dangerous clause in publishing contracts

Dear fellow publishers and authors,

Do you expect your authors to sign a contract that states this clause below.

"The Author agrees to pay the Company's legal fees and any resulting judgment against the company if legal action arises from any known or unknown libel, plagiarism, breach of privacy or misrepresentation of facts, whether known or unknown by the author, medical and/or legal damages, copyright infringement or any other legal dispute related to the authenticity, character or content of the Author's books."



And if you're an author, have you ever signed a contract that states something to this effect? It's on the Booklocker contract. Yes, they're subsidy and they admit it, and are currently filing a class action suit against Amazon.com for that company's taking advantage of the small folks. Yet, other publishers I know call this an abusive clause towards authors. As an author, it would be a joke if I signed something like this. I can't cover a publisher's legal fees! I barely pay my mortage. Of course, authors need to sign that to the best of their knowledge their work is original, not libel, etc. etc. But the above clause seems to go too far.


My main concern is that I'm starting to see it show up in magazine contracts as well. Publishers are expecting authors to publicize themselves, sometimes help pay for promotion, get paid once for using their material twice (in print and online, in spite of twice the advertising revenue for the publication) and now, cover their legal fees? Any thoughts? A major magazine that's been my bread and butter now has that clause in their contracts, and it seems I either lose my monthly income or sign it. Any ideas on how to ask them to reword it?

Great input, everyone! For Booklocker, it's for fiction or non-fiction. I also saw something similar in one of Bowtie's contracts for magazine articles. Bowtie publishes both books and magazines, and I've only seen the contract for magazines. They only publish nonfiction. I'd have to get the exact phrase from a friend who writes for them, but I'll do that if anyone is interested.

This all makes me want to "Inc." or "LLC" myself, as one writer apparently did. Supposedly if you do that and find you have made a mistake or a gold digger comes out of the woodwork and wins, your "corporation" has to pay, but not you or your personal assets. You keep as little as possible in the corporation.

I've heard of the idea of transferring assets, but have heard that if it happens after a possible lawsuit, it can be considered fraudulent transfer. Maybe I should just move to Mexico where there's no liability (kidding).

I am a responsible writer, and think we all should be, but I'm human, also. I want to pay for my mistakes in a fair way, but not become homeless and put my kids up for adoption for a single mistake. I've also done small time publishing and wouldn't want to find out my author had done something illegal. But many of us know about the gal (forgot her name) who published Deceptively Delicious (or something like that), a cookbook for healthy kid-friendly meals that did really well, and now someone is claiming it was her idea first, and is trying to sue the author. We can sometimes do nothing wrong, and still someone comes after us. That's why that clause and similar ones give me the creeps.

Thanks for reminding me who that author was. Our country doesn't have different rules for movie star's wives when it comes to following copyright rules, so regardless if Jessica is enjoying the attack and doesn't mind the loss of a relatively small amount of income, it still illustrates that an author can unknowingly create something similar that someone else may have come up with, and have that someone show up that can "prove" you saw their work (maybe you did, in passing, and have no memory of it), and then the publisher puts all the legal fees onto the author, only. I sometimes have no idea how a great non-fiction article or book idea pops into my mind. It may have come up from a newspaper clipping or filtered up from my sister's hairdresser's cousin's husband's brother, or someone showed a group of us a snippet of an idea about someone's funny life with a dog named Carl (which is our dog's name) over drinks three years ago, I don't remember but a seed was planted, and it turns out the owner of the other dog named Carl, has also submitted it. I don't like the publisher having no responsibility in situations like that.

I do think author's should take some of the risk, just not all. Maybe "inc." is the way to go.