Hope all of you U.S. visitors had nice Thanksgivings and a great holiday weekend.

I thought this might be a good day for a writer/reader question! The Jaunty Quills will be answering questions from writers/readers on a semi-regular basis. If you have a question, you can email it to me at jenna (at) jennapetersen.com (without the space and with the real symbol, of course). I’ll put them in the queue and answer them in order.

This is the last carry-over question from my JessnJenna blog. There is one question in the queue after this one from Isabel:

I’m under the impression an author holds the copyright of their book/work after it’s published. What happens when that author leaves that publisher and wants to take her characters with her? Let’s say she wants to continue a popular series with her new publisher, is this a possibility?

This is another one of those ‘it depends’ questions. That seems to be my stock answer, doesn’t it? It all boils down to the contract, which is another reason why having a literary agent is so darn important. Everything about who owns what and what who can do with what they have is outlined in the contract. It used to be more prevelant for publishers to retain rights to characters or the fictional town a writer created… even their pen name. Then a bunch of writers organizations (NINK and RWA were two of them) entered into a negotiation with publishers to have those kinds of contract clauses eliminated, or at least reduced. That means the author has more rights, which is good. But if an author had one of those older contracts, that could be a limiting factor on taking a series of stories somewhere else.

Most authors, I would guess, do not split their series’ between multiple publishers, though. It happens, but it’s more likely that an author would start something new with a new publisher. But, it is possible to take the characters/series into a new publishing house. You just have to make sure it’s contractually allowed.

Literary agents, people. So much more than a gateway between aspiring authors and editors.