: Re: What rights are OK to give up for publishing? I'm thinking of submitting a short story to a small (and probably not well-known) serial anthology publication. For an author who's never been published

@Hamaas631

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How prolific are you?

I'm pretty prolific, so I honestly don't worry too much about what rights I'm selling - I try to work with good publishers, and then assume that they'll do a good job selling the work associated with the rights I've granted them. But that's because it's not that big of a deal if I give rights to someone who doesn't deserve them - I'll just write something else and sell it elsewhere. If you're less prolific, you need to worry more.

Even prolific authors need to worry about some things, like giving publishers rights of first refusal on future works. Anything related to future work, really, negates the 'prolific' exemption, because being prolific in that context just means that you're binding yourself to the publisher for even more work.

But, honestly, I'd say that the examples you give are pretty inevitable if you want the work published. I'm assuming it's a Canadian publisher, so that makes sense, non-exclusive anthology rights are pretty much the minimally binding terms given that you're looking at an anthology, and first online rights just means that your work is going to be published online (at least, this is my understanding - I Am Not A Lawyer).

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