Publishers Go Belly Up
There’s been lots of hubbub lately about the economy. If you get the daily emails from Publishers Lunch you’ll have noticed that it isn’t that unusual to read a report of another bookstore going down. Occasionally, like the other day, you have a publisher declare bankruptcy.
If you are like me, you shrug your shoulders and move on. It happens.
However, as Kristen Nelson, literary agent and owner of Nelson Literary Agency, comments in her blog (Pub Rants), publisher bankruptcy can spell uh-oh for a writer. After reading her blog post and then the links provided in her comments section (Writer’s Block and In the (Red)), I became a bit concerned. You see, although writers often have a clause in their publishing contracts stating that their rights will revert back to them if something happens to the publisher, it isn’t always that simple. A judge who is overseeing the bankruptcy proceedings can declare that paragraph void and claim the income on a particular work as part of the pile of assets needed to pay off the guaranteed creditors. Yikes. Authors, as far as I know, are not considered to be guaranteed creditors. Meaning, they get the shaft.
It doesn’t seem right to me, but it is definitely worth thinking about if you are about to sign a contract with a publisher–even if the economy isn’t in the you-know-what.
