On Mon, 2009-07-27 at 23:16 +0000, TedKubaska wrote: > > Agents tell him that he can only sell those FNASR if the work has never been > published anywhere else. I think that Google doesnt want or care about owning > those rights. But then the real question is whether after using google docs > he can still sell FNASR.
There is clearly no issue if he uses Google Docs and does not make his document viewable by anybody and everybody. You can selectively share documents via Google Docs, so that only the people you identify can view and/or edit whatever you share. There's no risk that doing so would have any impact on first-serial rights. I think, also, that it is extremely unlikely that making a story publicly available on Google Docs would have any impact on first-serial rights, but if he's paranoid about it you can at least assure him that limiting his works' availability is perfectly safe. First-serial rights are fairly specific and, for most fiction writers, not really worth much in dollars. At this point, only the New Yorker pays what most people would consider real money for stories, and most writers have about as much of a chance of winning the lottery as getting a story published in the New Yorker. Most other magazines, literary journals, sci-fi magazines, etc., that publish any fiction at all pay a nominal fee, unless the author is already well-known. The value of a first-serial sale for unknown or little-known authors is mostly exposure, and resume-building so that the author looks more appealing to a book publisher. The days of competition among magazines for short stories are long gone, as are the days when authors like Ray Bradbury or Truman Capote could make some nice change from selling first-serial rights even before they became famous. There might be more of issue with electronic rights, but again I think that's extremely doubtful even with a story that is publicly available over Google Docs. A service like Scrib'd might present more of a problem, since that is more of a "publication" tool than a collaboration tool (like Google Docs.) -- Michael M. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
