Written Terms Are Best
I am constantly preaching the value of written contracts. For some reason, they tend to scare people who are not in the mainstream business world, but the whole point of a written contract is to make sure that each party understands, as best as is possible, exactly what is being agreed to. There are other good reasons to write things down, but ensuring that everyone is agreeing to the same thing is one of the primary purposes of committing your agreements to writing.
So with that in mind, I found an excellent checklist for putting together book publishing contracts. Any agreement that involves copyrighted materials becomes just that much more complicated, because the bundle of rights that make up copyright can be split and repackaged so many ways. Book publishing and article rights can easily be overlooked and left out of written agreements if the parties are not careful, so a good checklist like this one is well worth the time to go through.

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