Clark's Publishing Agreements, 8th edition - £120
plus VAT at 10%

Twenty-five years ago, an older and wiser independent publisher sagely observed, when I asked for advice about contracts, that when authors (or other publishers) referred back to contracts, the relationship had gone wrong. Hence their importance – and equally, their unimportance – in the publishing relationship. Of course, this is as true now as it was then, but almost everything else has changed.

It would be nice to look back on that time as a charming idyll in which gentleperson amateur publishers lunched authors – and even agents, or booksellers – and books somehow got written, published and successfully sold without much reference to strict terms of business or contractual minutiae. But while it is true that one publisher could then airily declare that his company “didn’t really bother about royalties – they always led to too much ill feeling” and another refuse to pay one of his authors more frequently than every two years, the words biannual and biennial having become confused in the contract, it is far from true that publishing was even then a relaxed and easy-going business. Contracts, shorter and much less complex, reflected the business practice of the day – a straightforward transaction with the author about physical objects in a terra cognita of what we now call bricks and mortar bookselling, libraries just beginning to feel what then seemed like the pinch, the territorial rights that stayed territorial. Standards contracts, with their few variants, represented fairness and a straightforward reflection of a relatively easily understood business.

In 2011 the biggest problem with contracts is that we have trouble understanding the publishing business as it now is. And if we think we understand it today, we can be pretty sure that it will look different in six months’ time. How are we to spot the opportunities and agree equitable terms with our authors (who increasingly don’t really know what publishers do) and fellow publishers, and enshrine these in contracts? Oddly, the underlying relationship of trust, as least so far as a small publisher goes, is as important as ever, indeed perhaps more so. Industry knowledge, however, is more important than it has ever been, but in an environment where radical disagreement about fairness, based on differing perspectives on opportunity and reward (of course I am talking about the e-market) is possible, inventing a new wheel often seems the only way to go, foolhardy through this may be...

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