If you will be collaborating with someone else on a book, the first issue to be resolved–as Tad Crawford points out in Business and Legal Forms for Authors and Self-Publishers–is how the copyright in the collaboration will be owned. In every case, all details of the agreement should be spelled out. For example, the names …

Because rights revenues can make a big contribution to a publisher’s profitability but rights deals can be time-consuming and complex, many publishers hire literary agents to represent them, just as authors frequently do. There are good agents and bad agents, of course, and a bad agent is worse than none at all. So if having …