What are First Serial Rights?

The first goal of any writer or poet is to write, ideally something original in their voice that captures their readers. You can only capture readers’ minds or hearts if you publish and they can read your words. Luckily, thousands of literary outlets and journals exist to do just that and are eager for good content. When you first submit an original piece or poem and are selected, paid or not, they will require First Serial Rights.

Here’s a typical Term and Condition:

  “We are entitled to first serial and reprint rights. That is, we are allowed to be the first publisher of your work before the rights revert to you, and we are then allowed to republish your work if it is chosen for an award or an anthology. These publication rights extend to all formats (digital and print) and locations, and once your poem is accepted for an anthology, you agree it can be featured in our digital and print issues, which are sold to [publication name or org name] readers.”

By submitting, you are telling them they are the first to use your piece. Second, you are giving them the right to republish that piece. Sometimes it might say “First North American Serial Rights (FNASR)” meaning only pertaining to North America, but increasingly and with online publications and the internet, “world” is more common. In the example above “all formats and locations” means the world.

All writers or poets submitting their work to literary outlets or publications, whether print or digital/online, will have to agree to language similar to this in order to be published if selected. If you don’t agree, withdraw your submission, since it is unlikely the wording will change. This right of the publisher, “first serial and reprint rights” is always implied. It’s your job as the submitter to make sure there are limits when the publisher can issue your work, and for how long he holds the rights to do so. Generally, two years should be the limit. All rights revert to you (as in the example above), at some point, which should be clear.

During this time and afterward, it is not only courteous but accepted practice that if you submit the same piece to another publication; you state where and when it was first printed. This usually is done on the piece itself. Reprints of your work that previously appeared in another publication are “second serial rights.” These rights are nonexclusive, meaning you can submit or sell the piece to many publications at the same time.

In other words, your piece or poem is not “exclusive” to the publication that first printed it. If they ask for that, consider what that means to you and if you agree. Many publications accept reprints, so think of that too.

Other rights to consider are “simultaneous rights” that give you the ability to sell work to publications that don’t have overlapping circulations, and “all rights,” which means you sell all the rights to your work to the buyer, and you never get another nickel for the piece, no matter how many times they publish it.

One thing. You always own the copyright in the piece, and as the author that always remains with you.

One more thing. Don’t plagiarize. 

 Guest Blog

How to Incorporate Feedback Without Destroying Your Story

By Chandra Shekhar, December 6, 2021

Feedback tells us what we are doing right and what we could be doing better. The advice and suggestions we receive from beta readers, fellow authors, and other sources can help us transform our flawed-but-promising story into a publishable piece or even a glittering masterpiece.

   Ideally, the process will be almost painless.

   The reality, however, is quite different, as any author who has ever attended a critique session can attest. You go into the session expecting to receive little criticism and lots of praise, but often it turns out to be the other way around. You find yourself assailed from all sides by brilliant suggestions that have one simple flaw — they will require you to completely gut your story and rewrite it from scratch.

It is a chastening experience. Even the thickest-skinned writers can’t help but feel disheartened at moments like these and fantasize about skinning their colleagues with a blunt knife.

   What’s the solution? How does a writer handle adverse—but well-intentioned—criticism?

   I don’t have an answer for this in the general case, but I have discovered one trick that’s helpful in certain situations when a reader points out what appears to be a serious or even fatal flaw in your text. This trick not only makes it almost painless to fix the flaw, it actually deepens the plot and strengthens the story.

   The trick I’ve found is to fix by incorporating. Let me explain with a couple of examples how that works.

   Example 1: Let’s say you’ve written a play in which the following dialogue appears:

                John: We should leave soon.

                Jane: Leave where?

                John: Where? To the reception at the Chamber of Commerce, or course.

                Jane: Oh.

                John: So will you go and get ready? It’s getting late.

                Jane: Let’s just stay home.

                John (staring at Jane): Are you kidding? Don’t you know how important it is for my job that I show my face at this event?

                Jane: Screw your job.

Someone in your critique group tells you that the dialogue doesn’t ring true, because Jane is not the type who will swear at her husband. The criticism is valid, you feel, and wonder whether you should change the dialogue slightly:

             John (staring at Jane): Are you kidding? Don’t you know how important it is for my job that I show my face at this event?

