About
Stewart Ferris
Children’s screenwriter, script editor, and author of more than fifty books, translated into a dozen languages. Co-founder of Summersdale Publishers. This guide is one more attempt to put the inside of the business on the outside.
Stewart has spent his working life on both sides of a publishing contract. In the 1990s he co-founded Summersdale, a house whose list — travel, humour, dogs — still carries the shape of his taste. He has also sat in the author’s chair: novels (including the Ballashiels Mysteries), writing guides such as How to be a Writer and How to Publish Your Own Book, television and radio, and the theme song to Ricky Gervais’s first television series.
He is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Surrey, where he won the university’s Creative Writing Prize in 2017. His literary representation is with Paper Lion. He writes some fiction as Matt Mountebank.
Inside the Contract is not a substitute for an agent or a solicitor. It is a reading primer for the moment between the offer and the signature — the moment in which most of the damage, if there is going to be damage, is done.
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A link for a writer on the verge of signing.
Follow Stewart
The author’s site is stewartferris.com.
Contact
Enquiries about this guide, talks, or the books: [email protected].
This is a practical guide, not legal advice. The sample contracts are composites drawn from typical UK and US trade terms in the mid-2020s, not copies of any one publisher’s agreement. Always have an agent or a publishing solicitor read a deal before you sign it.