your father is said:
Takyris: You could always submit more than one proposal
As for the "all rights," I'm not quite sure what that entails. Hopefully there'll be some clarification in the next few weeks.
The quick version:
You sell a novel to Daw or Tor: They get first publication rights and probably reprints if they're warranted. You get an advance, and they will pay you royalties once a certain number of books have sold. One example would be "You get $5,000, and then $.15 for every book that sells after the first 5,000 copies." That might not be even close in terms of the numbers, but that's sort of how the equation would look.
You'd also hold onto the rights to write more stories in that world, even if you didn't publish them through that company. You'd hold movie or television series rights, the right to get paid if somebody turns your novel into a video game, the right to sell the foreign rights to your novel (which means you'd get paid again when you sold it in France, and again in Germany, and again in Poland, and so forth), and a host of other rights.
You sell your novel for all rights: You get a check. Then that novel, and the world that you created for that novel, belong to Wizards. If they want to make a game, you get no more money, and have no input on how the game is made or who makes it. If they get two million bucks for selling the rights to make a movie in your world, you get no more money, and have no say in who directs or who writes the script. If they decide to do a sequel, they might ask you, but they might have somebody else do it, too, and you have no say in that, either. The world now belongs to Wizards.
You can never write in that world again if you want to sell it for money, unless you're working through them. It's certainly possible that Wizards will treat you well and invite you to help write the game or further novels in that world -- but they don't have to. They could say, "Yeah, good worldbuilding, but we're gonna give it to Bob Salvatore now, and we're gonna sell the game-making rights to Mongoose, since those guys offered us a boatload of money for the options."
That's the difference.
If the number in the check-amount box is a big enough number, it could totally be worth it. But if it's your baby, and you want to write an eleven-book series, you'd wanna negotiate long and hard to get, if not some of those rights back, at least some kind of guarantee that you're gonna get to do what you want to do.
