Customer Reviews

Business and Legal Forms for Authors and Self-Publishers

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The most difficult part of filling-in forms is understanding the questions. Attorney Tad Crawford not only provides the forms you need, he explains your choices for each line. He begins with a discussion of contracting. Then he provides each contract with a discussion of that agreement and a negotiation checklist.

As an author and a publisher, who has run his own business for over 30 years, I highly recommend this valuable book. DanPoynter@ParaPublishing.com.

Tad Crawford's instruction manual, Business and Legal Forms for Authors and Self-Publishers, provides over twenty blank forms and clear checklists and explanations for their use, appearing in a revised edition and including the forms on a handy cd-rom. The sample contracts are particularly useful in this business guide.

This has all the basic forms you need. I had them on the CD and was able to "fix" them up to fit my needs more precisely. It was quick and user friendly. When you give a person a contract to sign, you want it to look professional. When done, I removed everything from my computer, and thereby, didn't use up memory.

Tad Crawford has written a whole series of books out of his expertise in the law and creative arts, with a special focus on photography. I'd suggest looking at Tad's other books, too, since this one is more action-focused without extensive explanations of the whys and wherefores of it.

"Business and Legal Forms" has the documents you'll need, such as copyright transer forms, publishing contracts and agreements. His descriptions are very helpful. Of greatest practical use, though, is the included DVD containing MS Word documents of all of the forms.

If you're just getting started writing, you need this book! It is not at all uncommon for creative work to be copied or outright stolen, so protect your rights as soon as you get started...

This book has a few good notes of things you should pay attention too but over time I have found I rarely go to it. The number of sample contracts you receive is good and worth the money if you need samples to work from. I found "Contracts Companion for Writers" to be a better starting point because it included finished contracts...so you could see where most company were starting as far as numbers and percentages go.

I knew what my concerns were with my literary Agent Agreement and what I wanted to say, but I didn't have a handy lawyer to draft the verbiage. I used Crawford's contract templates to dummy up the provisions I needed, and make sure I'd considered all the angles. This is a concise and targeted look at publishing-related contracts that's in understandable language and from the viewpoint of giving advantages and protections to the author. I hope one day to need the juicy ones even further back in the book.

I must say I was rather dissappointed. This is not complete and happens to be lacking in my specific areas of need ie.General Releases, Interview and Photo Releases. I shoved it in my bookcase in the hopes that further down the road something might be useful.