Contract Collection

Passive Guy is collecting contracts between authors and their publishers and/or agents.

He knows butterflies are prettier and classic Ferraris are more fun to drive, but PG has his heart set on a contract collection.

What will he do with his contract collection?

The Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian won’t be interested. The museum of Passive Guy’s law school won’t be interested even if he donates a whole lot of money.

PG will review his collection from time to time and pull out interesting paragraphs and classic gotchas that authors should know about. He’ll blog about money paragraphs, rights paragraphs and get-out-of-jail-free paragraphs if he can find them, explaining what’s right or wrong with them.

PG has a soft spot for gotchas, particularly hidden gotchas. As he discovers gotchas, he’ll blog about those and talk about how to identify the pitfalls and bear traps in contracts you might see someday.

What does Passive Guy NOT want in his contract collection?

• The names of authors
• The names of books
• The names of publishers
• The names of agents
• The amounts of advances
• Any addresses or other information that will allow anyone to identify an author, publisher or agent

PG’s contract collection will not be the basis of a vendetta toward any individual or organization. He prefers collective guilt and doesn’t want to know who screwed whom, just how it was done. (That sounds seriously pervy, but we’re talking whereases and wherefores here, not body parts.)

So, if you have a contribution for the Passive Guy Comprehensive Publisher’s and Agent’s Contract Collection, what should you do?

Click on Contact and send PG a message saying you have a contract. PG will respond to your message via email telling you to remove all identifying information, then email your contract to him. You may want to meet in a dark alley on a foggy night, but PG prefers email.

PG is very forgetful plus he’ll delete your email (he knows how to do it for real) after extracting the contract, so even waterboarding won’t elicit any information about who sent what contract. (For the seriously paranoid, open a free email account on Hushmail and use it once to send your contract. A former legal client of PG said all his drug buddies used Hushmail. This former client is not presently under indictment or in prison.)

So, got a contract? Send it in!

The Obligatory Disclaimer: Passive Guy is an attorney and you’ll have to sign a retainer agreement for him to analyze your contract and give you advice about what it might mean and what you might do. Any blog posts PG makes about your contract will not be legal advice. Passive Guy doesn’t promise to ever blog about your contract. Despite being a very nice person, you may have a very dull contract.