Short Story Contracts

I’m pretty comfortable with the technical portions of publishing, prepping files and the like. One part of the process I know very little about is the legal side. And I figure if I decide to do this thing, I’d better do it right. So over the past little while, I’ve been reading up on author contracts. It has been very useful that many magazines put up a template on their website. It looks like a large percent of mags use the SFWA’s model magazine contract as a starting place. It’s got good comments so you can understand the legalese.

Here are a few of the ones I’ve been looking at:

Model Anthology Contract – SFWA
Model Magazine Contract – SFWA I’ll probably use this one as a starting place if and when I decide to launch a magazine project.
Metaphorosis Magazine’s Contract pdf
Lightspeed Magazine’s Contract
Scribes Valley Publishing Short Story Contract
Podcastle Short Story Contract
TANSTAAFL Press Publishing Contract – Anthology – pdf
Thanks to Doug Lance from FictionMagazines.com, who sent me a copy of their template contract as well.