Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 8359673" data-attributes="member: 11760">So, in the 1990s, I spent a fair amount of time, as a sideline, submitting short fiction to the then-thriving short fiction market in magazines. (It's mostly dried up as part of the changes to the larger media ecosystem.)Every magazine picked one of several types of rights they would acquire, if they chose to use your work. The best, from the standpoint of the writer, were non-exclusive one-time publication rights. If they used your work, it could come out any time, but they'd only use it once. But that was exceptionally rare, because The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for instance, didn't want to open up a copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine and see the same story they were running next month appear in this month's issue.So most publishers would ask for exclusive rights. Sometimes they were one-time rights, sometimes they were for a given period of years, some times they were for multiple years with reprints or ancillary publications.The answer, for me at least, was not to submit my works to folks whose rights agreements I wasn't comfortable with. At the time, there were enough outlets that writers had those sorts of choices and the outlets that had the worst rights presumably felt pressure to change things, because they wouldn't even see a lot of the good stuff that was published elsewhere.The answer for artists isn't to eliminate outlets in which their works might be seen. It's to create more outlets. That's where everyone's energy should be going. Make the folks you see as predatory irrelevant and create market pressure for them to do better.</blockquote>

Verification