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Originally Posted by Aidan
Maybe this is really obvious, but can someone please tell me why the author's are all fearing their book rights being tied up in the courts for years. Surely either
a) You are owed money from your contract that hasn't been paid, therefore the terms of the contract have been broken so the rights revert to the author straight away.
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Breach of contract does not trigger an automatic payment. Also, many authors aren't yet "owed but not paid" in a way that's a breach--they're just owed, and the company's allowed to take some time to pay them. The company has announced it doesn't have the money to pay them next quarter (or whatever), or their books are slated to be published in a few months (at which point, they're due the rest of their advance), but now there's no guarantee they'll be published at all.
The right to publish is an asset worth money. Sometimes, the only asset a bankrupt publisher has. Those assets are divided among creditors. The creditors usually include the authors--but they're probably owed a lot less than other companies, like the printer and distributor.
There is no nice simple legal precedent of "you owe the authors money; you have their rights to publish; how about we swap those."
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b) You're not owed money but your books are out of print due to the company going bust. As the books are out of print the rights revert to the author after the time specified in the contract (normally a couple of months).
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One of the numbers I heard bouncing around for this case was "100 copies/year." If the company doesn't sell 100 copies in a year, the rights can revert (on request) to the author. So it takes a year of very low sales, followed by a request from the author, followed by a reply (some publishers drag their feet on this), to get verification of return of rights.
Reversion of rights depends on the specific contract.There are no industry standards.
The
contract they're being offered is at Scribd.