From the OTHER SIDE OF THE DESK
CLAUSE FOR CONCERN
Discounted author copies? Surely that can’t be a bad thing? Piers Blofeld urges authors to look carefully at their publishers’ Ts & Cs
Piers Blofeld
One of the least-noticed and seemingly most unremarkable corners of a publishing contract is the author’s copies clause, in which the right of the author to buy their own books direct from the publisher at a set discount is set forth.
For most first time authors, especially debut novelists it seems like little more than a friendly little provision, just one of the tiny, exciting little details that will make their first book deal seem so deliciously real.
And indeed for most authors it is not a clause which will ever have much meaning in their lives and yet, in its own way it is a perfect exemplar of the way in which publishers reveal not only their essentially inequitable attitude to authors, but also the way in which that attitude is all too often ill thought through and bad business practice.