'No way. I'm not signing that,' a New Yorker writer said when she saw the terms.
When
you see publishers and authors chatting chummily at book parties,
you’re likely to think that they’re on the same side — the side
of great literature and the free flow of ideas.
In
reality, their interests are at odds. Publishers are marketers. They
don’t like scandals that might threaten their bottom line — or
the bottom lines of the multinational media conglomerates of which
most form a small part. Authors are people, often flawed.
Sometimes
they behave badly. How, for instance, should publishers deal with the
#MeToo
era, when accusations of sexual impropriety can lead to books being
pulled from shelves and syllabuses, as happened last year with the
novelists Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie?(Business
Standard)
One
answer is the increasingly widespread “morality clause.” Over the
past few years, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Penguin
Random House have added such clauses to their standard book
contracts. I’ve heard that Hachette Book Group is debating putting
one in its trade book contracts, though the publisher wouldn’t
confirm it. These clauses release a company from the obligation to
publish a book if, in the words of Penguin Random House, “past or
future conduct of the author inconsistent with the author’s
reputation at the time this agreement is executed comes to light and
results in sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author
that materially diminishes the sales potential of the work.”
That’s
reasonable, I guess. Penguin, to its credit, doesn’t ask authors to
return their advances. But other publishers do, and some are even
more hard-nosed.
This
past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started
spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy.
If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the
writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt,
complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement.
In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need
only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could
mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of
strident tweeters.
Agents
hate morality clauses because terms like “public condemnation”
are vague and open to abuse, especially if a publisher is looking for
an excuse to back out of its contractual obligations. When I asked
writers about morality clauses, on the other hand, most of them had
no idea what I was talking about. You’d be surprised at how many
don’t read the small print... Read
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