Contract up? Do Not Fret

 

There will be a termination clause in your contract. Most of the times we give the rights back to you after three years from publication date but some contracts vary. However, we’re very reluctant to take books completely out of print unless the author wants it.

When we license your rights, it is for that particular book.  So, if it’s a collection of short stories, and you have one about a banana boat, and suddenly there is a call for stories about banana boats, yes its’s fine to send that story to the call. Chances are anyway you’ll re-edit it  so in fact it’s not the same story anyway. Of course bad practice would be to submit the book that we’d carefully edited and designed to Penguin Random before the termination time. We would me a little miffed.

So, when the three years is up (or whatever time is on the contract), what can we do?

Basically, we’ll keep it in print unless you tell us to take it down.  

You may have moved on so much, as a writer, that you no longer want the book in print. We can then pull it totally. Your choice!

A couple of comments on social media

 

Sadly, I’ve left Twitter.  My account is still there but I’m doing nothing with it. Twitter was always my favourite social media platform. However, I can no longer interact with it because of who owns it and which regime he belongs to. So, I’ve moved over to @gillj.bsky.social. Do come and find me there. I’ve left 4000 followers and I’m slowly building up on this platform – currently I have 241 followers and I’ve posted 197 times. Hopefully it will be different by the time you go and look. In many ways I’m enjoying the slow build up and now that I am older and wiser I’m taking a little more care about who I interact with and how I interact. I’m recognising some old friends and gaining some new ones.  

It isn’t a miracle cure. The same issues are still there that are on all social media platforms. Annoyingly many people‘s profile descriptions are rather vague. But there are a lot of Twitter refugees there and they behave very well on the whole. They are a critical mass.     

I wonder a little whether it will affect how visible all my enterprises are but here’s a thing: CaféLit has had over 129,000 hits in December – and that’s with me no longer linking to stories from the Facebook page.

Having said that, I think I’ve cracked how to make references to the e-zine acceptable. If I’m already on the Facebook page when I link from Blogger, Facebook doesn’t seem to mind so much.

So, we’re visible.