Wednesday 4 April 2018

What to do if an article editor buys your article but doesn't publish it.

This was an interesting question asked by a freelance writer: “Someone wants to buy reprint rights to my article…but the first buyer hasn’t yet published it!”

And it is such a legitimate dilemma but I'd never thought about it before.

What happened was that the writer had written an article and sold it to a magazine.

Months later, another magazine asked if they could buy the reprint rights to publish the article, but because the first magazine hadn't yet published it, she couldn't sell the reprint rights to anyone.

This is something I've never thought of before because I've sold a lot of articles and stories to magazines and they always tell me when they plan to publish it and they do.  But I have never stressed in a contract that they must publish it by a certain date. It's an open option I've always given them and trusted them to publish it when they said the would.

But this poor author did the same thing but because the magazine had bought the first publishing rights to her article, she couldn't use it again until they publish it.

I read about this at http://writersweekly.com/ask-the-expert/reprint-rights.

You can read about it there too and the solution, which is a warning to every writer who wants to get published in a magazine that they've never worked with before.

It's definitely food for thought.



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