Hold on to your reprint rights. OMG. I'm whispering/screaming this at you very loudly. There have been instances where I've been paid more for the reprint of a story than the original pro rate I got for it. Licensing contracts, reprint anthos and your own projects still exist. Do not give it away.
From a guidelines:
"Submissions that are accepted for publication by us cannot be submitted or published elsewhere at any point of time in the future."
RUN, DO NOT WALK, FAR AWAY FROM HERE
bonus in same guidelines:
"Any anti-establishment article will be rejected."
When you read a contract make sure it says that phrase all rights not listed here reside with the author. And don't give away exclusive rights. If someone told me they wanted a story of mine forever, that I came up with, not their IP, I would expect a ton of money. Start writing checks I"d say.
What if you want to put that story in a collection? What if you wanna do some weirdo art with it? What if someone says - omg this is the best story of the decade we need to put it in the best story of the decade antho!?!?! You're a dreamer, someone with imagination, dream big.
And listen sometimes you don't know where ppl will come from to ask you for the rights for things. It's not all: I'm going to submit to a reprint market. I know many writers who have been approached from Academic companies and other such places to reprint their work. So keep the rights!
Absolutely!
Most years I get the privilege to reach out to a couple dozen writers out of the blue and say "hi how would like to make an upfront advance plus royalties for something you already wrote?" And would be a bummer to not have the choice to say yes to that!
In addition, what if the original publisher collapses, or no one reads it, or that publisher turns out to be shitbags you don't wanna promote. I as a writer would want to know I can reprint it elsewhere in all these cases!
Yeah, I made more selling two of my stories to Escape Pod as reprints than I earned from the original sales AND used those Escape Pod sales to get into SFWA as a pro!
Yes! Big push from academic libraries to encourage authors to retain their reprint prints. Too much power in the hands of the big publishers otherwise.
Fantastic bit of advice that I often overlook myself in the IP space, I think sometimes people are too excited to get something published, they don't consider the ways they may be impacted by the terms they are agreeing to.
Holy crap, flee like the hemorrhoids of hell pursue you.
Counting sales you haven't made is foolish, but:
I reasonably expect the first sale of a tale to be a fraction of what I'll eventually make off that story. We create and license intellectual property, and need to treat it as such.
Can confirm. Sold a reprint this yr for more than double the cost of the entire anthology it originally appeared in. I bet more people read it there than its original appearance too.
