THE CAREER NOVELIST
want some rogue fiction writer killing off Superman. (They reserve
that privilege for themselves.)
Reasonable that may be, but where the licensor has approval of
the manuscript there is room for tremendous abuse of the writer's
talent and time. A job that was supposed to take ten weeks can
stretch to ten months—for no extra money, either. Acceptable work
can be turned down for the vaguest of reasons. Unless authors have
first obtained contract protection, revisions can be forced upon
them endlessly.
Do such abuses occur? In my experience they happen in 50 per-
cent of all cases where a licensor is involved (and that is not an exag-
geration). The reasons are plain enough: licensors who are the cre-
ators of stories or characters can be control freaks, or simply pos-
sessed of strong ideas about how stories based upon their work
should feel to a reader. I sympathize with them, but at the same
time comic-book writers and movie directors may have little idea of
how a novel goes together, or, indeed, of what makes a novel good.
Novels that are overcontrolled by their licensors can wind up
reading like comic books. Their characters can become as shallow
as those in movies. Licensors have the right to do this, but when it
comes at the author's expense the situation is abusive.
Nowadays, I insist that my clients work from an outline that is
preapproved by the licensor; any revisions required of them may not
go beyond the scope of that approved outline. I also insist that the
author be given a minimum period of time in which to complete the
manuscript. That lesson was taught to me the hard way. Once, a licen-
sor waffled about my client's outline until just two weeks before her
manuscript was due to the publisher. When the approval finally came
I said to the packager, "Okay, let's negotiate a new delivery date."
"Nothing doing," said the packager. He had agreed to a publica-
tion date that was just months away; the novel had been
announced, orders had been taken, a press run had been scheduled,
and the covers had been printed. If he did not get a novel inside
those covers on time he stood to lose big bucks. He said, "The con-
tract says delivery in two weeks, and two weeks it shall be."
The licensor was at fault, but in this case it was the author who
got squeezed. On top of that, the whole process had dragged on for