pddb{at}demesne.com writes:

    What publishers will give you is their boilerplate contract.
    This contains clauses that they will never enforce even if
    you sign it as is, because the clauses do not apply to the
    kind of writing you do.

When I published my trade-press abridgment of Johnson's
_Dictionary_ last year, the contract said that I gave the
publisher the movie rights.

Drat! -- and I had plans of optioning it to Miramax, with Brad
Pitt as the noun substantive and a cameo by Meryl Streep as the
letter N.  I thought about calling it a deal-breaker.

(Happy news: though it's been available only through mail order
so far, in September a retail edition will be released in a
co-publishing deal with Walker Books.  Walker is best known for
Dava Sobel's _Longitude_; they've also done _Brunelleschi's
Dome_, _The Victorian Internet_, _A Basque History of the World_,
&c.)

--- Rachel's Little NET2FIDO Gate v 0.9.9.8 Alpha