So the first day of BookExpo was a flurry of suits and contracts and seminars and banners and free books and guys dressed up like pirates playing live music. As for the pirates, they were promoting a L. Ron Hubbard children/teen series. Don’t worry – I got video.
Oh, and my shoulders ache. Free books, especially advance review copies, get heavy so quickly when you start snatching everything you’d like to read (I know, I know, just throw me a pity party for getting free books). But I’m especially excited to have “Home” by Marilynne Robinson, and although everyone else seems to already have a copy, I landed the Roberto Bolano’s tome “2666.” As far as upcoming short story collections, which I requested wherever I went, from Grove Press I scored a copy of Anne Enright’s “Yesterday’s Weather,” which has been mentioned before in these pages, and Akashic Books is releasing “Demons in the Spring” by Joe Meno (author of “Hairstyles of the Damned”) with full-color illustrations.
Mrs. BookFox gasped when she saw all the books. Yes, they sort of obscured our couch.
I was also happy to meet Scott Esposito for the first time. He was handing out cards for The Quarterly Conversation. He told me I didn’t look at all like what he had imagined. Which is okay, because I felt the same about him. Isn’t that weird? Meeting someone you’ve been reading and emailing for years. But it was great talking with him. Other bloggers and authors are lurking about, and I just need to run into them (Laila Lalami! and Dan Wickett! And Carolyn Kellogg, and Mark Sarvas, and Ron Hogan, and I know there are more of you out there)
I also had quite a long talk with Jeanne Leiby, the new editor of the Southern Review, so probably cheap pharmacy later on in the week, after a few time sensitive posts, I’ll offer up that interview.
I only attended one seminar, rather late in the day, from four to five. It was given by Anita Fore, who titled her seminar, “The Dime: Ten Trends to Avoid in Book Contracts.” Fore is a lawyer who specializes in helping authors avoid getting ripped off (that’s the blunt description). There are a ridiculous number of loopholes, and apparantly a large number of rather unscrupulous publishers who attempt to exploit them. It was all rather lawyerish stuff, and not the most exciting material, but an eye-opener into the difficulties of negotiating book contracts. I’ll give you the truncated version of the seminar:
- Reserve your multimedia rights.
- Don’t let the publisher forestall a payment until the book’s publication date.
- Negotiate for bonus advances if your book earns back its advance within a year.
- Don’t let the publisher combine accounts for multiple books (or else a successful book will be used to pay off the losses from a book that didn’t earn its advance).
- Insert the “1st Proceeds Clause,” which says you can shop your novel around if the contracted publisher decide to pass.
- Get royalties off the retail price, not net sales.
- Add an “Out of Print” clause so you can wrestle your book’s rights back once the publisher stops promoting it.
- Include the phrase: “An unearned advance shall not be deemed an overpayment.”
Many other helpful tidbits, but those were some of the best ones. The lesson: get a great agent. And maybe run the contract past an additional lawyer or two.
My video editor is currently hard at work on all the footage we nabbed, so I should be getting some video up on Saturday and Sunday and probably have enough pieces left over for posts during the week as well.
