Publisher Signed Contract

I received a copy of the Knox Robinson contract today with the publisher's signature on it. That might not sound like much of a big deal, but believe me it is a big deal. If the publisher does not sign their own contract, then they will have no legal obligation to abide by the terms of that contract. Meaning, they won't have to pay you!

And yes, that has happened to me before. With Cogito. Cogito was the publisher who had accepted my second novel, The Vase, for publication. They sent me the contract. Unlike the contracts I received from Virtual Tales and from Melange Books, this contract had no publisher's signature on it. Sure it had the book's name, The Vase, and my name, and a place where my signature and the publisher's signature belonged, but those spaces were blank. Of course my signature place was blank, because I had yet to sign it, but the strange thing to me was that the space where the publisher's signature belonged was also blank.

Being a relatively new author, I went ahead and signed the contract and sent it back to them. But they never sent it back with the publisher's signature on it. And then, of course, none of the terms were met. I had no recourse because the publisher never signed it. And another red flag was that the publisher made himself unavailable to me, and to all authors I'm guessing.

So when my Cogito editors revealed to me that they were quitting the place, even suing Cogito for not paying them, I put two and two together. When the time allotments for editing passed, I used that as a legal way out of the contract. And then I found Penumbra to publish The Vase, and their contract had a publisher's signature on it, and there was no problem with them.

So yeah, getting the KRP contract with the publisher's signature on it was huge for me today. And they want my photo, mini bio, and jacket copy for the story, too. That means things are rolling over there at Knox Robinson Publishing. They also sent me a letter welcoming me to the KRP family and said that they plan on publishing all my future books as well. That is a great thing, too. Meaning when I write another book, I'll know that I already have a publisher willing to publish it. And not a small POD publisher, but a real print run publisher who gets their books into bookstores. Things seem to be working out for me. Hope it all pans out. We'll see.

Side note. I've made it clear to KRP that I will remain loyal to Melange Books for the Killer Series. So any future Killer books like the soon to be released Killer Eyes and the third book in the series tentatively titled The Killers Guild, will be published by Melange.