The Story behind the Book

During the proposal submission and due diligence process, I had not involved my employer other than to let my manager know what I was doing. What I was doing did not encroach on work time and until I was offered a contract there was little point discussing things further. Equally, neither publisher knew that I was in talks with the other. From my point of view this was helpful as it kept my options open and in theory gave me a stronger bargaining positioning as and when it came to contract negotiations. However, as a first time author I did not want to risk upsetting either publisher by going behind their backs. As neither ever asked whether I was talking to anyone else I never needed to face this issue.

After what seemed like a long time, both publishers offered me a contract. One seemed to me a much more preferable option to the other: not just the terms of the contract but my own feeling for the likely working relationship I would have with the preferred publisher (Morgan Kaufmann). So I had been offered a contract to write a book – amazing! However, I still needed to work out how on earth this would be possible in view of my work commitments. Would I get time off? If so, how long would I need? Who would own the copyright? Who would get the royalties? Would I leave my job if it came to it?

Now that I had been offered a contract I also needed to consider whether I should try and get an agent. One friend who worked for a publisher suggested I ought to think seriously about getting an agent to help me negotiate the best contract. However, through my own research I had a fairly good idea what constituted a typical deal and ultimately I wasn't doing this for the money. Book writing was not my full time livelihood and I had done all the hard work in winning the contract so I felt why bring in an agent simply for them to take a cut and perhaps elongate the process further? I guess time will tell if I was unwise.

pres.co have always been a very forward thinking company and I would like to think that in my relationship with the company, each has benefited, so I felt fairly confident that one way or other we could hammer out a deal that both I and pres.co would be happy with. It was clear to me by this stage that there was no way that I was going to be able to write the book outside of work time. Even with holidays, evenings and weekends, I would have killed myself in the process. This effectively meant that the copyright would belong to the company. Under UK copyright law, and according to the terms of my job contract, the copyright to any work that I did during work time as an employee belongs to the employer unless specifically agreed otherwise. Under the terms of the publisher's contract an exclusive, world-wide, non-revocable, all media (etc. etc.) licence was to be granted by the copyright holder to the publisher anyway so there seemed to be little point my trying to fight to keep ownership of the copyright.

The 'deal' that I put together and which was agreed with pres.co ended up as follows:

• 8 weeks paid off work to write the book, broken into an initial 4 week chunk and then 2 fortnights over the course of 4 months.
• I would receive the entire advance against royalties ($10,000 paid in instalments of $6,000 on signing the contract, $2,000 on submitting the first complete 3 chapters and the final $2,000 on the publisher's acceptance of the final manuscript). All royalties due to the author thereafter would be split 50 / 50 between pres.co and me. According to the terms of the contract, royalties paid to the author would be between 15-17%, depending on total sales, of the book's wholesale price. Based on predicted sales of 10,000 copies at a wholesale price of around $20 this would give a total royalty income of around $30,000 i.e. an additional $20,000 over year 1 once the advance had been paid off.
• The copyright would be owned by pres.co. In addition the company would benefit from the publicity and kudos of having a member of staff publish a book. A number of free copies of the book were set aside for pres.co (to give to clients and the press etc.) and the company's name and logo would feature on the back cover of the book as well as in the text of the book itself.
• I had to create the web site that went with the book. This was to go at E-consultancy.com, a domain name that I had owned for a while. I would get no extra time to do this and all costs associated with the site would be borne by me alone. In practice this meant that I would spend more money than I earned.