All the Prestige of Publishing Fiction Online Without the Burden of Excessive Intellectual Property Rights

By Ron Hogan on July 17, 2007 8:00 AM

So there’s a group of “established Wall Street and retail/consumer professionals” who’ve got plans to launch an online science-fiction magazine, and they’re looking for their editor on Craigslist. The content plans, skewing heavily towards fiction with a possible dash of “reviews and journalism covering both short-form, book-length, and film/television/game media,” are conventional to the point of boredom, but potential contributors will soon hear a faint alarm bell go off: “While we will be a professional market,” the backers reveal, “acquisition fees will not be high.” That’s not great; still, nobody expects to get rich selling short genre fiction, not even to the print outlets, so maybe you’re still on board. So here comes the best part: “Key to our business model will be acquiring partial rights to derivative works in the stories we publish and revive/reprint—e.g., participation in book-length expansion, film and television adaptations, etc.”

In other words, if these guys publish you, not only are you going to get lowballed on the check, if by some stroke of luck you manage to make something of that story anywhere down the line, they want a piece of the action. And if those derivative rights are so “key,” I’m guessing the piece they’ll be wanting is fairly substantial. I don’t really have comment beyond John Scalzi‘s excellent summary: Where these guys say they’re looking for an editor who can work with “less-established and new authors who will be amenable to our terms,” read “poor newbie schmucks who don’t know any better.”