Publishing and Literary Law

ENTERTAINMENT LAW - PUBLISHING AND LITERARY LAW

Ms. Feigen has practiced literary law since the mid 1970s. Literary law encompasses publishing contracts between individuals and publishers, joint venture agreements between co-authors, rights owner and writer, author and editor.

Because the publishing industry has contracted over the past decade, leaving fewer publishers, the clout of those publishers has grown. Authors have fewer places to sell their work and publishers often must focus on the bottom line, rather than the literary quality of writing for its own sake. Multi-national corporations, often based in Europe (for example Bertelsmann that owns Random House) care much less than the publishers of yore did about the quality of writing. What they want are commercial best-sellers and they do not want to pay much even for those. Furthermore, because the emphasis is on the bottom line, publishers discourage their editors from really editing. This has caused many highly acclaimed authors to hire private editors, and Ms. Feigen connects authors with editors so that the manuscripts need little if any work once submitted. These trends have made it necessary for authors to be well represented in their dealings with publishers. How royalties are defined, whether it is necessary to give the publisher an option on a second or third book and what electronic and performance rights are retained by the author are among the issues that, while constantly evolving, Ms. Feigen has been negotiating for almost thirty years. In short, her experience in dealing with these issues is key to the success of the author and the amount of money that is generated from his or her book.

Among Ms. Feigen's clients are authors whose manuscripts have been bought by Alfred A. Knopf, MacMillan, HarperCollins, McGraw Hill, Adams Media, Wiley, Dove Books and others. She was until recently involved in contract negotiations on behalf of a Nigerian novelist whose book was to be purchased by a British Film company to be made for adaptation into a movie to be distributed by a major Hollywood studio. She currently represents the books of two high profile individuals with memoirs, as well as a former CNN producer, who is writing an exposé. Ms. Feigen has also negotiated on behalf of rights owners whose copyrights have been infringed. This has led to her successful representation of one author whose work had been "used" by the BBC without acknowledgment or payment, another whose non-fiction historical tome had been plagiarized by a novelist without credit, another whose academic publication had been the basis of a play without so much as a mention. A strong transactional background as a lawyer, coupled with having served as a literary agent/manager and recently an acclaimed author of her own non-fiction book, make Ms. Feigen the ideal attorney to hire for negotiations involving literary works.