2005 - 08/2005 Meeting

Page Created: 09/25/10. Last Updated: 10/29/10. Last Google Group Page Update: 06/04/08.

SEAN FODERA

Mr Fodera's website is: http://www.seanfodera.com/

MEETING SUMMARY:

Meeting Date: August 13, 2005.

Meeting Site: Borders Books & Music, Paramus, New Jersey.

Official Attendance: 19.

Meeting Program: Talk by Literary Rights Agent.

Notes:

The Fodera Rights Agency closed in December 2006.

Meeting Memories:

Newsletter Account:

The most recent meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County was held on a blisteringly hot Saturday, August 13, 2005 at Borders Books & Music in the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey. Rights agent and author Sean Fodera was the guest speaker.

The Final Frontier met before the meeting at 7:00 PM. The topic was "Life after STAR TREK." The title referred to what had become of actors associated with the various TREK shows as opposed to how fans of the series could cope with the franchise having come to an end, at least for the foreseeable future. Vincent Carlucci led the wide ranging discussion of actors who had prospered, disappeared, or -- in a few cases -- died since the shows had gone off the air.

Speaker Sean Fodera is the principal of the Fodera Rights Agency which specializes in the resale of secondary rights to a variety of markets. These can include foreign rights, book club rights, e book rights, and others. He sometimes works for the author, but more often his client is a book company like Tor Books or Wildside Press, because most contracts give the resale rights to the publisher (although the author receives a percentage of the sale).

Mr Fodera had always been interested in publishing. After college he applied for an editorial position at Penguin Books but then discovered a higher paying position in the Contracts Department of the company's Children's Division. He later moved to Simon and Schuster and then to DAW Books before starting his own agency two years ago.

His position in the Contracts and Rights Departments of various companies placed him on the cutting edge of new technologies like e books. He organized the first e books autograph session with Palm and has given workshops about Publishing Law on behalf of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

A lot of his talk consisted of detailing the state of science fiction publishing in the world. This is an intricate and continually changing state of affairs. For example: a 50 year old treaty partitions the world into mutually exclusive territories allocated to the United States or the United Kingdom. Australia, however, has recently enacted legislation allowing the nation to import either U. S. or U. K. editions under certain conditions. Things have also changed in Russia over the past several years. Gone are the happy days when a book could be sold to a publisher who would pay in advance but go out of business before it actually got published. Mr Fodera sold one trilogy three or four times over the course of a decade to essentially the same people who kept going through bankruptcy proceedings. Japan is another special case. It is necessary to have contacts with multiple agencies in Japan because agents work with only particular publishing houses, so if you want to have a book seen by all the major players, you must work with four different agencies.

He also spoke about copyright law. This is an area of the law which has changed several times over the past 30 years. The net result of all these changes is that the author (or his estate) now holds the copyright for 140 years, which brings the U. S. into compliance with international copyright law. This is not to say that everything is now cut and dry. Publishing has an interpretation of legal terms that is different than other areas of jurisprudence. A couple of years ago, SFFWA had co-sponsored a weekend dealing with Publishing Law with the Chicago Bar Association. The CBA invited a Chicago area legal scholar to give the keynote address. Mr Fodera and another agent of SFFWA conducted the second seminar on the program. The theme of their talk was to disregard everything said by the prior speaker because a U S Appeals Court had overturned the traditional interpretation of the law the previous night.

The most amusing segment of our guest's presentation dealt with a sting perpetrated against a publisher named PublishAmerica. As part of this operation, writer James Mac Donald arranged for 17 science fiction writers to write a round robin romance novel titled ATLANTA NIGHTS written by Travis Tea. The contributors were told to ignore spelling, grammar, continuity and logic. Thus one chapter appears twice while another does not appear at all. Characters are killed in one chapter and are back without explanation in later chapters. The hero changes hair color, age, race, and sex at random throughout the book. The work was submitted and accepted by the publisher without editing. The talk was a hoot, and not the dry presentation that some had feared.