you have a contract or an agent’s agreement).

Financially, with a flat fee contract, it’s simply about the amount. Some publishers will offer a bonus, for example if you exceed a number of copies sold – it’s always worth suggesting this. There are far more components to royalties. You will be offered a percentage of either the cover price or the price the book is sold at (the cover price is best, but this isn’t often offered anymore). This will usually vary between hardback and paperback and whether the book was sold by the publisher with a high discount. Publishers will often accept the idea of an escalator. This says with sales over a certain level you will get a higher percentage. Then there all the other potential sources of income.

Say you are offered 7.5% for paperback and 10% for hardback (yes, the percentages are often this low). You can expect a much higher percentage – say 25% – on ebooks and audio books, as the costs to the publisher are far less. You will then be offered a whole list of subsidiary rights. These are sources such as translations, serial rights (publication of an extract in a newspaper, say), film and broadcast rights. It’s very rare these should be less than 50%. For translation rights, publishers may give you, say, 60-70% and serial rights could be as high as 90%. What you can get here is always subject to negotiation – a publisher will often be prepared to up the percentage a bit on subsidiary rights as it’s effectively money for nothing as far as they (and you) are concerned.

There are a number of things to look out for in the contract, of which I’ll just highlight a few. If it’s to be illustrated, who pays for illustrations? What liabilities do you have? Does the publisher have any claim on your next title? And is there a competition clause?

Illustrations cost a publisher money, both in producing the book and, if necessary, obtaining copyright or having a designer put together a diagram. Some contracts will load these costs onto the author: if illustrations are important to your book, unless you are able to use public domain images (for example NASA’s space photos), you may end up paying more than your advance just on the illustrations. If you are landed with the cost, ask the publisher to take it on (perhaps discussing a limit), or be prepared to cut illustrations to a minimum.

Then there’s liabilities. Many contracts have scary clauses about liabilities and indemnifying the publisher against damages resulting in breaches of your warranties. Some of this you are just going to have to live with. You will be expected to say that your writing is original – if you plagiarise someone else, then the publisher quite rightly can’t be expected to suffer any damages. It becomes more of a grey area when you get onto, for example, the potential for libel. If you are writing a biography of a controversial figure, for instance, then it would be reasonable for the publisher to accept responsibility for any legal defence.

A relatively common clause is one where you have to offer your next book or next couple of books to that publisher first. Generally speaking this isn’t too much of a problem. It’s a courtesy: it’s very rare a publisher will insist on taking a book they aren’t the right publisher for, just to activate this clause. I’ve never had an example where a book I intend to write for another publisher (because it doesn’t suit the existing publisher) has been blocked.

Something that is harder is a competition clause. This is where you say that you won’t write a book for another publisher that competes with this book. This is a very vague concept. Where it’s put in the draft contract, I have always tried to get it struck out, and often succeeded. If the publisher insists on it, I have always got from them in writing a clear definition of what would count as competition. So, for instance, if I wrote an illustrated overview of quantum physics, I would establish that only another illustrated overview would be in competition not, for example, a book about a specific quantum physics topic, such as entanglement or quantum computing.

All this might sound a bit depressing – but remember a contract is good news. They want your book! The main thing is to discipline yourself and read it carefully, even if it runs to many pages. (Take it a bit at a time if necessary.) Make sure they aren’t ripping you off. Use a checking service, such as the Society of Authors’ service, if you can. Sign up with confidence, or not at all.

To finish, here’s an outline of the topics this series of posts will cover.

1. Is my idea a book?
2. Outlining
3. Other parts of a proposal
4. The pitch letter
5. Finding a publisher (or agent)
6. The contract
7. Publicity (and extra earnings)
8. Self-publishing

Image by Romain Dancre from Unsplash

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.