Work-for-Hire and Hybrid Contracts
If a contract does not deal exclusively with first North American serial rights, it will probably be either a work-for-hire contract or some combination of first North American serial rights and work-for-hire. Work-for-hire contracts, sometimes known as all-rights contracts, are far less friendly to writers than first North American serial rights deals. Unfortunately, they are also becoming far more common.
Work-for-Hire Contracts
Work-for-hire contracts stipulate that the story you are writing is a work the magazine is hiring you to create, as opposed to a work that you are creating and “lending” to the magazine. The difference is important because it involves the ultimate ownership of copyright. When you sign a work-for-hire contract, you are essentially agreeing that the magazine — not you — will own the story's copyright from the minute you send in your manuscript.
Practically speaking, this means extra potential income for the magazine and less potential income for you. Here's why. If you own the rights to your article, then you can sell it several times — or at least use your reporting to craft several similar stories for multiple publications. If the magazine owns the rights to your article, then you can never sell it again. You write the piece and then have to move on to reporting and writing a new piece if you want to receive any additional income. That's more work by you for the same amount or even less pay over time.
The magazine, on the other hand, can use the story as many times as it wishes. It can repackage it as custom-published brochures and sell it to advertisers after already having printed it for subscribers. Some magazines repackage stories into anthologies and make more money from them in bookstores. The Internet is an ever-growing source of revenue, too, which a magazine can easily capitalize on if it owns all the rights to your story — and never has to share the wealth that the story generates over the long term.
Why would any writer sign a work-for-hire agreement that gives away total copyright to a story?
To earn a paycheck. More and more magazines are insisting that writers sign these agreements. If a writer won't sign — even a longtime, well-known writer — the magazine looks to work with someone else who will. Work for hire is becoming a cold, hard fact of the magazine-writing business.
For these many reasons, professional magazine writers often refuse to sign work-for-hire contracts. Refusal does come with consequences; in some cases, writers end up never again working for some magazines. However, some writers say their refusal to sign is akin to taking a moral and ethical stand. They believe magazines are hindering their ability to earn a living, and they believe magazines — or, more accurately, the corporations that own them — are acting not out of fair business practice but out of pure greed.
Hybrid Contracts
Sometimes, you will receive a contract from a magazine that intermingles the language of first North American serial rights and work-for-hire deals. An editor may explain to you that even though the work-for-hire language is in there, the magazine really is buying only first-publishing rights, but that those rights come with a few added usage options for the magazine.
Don't be fooled. If a contract is not strictly for first North American serial rights, then you are giving away something else that likely is of financial value. You may not understand your pocketbook loss at the time you make the deal, but you likely will see the lost opportunities over time, as the magazine finds new ways to re-use your story to generate earnings.
