Before you submit your work to a contest or magazine, double-check the rights you’re selling or giving away.
The best magazine publishers buy first world serial rights to the pieces they publish (that means they have the right to publish it first anywhere in the world) and also the non-exclusive right to archive your work on their website (that means they can keep your piece on their website even if you later republish it elsewhere; many magazines will remove your piece on request after a couple of years).
Some period of exclusivity is reasonable (e.g., you can’t publish that piece elsewhere for, e.g, one year) and some recognition of the first publisher is common courtesy (if you republish the piece in an anthology, you mention that it was first published in this magazine). Whether the magazine pays in cash or glory, these are the minimum rights they are buying. And any writer is happy to grant them.
If you retain all other rights to the work, you can put it in a collection or sell the reprints to an anthology or post the piece on your website at a later date. A publisher that wants more than first serial rights should ideally purchase only non-exclusive rights to your work. (So, even if they can reprint it in an anthology later without your permission, you can reprint it without their permission.)
Sadly, it is not uncommon for publishers to buy all rights to the work that young people submit to contests or magazines. Sometimes they claim the copyright to winning and published pieces, but sometimes a publisher will say that just by submitting to them, you are giving them the rights to your work.
It’s not that they’re greedy; they’re avoiding potential legal headaches by buying the work outright. (Because you would not believe how many people claim their ideas were stolen. “I sent a story about a lost dog to your contest and now someone else published a story about a lost dog. I’m suing!” Seriously, no one wants to steal your ideas. If your story was worth stealing, it would be worth publishing.)
I understand the motivation for a blanket rights seizure, and it’s the way that rights are purchased in most kids’ contests that I’ve judged (and I’m a staunch supporter of those contests — they’re fabulous!), but I believe that authors of any age should retain the rights to their work — at least non-exclusive rights — unless they’re extremely well paid (and a $50 prize is not well paid, though it’s way better than a $0 prize).
If you give away all your rights to, say, a poem, then you can’t include that poem in your collection five years from now, you can’t read it aloud on your podcast, you can’t even include it in the autobiography you write 40 years later after you become a famous author.
(Well, you could write the original publisher and ask for permission for any of those things and they will likely say yes, because they are probably nice people who want you to succeed, which is why they’re involved in children’s publishing in the first place — but still, you’d have to get permission to publish your own poem that you sold for $10 when you were 12, and they could say no if they’re rotters and you can’t do anything about it, and that’s just wrong. IMO.)
Chances are, you will never want to republish a story you wrote as a child, so it could be worth any price. $10? Take it! Let me write you another dozen! Just know what you’re getting into. Read the terms before you submit anything. Writers have rights. (Till they give them away without reading the fine print.)
Now you can get back to my list of Print and Online Magazines open to Canadians under 18, with links to further resources.
And check out my list of Contests open to Canadian Writers under 18.
Good luck!
Catherine Austen 