[Publisher] Earthbound Fiction

Nexus · Dec 21, 2011

Their contract seems very solid, professional. If I recall, they take rights for the e-book publishing for 18 months. After that, rights revert back to the author.

Taking royalties on a short story for a magazine or anthology seems illogical. That's not something I'd look for either. Izz put it well. I've never seen it myself.

I am also not hot stuff in the publishing circle. I don't demand much. A paying market is even a plus for me at this juncture. Getting a check when my work is published is enough. I never expected more, like royalties for e-anthologies and e-zines.

Brick and mortar book sales might be a different issue, but they would be handled differently I assume.

Unimportant · Dec 21, 2011

evieeveking said:
Earth Bound Fiction accepted 2 of my stories, but I will not publish with them:
They only pay 1 cent a word, and want not only 1st internet rights, they want Kindle and Nook with NO ROYALTIES!
They want editing rights.I'm ok with editing for mistakes only. Otherwise I want approval. They agreed to change my contract about that, so that is fine.
However, to not pay any royalty for Kindle and Nook is NOT!

Would they be publishing your story to Kindle/Nook as a standalone story? Or as part of a magazine issue? If the former -- yeah, I can see that maybe they should pay royalbies (with the 1 cent per word as an advance on those royalties). If the story is being included as part of an anthology or magazine issue, though, royalties would not be standard. They'd just pay a flat fee (1 cent per word or whatever) for the rights to put the story into the antho/mag issue, which they'd then sell in whatever formats (including epub) specified in the contract.

Izz · Dec 21, 2011

Nexus said:
Their contract seems very solid, professional. If I recall, they take rights for the e-book publishing for 18 months. After that, rights revert back to the author.

That clause is a little confusing. Most short fiction pubs ask for exclusivity for 6 months, or maybe a year, from the date the story is published before the author can sell the story as a reprint. The contract usually makes a differentiation between that and the amount of time the venue can hold the story without publishing before all rights revert to the author (for most places this is eighteen months). However, Earthbound Fiction's contract appears to lump both of those in together. That's not one of the area i asked for clarification on (though I did ask for changes earlier in the clause), but i hope they think about making it clearer in future.

On the two clauses i did ask for clarification/changes, they've got back to me saying they're happy to make those changes and will send an amended contract out shortly.

From their clarification of what they meant, it looks like the clauses were just poorly worded, rather than an attempt to sneak anything past the writer. I do hope they think about changing the default wording of those clauses for future contracts to make the meaning clearer, though.

Nexus · Dec 21, 2011

Congrats to you, Izz. I am excited to see where Earthbound Magazine goes.

My only dissapointment in them is that their editors names are not listed on the website. I very much like it when any sort of publisher is very transparent.

CaoPaux · Nov 15, 2013

Site's gone. Last Tw/FB activity Apr '12.

[Publisher] Earthbound Fiction

Nexus

Evolute

Unimportant

No COVID yet. Still masking.

Izz

Doing the Space Operatic

Nexus

Evolute

CaoPaux

Mostly Harmless