David,
You have brought up a good point. There are various type of publishing contracts out there and it is important that you know what you are signing. You mention the dreaded work for hire contract where the author loses the rights to his work for a flat fee payment. This is typical but not a set standard for a situation as you described below (where someone might pick up a chapter or two to write). The more common contract offered is called a royalty contract where an advance on royalties is paid and royalties are earned on units of the book sold. The author does not lose the rights to the material; instead they eventually (after the book is placed out of print) can earn back the publishing rights. 
Publishers are all different and have different contracts and ways of doing things. If you are thinking about writing a book, research publishers and make them sell themselves to you.

If anyone has more questions about this, please feel free to ask. But of course, since this is a Linux list, if you don't care, then nevermind.
Stephanie

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-admin@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-admin@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us]
Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2000 10:41 AM
To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
Subject: re: Looking for [publishing-related-folks]




\_ I am an acquisitions editor for a well known computer book
\_ publisher and I am looking for Linux gurus (in addition to other
\_ areas) to review proposals from prospective authors, perform
\_ technical edits on written manuscript, and of course new authors to
\_ write books. For each of these jobs there is of course payment, it
\_ just depends the role.

This is my $0.02 and doesn't necessarily reflect on the company who
sent this message, but is meant as a general warning in the field of
writing.

I was at one point contemplating assisting a publisher by writing a
chapter or more of a linux book.  We had a disagreement over terms,
particularly the "work for hire" clause.

IANAL, but IF you sign a 'work for hire', then you get *only* the
money in the contract, and if that doesn't say anything about
royalties or derivative works or anything subsequent then you have NO
rights on what they do with it *and* *you* can't do anything with it
either.  So, given that, a possible scenario was:

* write like a dog
* revise like a dog
* get chump change (another part of the contract I didn't care for --
    "you'll be famous" -- this from a company I had *barely* heard of :-)
* book publishes
* book does 'well'
* second edition, minor edits, if any
* different book, same chapter, minor edits if any
* second edition of book #2
* third book, same chapter...

dya notice that there was no recurring chump change despite being used
several times?  

I went and read the 'typical' ORA contract that is floating around on
their site someplace, and *I* would have signed on that one, if I
didn't like the first two steps (I happen to know how hard writing
is).  

Anyway, YMMV, and I have nothing against publishing companies and
work-for-hire so long as *both* parties understand the ramifications
before signing.  Read those contracts, lawyers wrote them.  :-)

David

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