Hi, everybody,
I have signed perhaps a dozen Publishers Agreements over my life time and each one was more onerous, self-serving, and stupid than the one before. My favorite was the publisher who asked me to "hold the Publisher harmless for anything that might occur as a consequence of the publishing of the work." I asked a lawyer if this meant I was liable if a printer got his hand caught in the press while my book was running and he answered, "Well, probably not." And then he thought for a moment and said, "Oh, they'ld never come after you for that!" Early contracts limited my liability to the income from royalties, and one publisher actually provided authors' insurance for a modest premium. But no more. Well today, I got an author's contract for a paper I am contributed to an academic collection that asked me to warrant that the work had been commissioned by the publisher and was "work for hire". Now, work for hire means that one's surrenders ALL rights to the work including the right to claim it as one's own work. It's the kind of contract you sign when you write jacket copy for a publisher. ( The publisher in this case was Oxford University Press, in case any of you are thinking of doing business with them.) I am a wishy washy fellow, but somehow I could not sign a document that said that my original work was "work for hire." Couldn't do it. It's too late for this work. I will have to sign the rights over to my [young] collaborator, because she desperately needs the paper for her career. But MAN! It got me to thinking. WHAT ABOUT self publishing. With, say, Amazon" Does anybody on the list have any experience with Amazon or other self publishing services that they would like to share? My Dad was a book publisher, and I grew up with conversations around the dinner table about "developing authors" and trying to find new authors, and how a few books might have to be published before a new author caught on. They published Churchill's Memoires and Mein Kampf (!) and the Peterson Field Guides, among many others. Now, it seems, publishers do very little, and academic publishers, in particular, do nothing but scavenge off the fetid bits coughed up the publish or perish system. Is is it time to dump them? I am sure this is a party I am late to. Where do I get invited. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org <http://www.cusf.org/>
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