On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 01:29:44PM -0600, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > Steve Simmons <scs at di.org> writes: > > > Various folks mentions authors being tied to pre-existing contracts that > > would prevent the author taking direct control and doing e-publishing: > > Those contracts generally cover only the next novel, or the next novel > in a series, so if that were the only problem, an author could get out > from under it. Hmm? OK, I don't know about current (as in, this year) practice, but the last I was paying any attention, it seemed that three or four book contracts were very common. > > I had the pleasure of interviewing George R. R. Martin this past winter, > > and he made a comment that was pretty telling. For most of his career, > > he wrote novels before selling them. This worked pretty well, letting him > > pick and choose what he wanted to write and giving him a lot of > > flexibility in dealing with publishers. > > That's a very unusual choice, though. It's expensive for the author. Lois Bujold commented - sometime during the shopping for a publisher for Curse of Chalion, IIRC - that she preferred doing it that way too, if she could afford it and could convince the publishers. Neither of which were always possible. One of her problems with multi-book contracts is that the last book gets paid for at rates 3-4 years old, which tend to be lower than current rates. -- Scott Raun sraun at fireopal.org