Put this one in the read-the-entire-contract-next-time file: 

An ex-DEA agent writes a book and sends it to  University Press. All good so far, right?  Wrong.  He signs a publishing deal without an attorney and without knowing anything - anything - about book contracts.  And, here’s the ending you’re expecting:  he ended up giving away rights he didn’t mean to give away: 

”We talked about it, and I signed,” Doyle said. ”Shame on me, I never consulted an attorney, but he was a nice guy and, frankly, I was flattered just to have the thing published.”

The book came out about a year later. In the meantime, Doyle’s editor left the company and Northeastern University Press was taken over by University Press of New England.

The book didn’t exactly rocket up the best-seller list. Doyle said the publisher did nothing to promote the book, got him no speaking engagements and didn’t push it to bookstores or to Hollywood. But according to the contract he signed, the publisher gets half of any TV or movie projects that came from Doyle’s book.

As luck would have it, Doyle’s daughter ran into an old college classmate, Neal Flaherty, who works for Benderspink, a movie production company with a list of recent hits including ”Red Eye” and ”History of Violence,” and she gave him a copy of the book.

”I couldn’t put it down,” Flaherty said.

Flaherty’s company would like to option the book for a movie or TV series set in Boston. But the pay-out to University Press makes it a financial non-starter. Doyle is currently trying to negotiate an equitable arrangement with the publisher so the movie deal can happen.

Now, I don’t fully understand why giving up a cut of the money makes this a "financial non-starter" since some money is better than no money.  Rather than dissect it, we’ll just consider This a lesson to us all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2005 at 2:52 am and is filed under About Authors, About Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.