They are combining the worst aspects from both Movie (Hollywood accounting) and Music industry contracts (author pays for everything before he gets dollar one) add in vanity press (no advances) and adds more details (publisher gets ALL RIGHTS for duration of the copyright) and then twists the knife a bit more (right of first refusal on your next work, at the same terms).

To use a less anal-rapey metaphor, they eat your baby, and have the right to eat any more babies you have until they are no longer hungry.

Hydra is willing to negotiate

Tell H.Y.D.R.A. that the President does not negotiate with cultural terrorists.

I couldn’t resist. In all seriousness, what Adela said. If I have to negotiate myself part of the way out of the hole I have to start in, why should I let myself be put at the bottom of that hole in the first place?

It might as well be perpetual. If you publish a book when you’re 40, and life expectancy is roughly 70, that’s a projected 100 years of copyright protection even if the Mouse stopped meddling any further.

To clarify, the deal memo I saw came from Random House, and was provided to me, along with further information in a followup email from RH, by the author who received the offer. I haven’t seen the actual Hydra contract because the author hadn’t yet received one–only the preliminary offer. However, as one of the commenters pointed out upstream, such deal memos–while not writ in stone–do represent the terms that will appear in the contract.

As I note in my post, Hydra is willing to negotiate, and authors may be able to get better terms than this standard offer–including a precise reversion clause to offset the life-of-copyright contract. In my opinion this is definitely a second-class offer. But–also in my opinion–I’m not sure that SFWA should have jumped so quickly into the fray–especially if my blog post is the source of that decision. Frankly, I hope it’s not. I would hope that such a determination would be based on a full reading of Hydra’s contract–or at the very least, on a reading of the documentation on which I based my post (which so far has not been requested by anyone at SFWA).

Where have you been?  Because it’s a happier place than the endless-extension world I live in.

I’m a freelance illustrator, not a writer, but this sounds similar to the offer letters I get at the beginning of a project. A company will contact me and say, “We’d like you to work on X project, here are the terms we are offering.” Then, after a round or two of discussion, they will send a contract.

Before I posted this, I did a quick Google search for “deal memo” and it looks like this is indeed the case. Some writers even refer to deal memos as “short contracts”. It sounds like Writer Beware’s deal memo is a very good representation of Random House’s terms.

It would be nice if someone from Random House, or someone who has actually seen the contract, would clarify.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a contract lawyer stamping on a human face —forever. We control life, Winston, at all its levels.”