Registration is now open for the 2023 TAA Conference on Textbook & Academic Authoring

Network with other textbook and academic authors and gain knowledge on writing and editing strategies, writing productivity, textbook contracts and royalties, and much more! You will leave inspired!

You’ll have the opportunity to participate in more than two dozen educational sessions, one-on-one mentoring sessions with veteran textbook and academic authors and industry professionals, and plenty of networking and information-sharing sessions.

TAA’s 35th Annual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference will be held online, June 9-10, 2023, on an interactive virtual conference platform.

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Five chances to reset the terms of your book contract (part 2)

In Part 1 of this article (published in the summer edition of the TAA newsletter), we wrote about the imbalance in negotiating leverage between an author and his/her publisher early in the author’s publishing career. And we noted that there would be opportunities later for an author to retake some of the ground lost in those early negotiations. In particular, we wrote about two of these opportunities:

1) Your publisher calls for work to begin on a new edition and sends an amendment to your contract to memorialize this . . . with a few additional “updates”.

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Five chances to reset the terms of your book contract (Part 1)

If you published the first edition of your textbook ten or more years ago, you may find yourself occasionally muttering to yourself, “I wish I kew then what I know now.”

Why is that?

Historically, the publishers start the book contract negotiation game with all the cards…backs to you. You have one card…it’s face up. And it tells everybody, “I’m new at this but I’m excited. Just tell me where to sign.”

Publishers have generally been the gatekeeper to a published book. While this may be less true now, with self-publishing and Open Educational Resources (OER), the publishers still have the most established distribution channels self-publishers cannot begin to match.

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4/5 TAA Webinar, “Your Textbook Isn’t Being Revised. Now What?”

As publishing companies look to manage costs and focus on large introductory courses, many high-quality and high-value textbooks are not being revised.

Join us Monday, April 5, from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET for the TAA Webinar, “Your Textbook Isn’t Being Revised. Now What?”, when Donna Battista, VP of Content Strategy at Top Hat, and previous Pearson Executive, will help authors navigate this increasingly common challenge. She’ll provide guidance on requesting rights back, what to do when rights are reverted, and what options there are to make content available.

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What you need to know about ‘cross-collateralization’

It has an intimidating name. Indeed, it takes more letters to spell it than to put it into effect. But what is it and why is it bad for authors?

Most every book publishing contract will include a provision that obligates the publisher to periodically account to the author for the publisher’s sales of the author’s work. The language will probably look something like this:

Payments to the Authors will be made semiannually, on or before the last day of March and September of each year for royalties due for the preceding half-year ending the last day of December and June, respectively. If the balance due an Author for any royalty period is less than $50, no payment will be due until the next royalty period at the end of which the cumulative balance has reached $50. Any offsets (including but not limited to any advances or grant) against royalties or sums owed by an Author to the Publisher under this or any other agreement between the Author and the Publisher may be deducted from any payments due the Author under this or any other agreement between the Author and the Publisher.

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Textbook rights reversion: How to get them back

Most publishing contracts are for the life of the copyright, so how could an author ever get their rights back? In her TAA webinar, “A Second Bite at the Apple: Getting Rights in Your Book Back”, Brenda Ulrich, a partner at Archstone Law Group, discussed the role of reversion clauses in a publishing contract, which allow rights in a book to revert to their authors under certain circumstances.

The issue of rights reversion can confound many authors, said Ulrich, especially as it relates to how broad the grant of rights is in any traditional publishing contract. “It’s a very broad, very wide, very long, license,” she said. “You are giving the publisher permission to publish the book, but you are not signing over the book to them forever.”

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