Podcasting “Reasonable Agreement”

“On the Crapification of Literary Contracts.”

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “Reasonable Agreement: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts,” about the alarming standardization of non-negotiable (and terrible) contracting terms in freelance writing contracts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/reasonable-agreement-ea8600a89ed7

I started selling to magazines in the 1980s, a moment when Reagan’s antitrust deregulation drove waves of mergers in the market. The major magazines were changing owners frequently, and each new corporate overlord brought new contracts lawyers with weird and terrible ideas about the contracts they sent to writers. Lucky for writers, editors were on our side, and were able to help us get around these unfair terms.

For example, one of these mergers resulted in a whole family of magazines changing their contracts to grab rights that had historically belonged to writers (translation, audio adaptation) including some that were rarely exercised but represented an enormous upside for authors (film and TV rights). These new contracts also grabbed stupid rights that no one ever bought or sold for short stories, like theme-park and toy rights.