Storytellersunplugged

by Brian Hodge

A couple of months ago — May 17^th, to pinpoint it — Bev Vincent furnished a great exploration of the many pros and complete lack of cons involved with being represented by an agent. All true. Go read it again, if you need a refresher.

Having an agent is, among other things, like having a two-legged Excedrin tablet to handle all those business-related headaches that aren’t the least bit interesting to most of us who would rather be devoting our time and energy to creative pursuits. Or maybe just playing Doom 3.

Not that I’d know anything about that.

It’s so gratifying, in fact, especially after you’ve first landed one, that a writer can be tempted to let the agent completely insulate him or her from the hard-nosed world of contractual clauses and legalese. That’s what the agent’s job is, isn’t it … to hash out the nuts-and-bolts stuff so we don’t have to think about it, and can simply sign on the appropriate line?

Well, yeah. But…

Agents are human too. And having one in your corner doesn’t excuse you from the need to always, always, always exercise vigilance on your own behalf.

Case in point:

In late 2004 and early 2005, I did something atypical from my usual endeavors. On invitation from comics luminary Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, Mike’s frequent conduit between the comics and prose worlds, I wrote a novel set in the world of his hugely popular and blindingly red creation, Hellboy.

It came about through a typical licensing scenario. The condensed version: Mike, as the owner of the source material, licenses to Simon & Schuster the rights to publish four original Hellboy novels. Mike and Chris select the writers. The writers develop and write the novels. And everybody gets paid from Simon & Schuster.

In a situation like this — work-for-hire, it’s called — there isn’t nearly as much room for the writer’s agent to chip away at the publisher’s boilerplate contract and gain concessions in the writer’s favor. That’s because the writer doesn’t own the source material. The agent may still negotiate a higher advance, as mine did, but where royalties are concerned, the publisher isn’t likely to budge from the boilerplate terms: If the book earns out its advance, the writer will be due a small percentage of North American sales, and that’s it.

Here’s where the Hellboy deal starts to deviate from the norm: Because Mike is an eminently fair guy, and wanted the writers to potentially earn more for their work, he intended from the very beginning to take a smaller cut so the writers would earn royalties on sales and translated editions throughout the rest of the world, as well.

Hey, I like this Mignola guy!

And at last we get to the topic at hand.

After a long wait for Simon & Schuster’s famously sluggish business department to grind the contracts out on their gerbil-powered millstone, my agent forwarded my three or four copies to be signed and returned.

Five 8.5×14-inch pages of legalese. That’s quite short by most standards, but still … reading so dull it would put a speedfreak to sleep. But I read it anyway. Carefully. I always do. It’s not that I have trust issues, it’s just that I’m picky about the kinds of surprises I like.

Again, five 8.5×14-inch pages of legalese. And in all that verbiage, not a word about foreign royalties. At this point we cut to one of those aerial views of Springfield, with Homer Simpson bellowing a reverberant, “D’oh!!!”

The astonishing thing here isn’t that a multi-author batch of contracts went out wrong. Which I’m sure was an honest oversight, because it was something different from business-as-usual, and another round of paperwork only wastes everybody’s time.

No, the astonishing thing is how many people didn’t notice the error. And everybody got to see these contracts before I did. Even though my novel was scheduled as first of the four, for reasons unknown my contract took the longest to get out. So I was literally the last in line to see these suckers. Meaning they passed through a lot of hands and before a lot of eyes that found nothing wrong with them.

Obviously, whoever at S&S was responsible for the contract missed that clause. On down the flow chart, Mike’s lawyer, the representative handling the overall licensing deal, didn’t notice it. My agent didn’t notice it. My fellow writers didn’t notice it, and neither did their agents.

I don’t want to be putting out the wrong tone here. I certainly don’t mean to convey the daft idea that I was smarter than anybody else.

Just more paranoid, maybe.

Paranoia can destroy ya, the saying goes … but as a survival mechanism it’s not a bad trait to gently indulge.

After starting out as green as a Granny Smith apple, I eventually concluded that, when my livelihood is on the line, and when my signature is legally binding, it would never be good enough to take somebody else’s word for something. I would have to ascertain to my satisfaction that the formalized deal reflects what was informally discussed and agreed to, and what I’ve been led to expect. After all, honest people make mistakes, and on occasion someone may even deliberately try to put one over on you.

And the sooner writers take that to heart, and shoulder that responsibility, the more effectively they’re likely to protect themselves, their work, and their earnings.

Bottom line: Who else is going to care about those things more than you do?

A few resources on contracts you might find helpful:

The Authors Guild (http://authorsguild.org/?p=101)

WriteContent Publishing Tools (http://www.writecontent.com/Publishing_Tools/publishing_tools.html)

Writing World (http://www.writing-world.com/rights/rights.shtml)

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