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Second time's the charm?
7 years ago
General
My previous attempt at sending something to a publisher seems to have fizzled. I got a letter of acceptance, but it came with a contract that had some frankly super-aggressive language about having complete and utter first publication rights, (among other things) and that the story couldn't have been published in any form on any platform ever, and if it had I'd owe them All The Money. It was... uh... not something I quite expected to encounter to be honest. Wanting first rights, yes, being that aggressive about it, no.
So I wrote back to openly explain that this story was heavily modified from a story I'd once posted on a niche site called "furaffinity", and to please either modify their contract to reflect this, or to let me know if that was unacceptable. No reply, and it's been almost a month now. I assume that means "no", so I'll be finding somebody else to take that particular story at some point. (Or hell, maybe I'll finally give this Amazon self publishing thing a try. This one's just a smut short, so it's no biggie, and I hear that kind of thing does well there.)
Meanwhile, I finished the story I put up the little rough draft excerpt of a couple of weeks back, and I'm super thrilled with it. I got a very excellent editor to take a look, and my local writer's group loved it. And hey, it's 100% new material, though this publisher will hopefully not have such an aggressive contract. (Seriously, it freaked me out a little, how much that damn thing talked about how I'd owe them for this, that, or the other. I don't think that's normal.)
Anyhow, I just now hit "send" to ship the new one off to the publisher whose publication call I wrote it for, (Blood Bound Books' "Burt Fur" furry horror collection. Sounds like fun, no?) so now I get to wait and see if they accept it. Which I expect will take quite a long time, given that the submission deadline is still over a month away, and then they have to read them all and choose which ones they want.
Wish me luck. :3
I've got several more things lined up for similar small press collections, and I know I'm a decent writer. (Better than some people I've seen in print!) so I'm sure I'm bound to get in somewhere with something eventually.
P.S. Yet more what the heck about that "you will have to pay us all the money if everything doesn't go the way we like" contract. What. The. Heck.
So I wrote back to openly explain that this story was heavily modified from a story I'd once posted on a niche site called "furaffinity", and to please either modify their contract to reflect this, or to let me know if that was unacceptable. No reply, and it's been almost a month now. I assume that means "no", so I'll be finding somebody else to take that particular story at some point. (Or hell, maybe I'll finally give this Amazon self publishing thing a try. This one's just a smut short, so it's no biggie, and I hear that kind of thing does well there.)
Meanwhile, I finished the story I put up the little rough draft excerpt of a couple of weeks back, and I'm super thrilled with it. I got a very excellent editor to take a look, and my local writer's group loved it. And hey, it's 100% new material, though this publisher will hopefully not have such an aggressive contract. (Seriously, it freaked me out a little, how much that damn thing talked about how I'd owe them for this, that, or the other. I don't think that's normal.)
Anyhow, I just now hit "send" to ship the new one off to the publisher whose publication call I wrote it for, (Blood Bound Books' "Burt Fur" furry horror collection. Sounds like fun, no?) so now I get to wait and see if they accept it. Which I expect will take quite a long time, given that the submission deadline is still over a month away, and then they have to read them all and choose which ones they want.
Wish me luck. :3
I've got several more things lined up for similar small press collections, and I know I'm a decent writer. (Better than some people I've seen in print!) so I'm sure I'm bound to get in somewhere with something eventually.
P.S. Yet more what the heck about that "you will have to pay us all the money if everything doesn't go the way we like" contract. What. The. Heck.
That's very disappointing. While of course I can understand them wanting to limit access to the story since they're going to count on people paying to see and read it, telling you that you forfeit EVERYTHING if you ever previously posted the story is too much.