Recovered from 7/11/11:
Today, 03:15 AM
TwentyFour
practical experience, FTW
I saw this on Facebook, anyone with knowledge about contracts and such can read the photo's section on Facebook and tell more on the company and what they are asking. I thought it might be interesting to try, then the contract had things about confidentiality that threw me off. Sites include:
www.chainbooks.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chainbooks/208391289179248?sk=info
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chainb...179248?sk=wall
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chainb...9248?sk=photos
Today, 04:57 AM
Unimportant
but appreciated anyway...
It's work for hire. For $25, they buy all rights including moral rights and derivative rights. For most authors, it's not going to be a very good choice. If you cede moral rights you can't assert yourself as author and claim it as a paid publication. If you cede derivative rights you can't use the setting or characters in another story. However, their model -- that one author writes the first chapter, another author writes the second chapter, etc -- really does require that they buy all rights including copyright.
I can see that it might be a useful way for the heir of a deceased author to dispose of unfinished, unpublished pieces that no one else is ever going to do anything with.
Today, 05:37 AM
TwentyFour
practical experience, FTW
Oh, yes. They state they must have 500 chapters bought or accepted *not sure which* before something happens. That would mean they would have to pay 500 people/writers $25 each and there would be 500 books in the making. I just don't see that happening unless they have so many people sign contracts *which you must do before sending a chapter* and then they use those 500 people to write chapters in ongoing books.
Today, 07:28 AM
Unimportant
but appreciated anyway...
From what I can gather, they've got funding to pay for 500 first chapters, and may extend that.
The method seems to be:
- - Person A writes chapter 1, signs over all rights, and gets $25.
- - Persons B - Z write the subsequent chapters (one chapter per person) for free, for fun, for the love of writing.
- - Chainbooks publishes the book as it chooses. If sales exceed a certain level, Person A collects a royalty of 75 cents per copy.
My prediction is that they'll get 500 people willing to sell them chapter 1 for $25 (or, more likely, 100 people each willing to sell them 5 chapter 1's). They'll get enough people to volunteer to write subsequent chapters to partially write about 100 of those books, and to complete about 25 of the books. They'll publish the completed books as e-books/POD and sell them to the authors (20 chapters = 20 authors = 20 copies sold) and that'll pretty much be it. And they'll not recoup their initial investment of $12,500.
I could be wrong. It's happened before.
Today, 09:52 AM
BenPanced
Cover-Stud Wrangler
Round robin novel as MLM.
Nice.
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