Contracts!

I got to work with contracts today! Muahahaha!

Seriously, the company I work for is putting all of their contract info into an electronic database, and that means that I got to spend today poring over contracts and putting all the important information in them into a spreadsheet.

My co-intern seemed to find the situation mind-numbingly boring, but I was thrilled.

It was very, very, enlightening to get to look at the contracts, at how they're set up, at what the different terms mean, and most importantly---at who gets what terms, what they mean, and why they're important.

For instance, I saw today that advances tend to be pretty meh, and that having a good agent can increase your royalty rate by like 25-50%. I also learned that some people make decisions on subrights I find very interesting---take, for interest, translation rights. A lot of people seem to negotiate these so that the author gets a bigger cut than the publishing house.

This makes sense on the surface, I suppose, but if you dig a little deeper it's pretty illogical. The only reason I can see to cut the publishing house in on the money at all is if they're doing the work of shopping the title in other countries. If you plan to do that yourself (or have your agent do it), then they really don't deserve any of the money, in which case you should reserve all the rights. If you can't reserve those rights, then you'd want to give the publishing company an incentive to do the work by cutting them a higher stake of the profits from the translation. If you plan to have them do the work, giving them a smaller slice of the pie will discourage them from shopping your novel around at all, and that doesn't help anyone.

I also had the fun experience of running into some agency names I'm familiar with and seeing what they got for their authors. Unfortunately, book contracts are confidential, so I can't share (and neither, it seems, can they, or some of them certainly would), but in a perfect world I think I'd want to see example contracts up on every agency's website, as those contracts are a big part of what they do for authors and seeing exactly what each place can offer would be a great help in ranking them.