Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
That certainly happens, though it also happens that publishing companies will revert the rights when they have no plans for a book, even if they are not required to by the contract. It just depends on the whims of whoever is making the decision. That's why authors should have good literary agents. Some people have the attitude that I'm not going to give up anything unless you pay me. Heck, there are a lot of cases where the heirs of the author are the ones preventing publishers who want to publish a backlist book from publishing it. They want to hold out for a big payout. Another reason I don't like the current copyright system.
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Authors should not bargain on reversions in this brave new world unless they are prepared to pay for them. The Big Publishers are part of large corporate groups, and the balance sheet comes first. And the publishers rights in each book are assets on that balance sheet.
Literary agents are also on the way out. They were yet another snout at the trough in the traditional publishing system, with a high likelihood of a conflict of interest by the very nature of their profession. As Chris Rusch pointed out on a number of occasions on her blog, many of them engaged in legal and negotiating work for which they usually had no qualifications whatsoever, and in the case of the legal work may even have been breaking the law in many jurisdictions.