You are right I shouldn’t change the topic. It isn’t like the whole travel around asia and write a book about your adventures thing hasn’t been done before though, and that “is” on topic actually.
Well… If you wrote what you believed to be a good quality, saleable novel, you would flush any chance of selling it to a publisher by giving it away, would you?
Well… If you wrote what you believed to be a good quality, saleable novel, you would flush any chance of selling it to a publisher by giving it away, would you?[/quote]
At the risk of pissing off almas john I’d like to ask a question on this point. If you write something and give it away, I mean the actual piece of writing, you haven’t given away the right to “publish” that material as your own have you? People write teaching materials that they pass out all the time. Have they lost ownership of that intellectual material?
By the same token did the OP give away ownership of the first chapter by posting it here?
Well… If you wrote what you believed to be a good quality, saleable novel, you would flush any chance of selling it to a publisher by giving it away, would you?[/quote]
Of course. Information wants to be free. It follows the path of least resistance.
An EFL writing contract/letter of agreement in the UK would expect total exclusivity, whether you were being paid a fee or royalties, and the big houses spend considerable amounts pursuing copyright infringemnets and pirated materials.
Most schools have a clause in the contract whereby all of your materials produced in their time and using their resources are belong to them. It’s a grey area, for sure, but given that my work perit forbade me to do outside work, they have a pretty strong case.
Although there are grey areas, obviously (what percentage has been used?), if you’ve used something for commercial gain before, it’s not then useful or interesting to publishers. No publisher wants to be stuck in a rights battle with a major EFL school. Bad PR.
No rules about churning out the same old EFL garbage though, fortunately.
I’d like to qualify the above that this is very likely not the case in Taiwan. In another thread, a guy was asking how much he’d be paid by the word, which leads me to suspect publishing in the 'wan is a different beast.
Just saying that if you are planning on mounting a challenge to John and Liz Soars, keep it under your hat. Although Hartley would be more likely to mount one to Carolyn Graham…
In the UK then they (the students) would have the right to publish it under their name and the writer would not have the right to publish it under his own name?
[quote=“bob”]They would have the right to publish it under their name and the writer would not have the right to publish it under his own name?
(Are you absolutely sure about this?)[/quote]
Self publish, sure; it’s still your work. A publishing house wouldn’t invest in it because there is no legal guarantee of exclusivity. That’s how it works in Englund, with the big UK EFL presses. Dunno about other stuffs.
If a publishing house gets involved, it is not ‘your’ work, it’s the design dept’s, the editing team, the marketing and everyone in between’s work. Knocking out a manuscript’s the shortest part of the process.
How can you reasonably prevent a student from publishing your work? It’s highly unlikely, but unless you can prove it’s yours, and have the funds to pursue it, there’s nothing you can do.
Not really talking about ‘ownership’ as an abstract right, more as a business concept. A best-selling author is not ‘allowed’ to publish extracts of a forthcoming novel in a newspaper without permission from the publisher, nor to get money angain by reselling it to another publisher.
Mail it to friends and tell them not to open the envelope? Any suggestions about what else could be done?[/quote]
Well, if it’s EFL materials, most would be co-wrote after it was commissioned, anyway. Pretty rare for an unknown to get published.[/quote]
I think you are getting sleepy. What I am asking is how do you “prove” that you wrote something? On the off chance that there was ever any argument over it I mean.
No, no, I understood, I’m just saying it doesn’t come up because the publishing and writing process pretty much rule out using recycled kaka from your classes. Unknowns and uncredentialed writers are not used.
I can’t imagine a situation where an enormous string of fckups went unchecked and allowed a plagiarising writer to reach the markets. too many checks and balances. It takes five years for a major title to come to fruition.