Negotiating the foreign sales clause in textbook contracts

If authors are not careful when negotiating language related to foreign sales in their book contracts, they can end up earning next to nothing on international sales of their books.

Stephen Gillen, an attorney with Wood Herron & Evans, said that although he cannot provide exact language authors can use to negotiate the foreign sales clause in their contracts without knowledge of the unique facts and circumstances of each case, he suggests authors use the following to start the discussion with their publisher:

Authors share advice for writing your first textbook

Writing that first textbook can be a really time-consuming and exhausting experience, but knowing the ropes beforehand can make it less daunting.

Easy money. A screenplay. Fame and glory. If you’re thinking about writing a textbook, put these out of your mind. But if you’ve got a lot of knowledge to share in return for the satisfaction of just doing it, there’s some advice out there for writing your first textbook.

Five myths to overcome when writing your first book

Many people live exciting lives, have great vision or imagination and are compelled to seek the long road of writing a book. Writing your first book is an especially daunting task. Where to start? How do you proceed? What if writer’s block hits? And will I ever find a publisher? These are just a few of the myriad of questions that keep would-be authors away from the keyboard and awake at night as they wrestle with conquering the page.

Let’s begin from the rejection pile as it were: Things Not To Do. If you can eliminate some lethal, bad habits, maybe you can free your fingers so they can dance joyfully over the keyboard once again. Are you game? Here are five myths you will need to overcome when writing your first book:

Don’t manage time, manage goals

While you can’t actually manage time – because it operates independently of you — you can manage your goals, said Susan Robison, a psychologist and faculty development consultant with Professor DeStressor, during her 2009 TAA Conference session, “Time Management: Why You Don’t Need It, Can’t Do It Anyway – And What To Do Instead.”

“One of the things that the research on time management workshops show, is that they don’t work,” she said. “What happens to people emotionally is they come out of the workshops feeling absolutely overwhelmed by a thousand techniques they’re not going to do, and so they’re not going to manage their time any better.”

How to choose a textbook publisher

When selecting a publisher for your manuscript, don’t leap before you look. Most authors are so happy to find a publisher interested in their proposal that they accept the first offer that comes along and sign the standard publisher’s contract. After all, if it’s standard, then contracts from all publishers must be alike. Not so. All contracts are negotiable. Not only do you need to do your homework before accepting any publisher’s offer, you need to do your homework before you ever submit a proposal to a publisher.

Before choosing a publisher:

When writing, focus on your strengths

There’s a world of knowledge out there and it all intertwines. The study of any one subject begins to touch on the boundaries of others, motivating study into the new subject. When reading and when writing, we learn new things, which could lead to feelings of treading on unfamiliar ground.

I’ve met some brilliant and hard-working people in my life in academia. I’ve met people who read articles by the bushel and books by the shelf, but I’ve never met one who had read everything worth reading. There’s too much knowledge out there for any one person to know everything there is to know and to read everything that has been written. And, of course, we recognize this; it is the motivation behind the specialization all around us. Nonetheless, it is not unusual to become paralyzed by the sense that we don’t know enough.