A Brief Guide to Writers' Rights

Writers often submit their work for publication without knowing the terminology or what kind of rights they are selling and how, if at all, they can sell their work again (I was one of those writers a few years ago). Quite obviously the writer owns the rights to his/her work until the copyright is assigned to a third party.

The following is a list of rights you can sell as a freelance writer and what is involved with each:

One-Time Rights: One time rights, also called simultaneous rights, grants the publication the right to publish your work one time. This is a non-exclusive right which will allow you to sell your work to several publications at once for one-time rights.

First Serial Rights: If you sell First Serial Rights, you sell a publication the the right to publish for your work for the first time in any magazine, newspaper, etc. All other rights still belong to you, the author.

Second Serial Rights: Selling Second Serial Rights means that you've sold the publication rights to publish your article, story, poem, etc., which has already been published with another periodical or website. Second Serial Rights is non-exclusive, so you are free to submit to multiple publications.

All Rights: I think this one is fairly self-explanatory. Selling All Rights gives the publication the right to publish your work in any format without additional payment to you. You have the right to claim ownership for the work but relinquish rights to publish elsewhere or redistribute it.

Work for Hire: Any work done by an employee or someone hired under contract belongs to the company unless otherwise specified in the contract. The most obvious examples of this are staff writers and editors, ghostwriting contracts, and copywriting.

This is to serve as general definitions to give you a guideline as to what to look for when selling your work. This is by no means a legal guideline.

Keep writing and submitting.