by
Kathryn Page Camp
It won’t surprise
anyone who knows me to hear that I’m a very organized person. Unfortunately,
I’m also a forgetful one. So when I started submitting articles to magazines, I
developed a submission chart to keep track of them. You can see a copy of the
chart at the head of this post. You have my permission to copy it for your own
use and to distribute it to your friends for their personal use.
As you can see,
the six columns show the submission date, the article title, the publication,
the address, the result, and any additional
notes. ATS1 and WC1 are codes I wrote inside the return envelope in case
the response didn’t identity the publisher. This was a suggestion from someone
who had received several form rejections and couldn’t figure out who had sent
them. I don’t always remember to use a code, but so far I haven’t received any
anonymous responses.
When I submit
books, I create a separate chart for each one. I modify the form by putting the
working title of the book at the top and leaving out the Article column. Everything
else remains the same. You can also do this for articles and short stories that
you submit multiple times, perhaps as reprints.
If you intend to
submit reprints—or even if you don’t—you should also keep track of the rights
you have sold so that you don’t try to sell rights you don’t currently have. I
didn’t realize this immediately, so once I had created a rights chart I needed
to locate and fill in the past information from other records. Fortunately, I
was able to find everything.
As you can see,
the columns show the manuscript title, the copyright owner, when sold and to
whom, which rights were sold and which were retained, and when the rights
reverted (if ever). If you sell first rights, for example, that publication has
the bought the right to publish the item first. If you resell it in the
meantime and the second publisher wins the race, you have violated your contract
and may find yourself blackballed. As with the submission chart, you may copy
the rights chart for personal use and distribute it to friends for their
personal use but may not sell it or distribute it commercially.
You shouldn’t sell
all rights to an article, short story, or poem without an adequate payoff, and
some people refuse to do it even then. I have never sold all rights on an
already completed work. The few times I have sold them, I received an
assignment to write something new and was well compensated for it. For books,
traditional publishers expect a temporary assignment of all rights by contract,
but don’t sign away the copyright and make sure you have a reversion clause
that gives you the rights back when the publisher stops printing physical
copies and/or e-sales drop below a set threshold.
If you want to
stay out of trouble with publishers, you must know when and where you submitted
and what rights you sold. Develop your own charts, use mine, create an
electronic report, or do whatever works for you.
But make sure you
keep track of your submissions.
_________
Kathryn Page Camp
is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month
Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s
First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. You can learn more about
Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.
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