If you do meet your contract’s reversion stipulations, indicate how you do (“Between Augand July 31, 2014, Title X sold 98 copies”) and state that per the provisions of your contract, you’re requesting that your rights be reverted to you. I don’t think there’s any need to create separate requests if you’re requesting reversion on more than one book but there are those who disagree.ģ. Begin your reversion request by stating your name, the title(s) of your book(s), your pub date(s), and your contract signing date(s). This is a big red flag: a life-of copyright contract should always be balanced with precise reversion language.Ģ. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen life-of-copyright contracts with no reversion language. This is often the case with limited-term contracts, so if your contract is one of those, you may just have to wait things out. It’s also possible that your contract may not include any reversion language at all. Worse, your contract may not include any objective standards for termination and reversion, leaving the decision entirely to the publisher’s discretion or it may include antiquated standards (“The book shall not be considered out of print as long as it is available for sale through the regular channels of the book trade”–meaningful in the days when books were physical objects only and print runs could be exhausted, but useless for today’s digital reality). Your contract may impose a blackout period (you can’t request reversion until X amount of time after your pub date), a waiting period after the reversion request (the publisher has X number of months to comply, during which time your book remains on sale), or provide the publisher with an escape mechanism (it doesn’t have to revert if it publishes or licenses a new edition within 6 months of your request). Unfortunately, reversion language is often far from ideal. The ideal reversion language is precise (“Fewer than 100 copies sold in the previous 12 consecutive months”) and makes reversion automatic on request, once stipulations are fulfilled.
For example, a book may become eligible for rights reversion once sales numbers or sales income fall below a stated minimum. See if there are stipulations for when and how you can request your rights back. Sometimes this is a separate clause sometimes it’s included in other clauses.
Look through your contract to find the rights reversion or termination language. If you don’t have an agent, or if your agent is not very competent or not very responsive:ġ. Especially if you’re with a larger publisher, your agent is more likely to know exactly whom to contact, and in a better position to push for a response. (Note that I’m not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice.)įirst of all, if you have a competent agent, ask your agent to handle it. There’s no official format for a rights reversion request, and if you do a websearch on “rights reversion request” you can find various pieces of advice from authors and others.
#Best day to order mypublisher book how to#
Partly in connection with the controversy surrounding troubled publisher Ellora’s Cave, I’ve been getting questions about how to go about requesting rights reversion from one’s publisher.
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