             Jane: Stop worrying about your job.

This addresses the criticism, but at the expense of losing some punch in the dialogue. Here is a better way to rewrite the dialogue:

                John (staring at Jane): Are you kidding? Don’t you know how important it is for my job that I show my face at this event?

                Jane: Screw your job.

                John (open-mouthed): What’s the matter with you? I’ve never heard you swear before. At least, not at me.

                Jane (beginning to tear up): Sorry, John. I’m not myself today. Ever since I got that letter from Cecilia.

                John: …

See what I did there? I incorporated the criticism into the dialogue, and by doing so, I not only fixed the flaw but also deepened the interaction between John and Jane.

   This is a simplistic example chosen for the purpose of illustration, but the point it makes is broadly valid. Whenever you encounter criticism that rings true but would be painful to address, try to incorporate it into the text itself. This will make your text critique-proof, at least as regards that particular flaw. The process will be relatively painless. And it will add depth to your narrative.

Example 2: This is a paragraph from my first draft of a short story about a serial killer:

      With the remaining officers out on emergency patrol, Fiona and Prince were left to man the precinct office. Prince moved his desk closer to the heating vent while Fiona kept her overcoat on. Both kept glancing at the loudly ticking wall clock, anxiously waiting for midnight.

In the story, the above scene takes place in a US city in August. One reader wondered why Fiona would wear an overcoat in mid-summer. For some reason, I had overlooked this very obvious flaw. Unfortunately, the plot requires the event to happen in August and Fiona to have her overcoat on. How to reconcile these two conflicting requirements?

My first impulse was to relocate this story to the southern hemisphere, where it would be winter in August. Then I realized many other elements in the story would make no sense if I did that.

Then I came up with this simple fix:

                With the remaining officers out on emergency patrol, Fiona and Prince were left to man the precinct office. The weather that summer had been unseasonably cold, and as the sun set and the evening shadows crept over town, the office grew chilly. Prince moved his desk closer to the heating vent while Fiona kept her overcoat on. Both kept glancing at the loudly ticking wall clock, anxiously waiting for midnight.

Adding that single sentence not only addresses the (valid) criticism but also brings in an eerie element that contributes to the feeling of dread that pervades the story.

                Mission accomplished!

 

Chandra Shekhar came to the US from India in 1987 to study Artificial Intelligence. After a decade of work on self-driving vehicles, facial recognition, and video surveillance, he switched to the less lucrative but more benign field of journalism. After studying science communication at the University of California, he worked for several years as a freelance writer for the Los Angeles Times, Cell, Princeton University, and other outlets. He taught for a year at the writing program at Stanford University, which inspired him to write his first novel, Mock My Words, and launched his career in fiction writing. 

   He is currently working on Thirst for Power, a novel about the intertwined lives of an idealistic young man, a scheming politician, a romantic professor of English, and an enigmatic social worker, set against a background of political, social, and climate change.

   Chandra is also a prolific writer of short stories, flash fiction, and humorous verse. An illustrated collection of his shorter works titled Unintended Consequences, Illogical Extremes, and Other Ironies of Life is in progress.

Here are links to his novels: 

Mock My Words and Unlight, both on Kindle 

 

Creating Grandpa: Guest Blog

 Dr. Michael P. Riccards, educator, administrator, three-time college president, and ex-Executive Director of a New Jersey think tank, is our guest writer today. Notably, Mike has written and published over thirty books and numerous plays, some produced on stage. He has written about Presidents and met some. His stories are interesting, varied, true life or fictional. 

CREATING GRANDPA

I always used to avoid fiction.  The best of it seemed wordy, overly romantic, and generally hard to follow from one day to another.  It took me a year to read  MIDDLEMARCH.  So I stayed with my major interest: political history and biography.  After I retired I decided to write a personal memoir which was moving slowly until I saw in the Hamilton NJ Public Library a notice on a bulletin board near the men's room for the establishment of a group of people interested in memoir writing led by Rodney Richards.  

I joined the group. At times I would grow weary of retelling my life and even was going to ditch the whole thing and go back to the American presidency which was the area I was most at home in.  When I got a note of congratulations from President Bill Clinton, that only solidified my dedication.

