Declaration: This piece is 100% my personal opinion and should not be associated with my company.

First rights of publishing bother me. When I learned about it for the first time, I asked my husband: “doesn’t it sounds like some medieval man demanding virginity from a woman?”

What is “first rights”? It is an clause in publishing contracts, where writers grant the right to publish their work first and exclusively to a publisher for a certain period in exchange for exposure and money.

Writers whose submissions are accepted will not be able to republish their work 3-6 months after the first publication. To me, this is even worse than the request for ‘virginity’. At least women who lose their virginity are not banned from sleeping with others for 3-6 months. Can you imagine?

This clause, though still very popular in 2024, brings me back to the age where society still used virginity to judge a woman’s value, since it is indeedused to judge the value of a piece of writing: if I don’t get the exclusive right to be the first to publish, it means much less, the piece is also worth less.

Most publications, no matter big or small, from traditional book publishers to indie magazines, still require writers to grant them these rights when submitting their work. And among most writers, it is a well-received idea that a piece of work, regardless of the quality, loses part its publishing value to them as soon as it is published somewhere, even the writer’s personal blog.

This idea makes many writers who wish to pursue traditional publishing for their work unwilling to share their writing with others unless it has been clearly accepted or rejected by all the publications that they have submitted.

Various writer’s hack articles often describe this as the opportunity for writers to leverage this clause. However, to me, there’s not much “leveraging”. There is only an imbalance of power and assumptions that are quickly becoming inapplicable, especially post 2020, when the entire publishing industry started changing to embrace the creator economy.

Assumption #1: traditional publishers are still is the single outlet for “serious” publishing.

When we live in a time when newspaper and magazines are still the main source of information, publishing a short story on those means a lot. I still own a cut-out of my 300-word article on a local teenager magazine from 2001. As someone who likes writing and wants more people to read my work, the only way for me to do that was to submit my writings to these publications. But this soon changed when I started my personal blog using Myspace, signing up for my first social media account on Xiaonei, publishing my love story series on Douban interest group, even building my first blog host using Writefreely’s opensource tools.

Some of my other writing friends turned to Wattpad, Jinjiang, Popo, Substack, etc. These platforms allowed them to write what they loved, distribute their work, and gain revenue directly through readership.

Should I also mention hundreds of niche magazine distributed online, NFT publications and self-publishing distributed through Amazon for those who are more entrepreneurial? Especially for self-publishing authors: from beta reading, editing, book design to distribution, there are services that cater to all your publishing needs and there is a big community that is more than happy to help you out and celebrate your success.

Want to know where to find them? sSomeone literally wrote about it here.

Assumption #2: individual writers cannot create big waves.

Another popular opinion is that though traditional publishers are no longer the only distribution channel, they are still the most influential ones for marketing your work. And this is not untrue, traditional publishers have long-standing relationship with major book stores, and have budgets they can “invest” in marketing your books, though later on you will have to pay it back by receiving a much smaller royalties percentage.

With the rise of social media, publishers can no longer stand between readers and writers: writers who wish to build their communities can simply open their social media accounts and start communicating straight away. Also, grassroots content creators, especially booktubers and booktokers have contributed greatly lately to book sales, especially in niche genres. According to Forbes, it is believed that young people posting about books on social media pushed print book sale in 2021 to all time high in the US: 825 million. And some even say that agents nowadays are prone to accept queries from writers with more social followers.

Assumption #3: work already published elsewhere cannot be picked up by traditional publishers.

Ok, I’m going to start a list with some self-published books that later got picked up by traditional publishers and gained great success:

  • Legends and Lattes- Cryptid Press
  • Atlas Six- Tor
  • The Martian- Crown, later on got picked up by Hollywood
  • Rage of Dragons- Orbit
  • Combat Codes- Orbit
  • The Lost War- Orbit
  • We Ride the Storm- Orbit
  • The Phoenix King- Yes, again Orbit.

(I think Orbit has really good book taste.)

Not to mention traditional publishers are now looking at indie writers for publishing trends. Heard about Romantasy? It used to be a niche thing that now it occupies at least 70% of space in the SFF book section in major bookstores.

If a book is good, it should be published and republished, this is how we make classics, isn’t it? Unless you say that, as a publisher, you simply just don’t want to pay writers what they deserve, which is a separate problem, then.

The final words

Of course, I’m not saying the traditional publishers are no longer powerful and effective. They still very much are due to years of accumulations of reputation and network effect, let alone some of them still paying rather well (the New Yorker, rumour has it, pays $7,500 for a piece of article, don’t hold me to it). If you are a writer who wants to borrow the power of traditional publishers, go for it. But keep in mind, the times are changing, and the power is slowly coming back to you as the creator.

This reflow of power started with video maker, streamer, musicians, visual artists, now finally, you, writers.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash.