Drafting a contract

We spent a chunk of this morning drafting a contract to use to buy stories. We're asking the Contracts Committee of SFWA if they'd be so kind as to weigh in on whether there's anything objectionable from the writer's perspective. We're writers ourselves, so we want to produce a contract that's fair to the writers, but we need to get the rights we're going to use, so that means a contract that does that.

It's kind of a balancing act.

There's all sorts of things we might want to do in the future, but that we don't have a plan to do. For example, it would be awsome to turn each issue into an audiobook to share as a podcast. There's enough chance that we'll want to do that, that it's tempting to go ahead and buy those rights as well. But since we don't have a plan to do that, it's not really reasonable either to pay for rights we're not sure we can use, or to tie up rights that the writer might be able to sell elsewhere.

If we get it together to make such a plan, we can make a new contract, and pay more to buy those rights as well, or even come back to the writers we've already published and solicit audiobook rights, if they haven't already sold them.

In the meantime, we're having a lot of fun.