THE CAREER NOVELIST
Recognize, too, that producing packaged novels all day will sat-
isfy your craving to write. When the day is over, what are you likely
to do with your evenings? Go back to work, or turn on the TV and
relax? Your own fiction can become a low priority when you have
money in the bank and a brain that needs a rest from writing.
Face it; there are really only two good reasons to write work-for-
hire: money, or the love of a particular project (or perhaps of the
media property on which it is based). Several authors I know want
to write "X-Files" novels simply because they love the TV show.
Other authors of my acquaintance are dying to pick up where Ian
Fleming, Rex Stout, or Erie Stanley Gardner left off.
For them, work-for-hire may be worth it. For everyone else, given
the generally low pay and exploitation involved, the only reason to
write work-for-hire is to pay the rent when there is no other choice.
However, a work-for-hire contract can also, I admit, soothe an ego
that has been beaten down by the industry. Many authors succumb
for that reason alone.
INS AND OUTS OF WORK-FOR-HIRE
The concept of work-for-hire is derived from the most recent revi-
sion of U.S. copyright law in 1976. The new law created several cat-
egories of work-for-hire, that is, a situation in which the writer is not
the creator of a work, but a contributor to a work created by anoth-
er person or entity.
For instance, if one writes a foreword to a textbook, a transla-
tion, test questions, or compiles an index, those are instances in
which a writer is contributing to a larger work. Her writing is occa-
sioned by the larger work, is dependent upon it and subsidiary to
it. The law says that the owner of such a larger work may copyright
the whole. Employees who create documents in the normal "course
and scope" of their employment—technical writers, for example—
are similarly covered (or uncovered, I suppose). Such employed writ-
ers are also entitled to legally mandated employee benefits,
though, unlike free-lancers.
With work-for-hire fiction, a different legal definition generally
comes into play. Here, work-for-hire is any writing that is especially
"ordered or commissioned"; that is, it is work created after an agree-