Advice on being commissoned to write first book...

tommy21

Hey all, I've been asked to penn the history of an Irish event that has not been covered before (cryptic I know!). I have no experience of the types of questions I need to ask and I am meeting the person who requested this in a few weeks. I wondered what I should be asking? It will be independently published by the person in question. The following comes to mind but please feel free to correct/add!

1) Envisaged length? (obviously when we meet I will get more of an idea of whether its a short or extensive history required)
2) Proposed content/chapters/specifc focus on key events?
3) Creative licence (i.e. will they reserve the right to remove anything they dislike?)
4) Payment - how do I even begin to gauge this/what to request? Would you base it on word-count? Expected hours and/or effort?

Many thanks

tommy21

Anyone?:(

Antilles

Find out up front exactly what they want you to do in terms of length and focus, so you don't end up wasting your and their time. Agree what the focus will be before you begin and confirm with them that they are happy with your process at every stage before you begin writing. Do nothing without their agreement and if they don't like something take it out.

tommy21

Great advice. What about contracts and the like?

EileenG

Get one. If you are going to commit months of your time to this, you need to be sure you'll get paid, even if the finished product is not exactly what they had envisaged when they suggested it.

Make sure the contract covers advance, royalties, reversion rights (when it comes back to you), e-books sales, subsiderary rights, and very important, marketing and publicity. How much money are they going to put into promoting the book?

Make sure they spell out exactly what they want from you, and have some provision for what happens if the story doesn't work out the way they want.

DHYNZY

tommy21 wrote: »

1) Envisaged length? (obviously when we meet I will get more of an idea of whether its a short or extensive history required)
2) Proposed content/chapters/specifc focus on key events?
3) Creative licence (i.e. will they reserve the right to remove anything they dislike?)
4) Payment - how do I even begin to gauge this/what to request? Would you base it on word-count? Expected hours and/or effort?

basing this on my experience doing a degree in history (not the same as a publishable work... i know!) but...

1) Length, well that comes down to the source material available to you. If you have a lot of sources from the archives, you'll have a big project! You can't do justice to an event in 5k words if there are thousands of scripts to be read. So source material is everything. Only when you embark on pre-researching your research will you be able to know how extensive your work can be.

2) I think if its going to be a history its important to know how to write a history. I recommend reading Carr's What is History? or something similar. That will really get you to grips with what exactly your responsibility is when writing history.

3) I think that's between you and your benefactor. Personally, I wouldn't mind focusing on a specific aspect of the material that he is interested in, but I wouldn't allow my conclusions to be tinkered with.

4) I think some periodicals pay 3euro per thousand words, which is almost demoralising considering the amount of research required. It all depends on what the plan is for it, really. You have to balance your desire to be published (if that is its destiny) versus monetary benefit!