So Nice, I Wanna Publish Them Twice

July 31, 2012 6:29 AM

Possibly confirming the obvious - I wrote a crapton of essays and articles for a market that a) was extremely limited and b) doesn't exist any more. I also believe the contract said the original market was "first rights" only. ...It's probably safe to try to pitch polished-up versions of some of those articles to a wider market by now, right?

The details:

* The original market for these articles was a theater company in Pennsylvania. They "published" booklets about each of their productions which they sold in the lobby and handed out to teachers; they also posted them on the company web site for people to download as PDFs. The company took down each of those online guides at the end of every season, and then the whole company went bust a year ago and the web site taken down (I've tried poking around on the Wayback Machine, even, and can't seem to raise any of the PDFs that way). I got a couple free copies of the published version of everything I wrote for them.


* This is the new market that caught my eye. I was going to go back through the archives and pull a few out for rewriting and polishing, and pitching to that site, but suddenly got paranoid that it'd be a problem. I have practically no understanding of rights and permissions and publishing from a marketing standpoint, and the ignorance is making me paranoid on top of it.

Intellectually I know it's probably okay, but I think I need a good talking-to to reinforce it. And yes, I will also be trying to find the original contract I had with the theater company to confirm that the rights were "first publishing rights" only. Thanks.

posted by EmpressCallipygos to Writing & Language (10 answers total)

You might actually want to check with Damn Interesting's guidelines to see if they'll republish work. Try getting in touch with an editor there to see what their policy is. Having worked for a few publications, I know we'd go through a heck of a time if we found out a work slated to be published by us had been previously published (read: we'd have to pull it, and wouldn't look too kindly on that writer). But that's because those people hid the real status of the work from us. Always better to be straight up about this stuff.
posted by Miss T.Horn at 6:54 AM on July 31, 2012

I'm not a lawyer, but yeah I think your biggest problem will probably be getting whoever publishes it in the future to accept material that has already been published before. Normally the boilerplate contracts for this sort of thing assume that the content has never been published previously. As far as your original contract goes, if they do have a perpetual exclusive license to publish that content, on a practical level it would depend on who if anyone still owns those publishing rights and would be willing to sue or threaten to sue over it.
posted by burnmp3s at 7:00 AM on July 31, 2012

Nthing - your main duty is to disclose to the person considering republishing. It would help if the buffing/polishing process was extensive enough to consider it a "new work," although if I were publishing it I would still insert that "parts of this in another form appeared in ..." in the acknowledgements.
posted by randomkeystrike at 7:14 AM on July 31, 2012

Response by poster: Good point, all. And at the risk of sound like I'm saying "okay, but...." I should clarify that "publishing" in this instance meant "they laid it out and saved it as a PDF, posted the PDF to their web page and then ran off copies in a Xerox in the back and you could buy them for a buck in the lobby." But yeah, I should still explain that when asking Damn Interesting if they would still be copacetic with that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:20 AM on July 31, 2012

Yeah, that's actually where publication sometimes gets hairy. Many places consider "on the internet" to be "published," even if you've just posted it on a blog.
posted by Miss T.Horn at 7:25 AM on July 31, 2012

'First rights' means that at far as the original publication is concerned, the stuff is still yours to do with as you wish, and if they want to print a Best Of collection featuring your piece they need to ask your permission because it belongs to you. The only stipulation, typically, is that any new place you publish it needs to have a little 'Previously published by XYZ' tag on it-- so yeah, I think your only concern will be with whether your new market will accept something already published elsewhere.
posted by shakespeherian at 7:29 AM on July 31, 2012

Response by poster: Just send the Damn Interesting folks an email saying "Okay, here's exactly what I wrote and where they appeared and how they were used - that being the case, would you be interested in rewritten versions of this stuff?"

I'd definitely be doing rewriting of whatever I'd submit them, partly because the old versions were for an audience of junior high school students and partly because a lot of them have a very high "oh my god i must have written this in my sleep because it SUCKS DINGO KIDNEYS i must fix this" factor for me.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:50 AM on July 31, 2012

You basically gave them the one-time rights to publish your work. What I would do is rewrite the articles and submit them. This is a pretty common practice, it's safer, it avoids any legal or ethical issues, and everything could stand to be revised, right?
posted by KokuRyu at 7:51 AM on July 31, 2012

Response by poster: ARG: that should read "I just SENT the Damn Interesting folks an email..."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:55 AM on July 31, 2012

Response by poster: And because I"ve been nudged with the followup - I finally heard back from them, and they cautiously agreed. They were more insistent that whatever I send them follow the tone of their site, and I'd have to be rewriting these things to do that.

But this is now a long-range project anyway, but still something to consider.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:29 AM on August 31, 2012