Contract Negotiations

[Tburger]

I was just curious and couldn't find this addressed on the boards: once an agent gets the deal points, how long does it take (give or take) to complete contract negotiations? I would guess that some factors that would influence this would be the publisher, so let's assume one of the big six, etc.

[shaldna]

It depends. Assuming that it hasn't generated any interet from another publisher, and you happy withthis one etc. Then it can take anything from a day to a couple of weeks.

However, for a first time author thre is very little negotiating room, mostly it will be trying to bump up the advance a bit. But contracts are pretty standard, especialluy with the bigger publisahers.

[Old Hack]

Shaldna, you're wrong when you say that there's not much negotiating room for first-time authors: a good agent can do all sorts of things for every single one of their clients, first-time authors included.

All subsidiary and foreign rights can be negotiated in or out of the contract; royalty rates, escalator clauses, advances and marketing budgets can be specified; deadlines can be changed. There is SO much more to contract negotiations than just the advance.

And yes, boilerplate contracts are pretty standard across the big publishers: but a good agent would not allow a client to sign one of those boilerplate contracts without working to change it in all sorts of ways.

To swing back on-topic, it can take anything from a few days to a few weeks to negotiate the best possible contract: I've known some cases which took months, but they're rare. It's worth an agent spending the time on, though, as it can really change the writer's experience of being published.

[Danthia]

Ditto Old Hack. First time author here, tons of negotiating went on with multiple editors. From my experience, deal points seemed to take a few weeks of back and forth (one editor took longer, the other quicker, but that was probably because we already had interest) and then contract itself was like four or five months. I'm told this was pretty normal for a contract. My foreign rights deals seemed to take even longer, but that might just be because I wasn't in the loop as much on those.

[Tburger]

Thanks everyone.

[priceless1]

Also ditto to Hackie. We just signed a new author last week, and the agent got me to fork over more money while we played with various rights. The whole thing took about a week. I'm small, so it's easier to run negotiations through the rinse and spin cycle in a timely fashion.

[J.Reid]

It can take a LONG time right now. A lot of publishers are changing their ebook language, and that doesn't happen without a lot of back and forth.