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Some time ago, when the editor of TGStories.com asked for submissions in fairly vague terms, I asked for submission guidelines and got no reply. Recently, I submitted a new story blindly, not knowing anything about the format or subgenres they prefer, and inquired about what publication rights they buy.
The editor replied that they buy all rights forever. On a further clarifying query, they said that they do not buy the copyright outright, but they do buy all publishing rights in perpetuity -- which seems to me a distinction almost without a difference. I asked another question to verify my understanding that there is no reversion clause, or whether it might be possible to negotiate a contract which would give them exclusive rights for a limited time and non-exclusive rights after that time; they did not reply.
They did not mention pay rates, but did say that they prefer submissions to be in the form of attached Word documents, rather than text files.
Has anyone else dealt with them before? Based on my conversation with the editor, I would not recommend that other authors sell stories to them under those terms. I have not actually seen their standard contract, and I may be misinterpreting what they said about it; but it seemed pretty clear that one would be giving up the right to ever sell the story as an ebook or part of an ebook short story collection, or to sell reprint rights to other zines or anthologies.
A recent episode of Writing Excuses talks about publishing contracts. The hosts said they'd talk about short story contracts specifically in a future episode, but they do mention here the importance of the author retaining reprint rights to short fiction, and of clear reversion clauses in contracts for longer work.
Comments
Publishing contracts...
...with mainstream publishers typically last as long as the book is "in print," but of course with eBooks it costs exactly zero pennies per year to maintain this status, so one *never* gets the rights back.
Considering the format they're demanding, one might suspect that they'll simply feed the file into a canned "conversion" tool, which usually generates an ugly book, and make little other effort.
I personally would use Calibre (or other tool) and generate your own damned book, go through the conversion and transfer to your reading device cycle several times to eliminate typographical and formatting errors (you *will* find them, if you bother to read the book) then take a great deal of care assigning Tags that your potential readers will use to find your book, even if they're not actually looking for it, because Amazon (number one in sales) will make suggestions based on *other* books that readers buy which have the same tags. This means that you have to look for similar books and pay attention to the metadata that's associated with many titles something *like* your book.
After all that, price it cheaply, which you can afford to do because you're not paying anyone *other* than the actual bookseller to do anything for you. A typical publishing contract pays out eight percent or so, more if your last book was mentioned favourably in a New York Times book review and sold a million copies, so if the book sells for (let's say) US$16, you might get a buck fifty or less, depending upon cost of sales. If you sell it yourself, you can afford to cut the price to the bone, because the profits are more-or-less all yours (after Amazon's cut). One sells a *lot* more books at a buck or two than one does at sixteen bucks. In fact, one of the best-selling (and richest) authors on Amazon sells books for a buck or two apiece and makes tons of money doing it, although the books themselves are "pot boilers" of so-so quality. He produces one or two or three a week, and lots of people like them, but the most important part of his strategy is that a buck (these days) is the sort of thing one gives beggars on the street.
Hardly anyone thinks twice about purchases like that, and in fact "Dollar Stores" make their living out of selling cheap schlock at just that price point.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Reversion of rights, ebooks, etc.
The Writing Excuses episode I linked to talks about the importance of negotiating reversion clauses so they still work for the author if the ebook edition remains nominally "in print" but the publisher is no longer promoting it effectively and it's not making much money for the author. Kristine Kathryn Rusch (she's a writer and a former editor) has talked about this issue several times on her blog.
I have in fact tried selling ebooks directly via the Kindle Store and Smashwords, and the experiment so far is not spectacularly successful, but I'll probably do it again for my next novel-length work. Anecdotally, such ebook sales tend to increase gradually over time rather than making most of their sales in the first few weeks after publication like a print book.
I posted my secondary-world transformation fantasies "Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes" and its sequel "When Wasps Make Honey" to the Kindle Store and Smashwords in late May, and I think they've sold fourteen copies across both platforms in the two months or so since then, which should eventually yield a bit less than thirty dollars. Not counting the actual first-draft writing and second-draft revision (which were enjoyable enough I would have done it in any case), that's a low hourly wage for the third, fourth, and fifth-draft proofreading, the ebook formatting and error checking, and other non-fun parts of the process. But it's possible other titles will do better, and it's possible those titles will continue to sell over a long time, so it might be worth it in the long term.
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They "...do not buy the copyright outright,..."
What they are buying is the right to publish the story whenever and for as long as they want, but since they don't buy the copyright, that doesn't preclude you from publishing it yourself or through another publisher who doesn't mind being non-exclusive.
Early in my writing career I sold "Why" to Reluctant Press. They bought the copyright and still own it. I think "Why" is my best work, and I can't republish it anywhere, even though I dislike the format it's in for eReaders. I really wish I'd have sold it to someone who only wanted publishing rights.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Knowing nothing about that particular site or publisher...
That sounds something like a "First right of serial publication" contract, which is fairly standard. Usually the publisher buys an exclusive right to publish for a very limited period of time, after which the author is free to publish the story elsewhere, although some "Serial" contracts also include the right to anthologise or republish the article.
It's a fairly standard way to handle short articles or stories meant for the magazine marketplace, because their business model depends upon fresh content every month. The typical serial publisher has little interest in perpetual rights, since fresh content is what their readers are interested in.
There are exceptions in some industries, such as publishers of scientific papers, because reprint rights can be very lucrative.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
That sounds better
But I can't quite tell from your post if you're speaking from experience of having sold stories to TGStories.com, and seen their actual contract? If so, then I might talk to them again about selling them first periodical rights to the story I recently submitted to them (and haven't yet posted elsewhere). But I'm still a little hesitant to do so, if they are so inarticulate at explaining the rights they buy and so bad at responding to emails -- they ignored two emails asking for submission guidelines, then responded promptly (but confusingly) to my first coulple of emails with the query about the rights they buy, and then have (so far, for about a week and a half) ignored my other email with its clarifying question about reversion of reprint rights.
It sure sounded, from their second email, as though they wanted to buy exclusive rights forever, forbidding all reprints. I'm hesitant to quote their exact words without their permission. I would not mind selling them exclusive rights for a limited time, followed by non-exclusive rights indefinitely; I said so in my third email but they have not replied to it.
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http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/trismegistusshandy
http://shifti.org/wiki/User:Trismegistus_Shandy