My publishing focused startup will be decloaking very soon, I've worked in the fiction side of publishing quite a bit. Non-fiction authors have it rough, they

My publishing focused startup will be decloaking very soon, I've worked in the fiction side of publishing quite a bit. Non-fiction authors have it rough, they don't have the associations that educate writers about the business and contracts. The Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of America are very active and have a lot of resources, such as sample contracts read it and you'll learn a lot http://www.sfwa.org/category/sample-contracts/ http://www.sfwa.org/category/sample-contracts/ They also run writer beware, which is the publishing worlds version of the BBB. http://accrispin.blogspot.com/ http://accrispin.blogspot.com/ What I will say is this, almost all publishers have you assign them the copyright for the entire term. Rights to a publisher are broken into specific blocks and some of those blocks can be carved out, others you'll never get. Indemnification is possible for fiction but rare in non-fiction because you know more about the topic than the publisher they can't know if you're giving bad advice. Really I'd suggest you get an agent, they've invested thousands of hours understand how the publishing system works and know what is possible to push for in dealmaking. If you're getting invited to write books you can get an agent. I know of one older agent near the valley that was an engineer for DEC in the 1970's.