I don’t want to pretend that freelance writing contracts were ever great, but in the 34 years since I sold my first short story — at 17 — I’ve observed firsthand how manifestly unfair contractual terms have become standard, and worse, non-negotiable.
I started selling to magazines back in 1980s, which were the the dawn of corporate publishing consolidation. Magazines changed owners frequently as they were snapped up by new owners who, in turn, merged or bought out their competitors (thank Ronald Reagan for neutering antitrust and allowing these mergers to be waved through).
Back then, it was an open secret that each batch of new corporate overlords would attempt to crapify the contracting terms the magazine imposed on its writers, and the editors would push back in subtle, clever ways.
There was the time that a major family of magazines was bought out by a corporate raider whose lawyers demanded that the contracts be amended to grab all kinds of nonstandard rights that writers had either retained and resold themselves, or that represented a fanciful kind of speculative ignorance about where the licensing opportunities were in short fiction.
These new contracts grabbed rights that writers were often able to resell for enough to buy a couple bags of groceries (audio, translation); rights that writers rarely sold, but which represented huge paydays when they did (TV and film adaptation); and rights that no one was buying or selling (theme-park and action-figure adaptations).
