The Importance of Royalty Fees
For clarity, we’ll quickly define the meaning of royalty fees.
A royalty payment system is an agreement wherein, rather than buying the copyright to a work, or even buying the publishing rights outright, the licensee, or buyer, will pay the artist or copyright holder on a by sale basis.
The pay paid out per sale may be per actual item sold at a retail store, or by unit shipped, be that unit a dozen or a hundred of the actual item. The actual amount paid out may be a flat fee settled upon before hand, or a percentage of overall sales.
Receiving royalty fees isn’t an option for every artist, unfortunately. For the longest time, royalty fees in comic books were pretty much unheard of.
One story regarding an early attempt at instating a royalty system at Marvel comics in the 1960’s has it that Will Eisner, comic book artist and creator of “The Spirit”, was once brought into the Marvel studios by Stan Lee to meet with the owner of the company and talk about taking over editorial duties on a number of the comics.
Asked what he would do with the company, Eisner stated that the very first thing would be to instate a royalty system for the artists and writers, and to allow them to hold the copyrights for any original characters they created.
According to Eisner, the owner of Marvel tried to stifle his laughter at the very notion of paying comic book artists anything but a flat fee.
And those flat fees weren’t much back in the sixties. An artist was lucky to make twenty bucks a page most of the time.
If at all possible, any publishing deal which will allow you to retain ownership of your work is absolutely ideal. Even if it seems to pay less money in the short term, it’s better to have your work to sit on as an asset. If you sell your work outright to a publisher, you’re basically saying “Here you can have this”. This means that, say if you sell a book to Doubleday, and you sell the actual copyright… If Doubleday is offered a movie deal on your book, you don’t have any creative control over that movie, and you never see a dime from it. If Doubleday wants to publish a sequel without your consent, they can do that. If they want to alter the characters so that the main character is Shaquille O’Neal, they can do that, too (as long as they get permission from Mr. O’Neal that is). Selling ownership outright, in the US, means that the publisher can even take your name off the book if they want.
In fact, that was common practice in the early American pulp magazines. Many times, dozens of authors would be credited under the same pseudonym so that the magazine could inspire a completely bogus fan loyalty to non-existent authors.
By retaining ownership, by protecting your right to your own work, you are turning what could be a one time deal into an actual investment. Through either royalties, or limited publish rights deals, if at all possible, whatever you can do to retain ownership of your own work should be pursued.
One thing to keep in mind if you’re dealing with publishers is to not feel obligated to sign anything. Many publishers will play hardball, and kind of act like they’re doing you a huge favour and this is your one and only chance at getting published. That’s not really the case, even though it feels like it. If your work is good enough to get one publisher interested, there will be others out there, too. These people know exactly how it feels to be a struggling artist and, unfortunately, many would rather take advantage of that eagerness than nurture it.
Don’t ever sign anything without reading it, and don’t ever sign anything you’re not comfortable with. Get a deal that works for you. If possible, keep your ownership rights and talk about compensation through royalties rather than selling the publishing rights in full.
Don’t fall for the trick of feeling like this is your last chance, know what kind of a deals you’re being offered, and try to get the best deal possible.
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