So in the group, I read short segments of my memoir, sometimes with minimal enthusiasm.  The group, especially the American consul to Trenton from the Italian government, Dr. Gilda Rorro, was especially wonderful in her critiques, especially on my Italian American roots,  Suddenly I decided to finish up my life story just after my retirement, which was on my birthday, October 2.

The group continued on, and some of my colleagues asked me to read their life stories and even offered to pay me for that review. I insisted that I did not charge friends and was pleased to take several of those fine pieces with me for a long boring winter in Florida. I was delighted to see them published as well over the coming years.

The group continued on and began to change: it became more interested in the genre of fiction, exactly what I had so avoided.  But I decided to start with a simple short story about my maternal grandfather who was born in Naples and came over to the United States in 1898 at 16.  As I searched out more information, I suddenly found that he developed a character of his own, as he faced the trials of living as a paterfamilias in the twentieth century.  I freely mixed fact and fiction, and in the process members of my family said they remembered this or that particular incident about Grandpa.  How could they?  

One cousin even told me that his funeral was interrupted by a poor woman whom he had given vegetables, wood, and flowers to in her later years.  She came to a sacred funeral and screamed out "God bless him, we shall not see his likes again."  That was not how I wrote, but it came about in real life.  When I showed Grandpa in one story in a less than flattering light, one of my fellow students complained that this was not in character for him, so I should changed the story.  Actually, it was a true story, but by then Grandpa had become a real persona in her mind, someone noble and decent and paternal, the way men used to be, or so we thought before the fractures our time.  

Anybody starting fiction should give it some time to grow.  I try to create characters and also have the stories end with some moral for our confused lives.  Sometimes the moral is too subtle, but such is life.  Give yourself a chance to make mistakes, for that is realism.  Look around at the symbols and metaphors that exist in your vision.  Grandpa had a tiny rosebush in the middle of his garden.  Surely it was out of place?  But I learned that he planted it when his 25-year-old daughter died unexpectedly.   That was how he remembered her.  

It really happened.  

"The Ordinary Duties of the Day": The Collected Grandpa Stories

by Dr. Michael P. Riccards and Ms. Cheryl A Flagg is available on Amazon

Some others on Amazon are 

The Odes of DiMaggio

The Ferocious Engine of Democracy: A History of the American Presidency (Volume 1)

The Collected Plays of Michael P. Riccards https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Plays-Michael-P-Riccards-ebook/dp/B0795857SJ/

And his autobiography A Hero of My Own Life https://www.amazon.com/Hero-My-Own-Life-2015-08-25/dp/B01K3JKEOE/

More of Mike's books and plays can also be found there.

Writers love their words too much when...

The one thing all good writers and poets seek out before they publish is feedback on their work. They know it catches mistakes, identifies misconceptions or confusion, offers better word choices, improves clarity, or cuts needless words. Also, when written well, critique offers confirmation.

  Writers know they can't please everyone, yet should want to reach as many readers as possible. But readability, regardless of subject matter, is in the mind's eye of the reader. At times we can forget that.

  Writers always, always, can accept or reject criticism. But sometimes we writers can be so invested in our work that we cannot acknowledge our own mistakes or what needs improvement.

  Based on my experience in over 3,000 writing and poetry critique sessions and working closely with authors, I've come up with the following stumbling blocks or traps some writers fall into:

Writers love their words too much when…

 

They ignore suggestions to switch POV or tense

They like excessive dialogue tags with adverbs

They use adverbs instead of verbs to show action

They skip necessary punctuation or have too much

They insert too many exclamation points

They insist on twenty-five cent words no one understands

They fall back on tired old cliches

They tell what happens instead of showing it

They pooh-pooh the idea of changing words or phrasings

They think their writing is perfectly understandable

They explain and defend what they’ve written

They know their book will sell well when published

They think they’ve told a brand-new story

They can’t see why their writing is boring

They refuse to cut out vague or extraneous words

They use the same pronoun to start every sentence

They care little about metaphors and similes or use too many

They don’t appreciate that criticisms are meant to help them

They think beta readers are overrated

They won’t spend money on a good editor

They believe the book will sell itself

 And the number one reason writers love their words too much is because…

  They are in love with themselves and not the reader

Know your target audience. Be in love with those readers.