Morals Clauses

Morals clause from an old movie contract. If you lose “the respect of the public” you lose your job.

I had an interesting chat with my agent yesterday. We’re awaiting a new contract from Little, Brown, and she said that it should be fairly straightforward unless they include a morals clause.

I was confused. It is 1940? But (as happens fairly frequently) I am behind the times.

It turns out that a lot of publishers have responded to the #MeToo movement by inserting morals clauses in contracts. These basically say that if (between the time that the contract is signed and the book is published) the author behaves in a way that is inconsistent with his/her previous behavior, the publisher has the right to cancel the book. And (here’s the kicker) pay back the advance.

It’s clear where this is coming from. In recent cases (like this and this) publishers have cancelled books or dropped contracts when an author’s harassment of women or engagement in hate speech has come to light. And a publisher has to eat costs when that happens. I get that.

But…the way these clauses are written is alarming. The language is so broad that it basically says that a publisher can cancel a project and demand repayment of the advance if an author does anything the publisher does not like.

I can think of lots of behavior that publisher might not like–or that they might have disliked not so long ago. Voting for the wrong candidate, say. Dating or marrying someone of the wrong race or gender. Getting arrested at a protest. Joining a union. Becoming a member of the Communist Party. Contracting HIV. Remember when getting married was grounds for firing a teacher?

In the standard publishing contract, the publisher already has broad power to cancel a project for any reason, up to and including that they just don’t like the manuscript very much. They don’t need a morals clause for that. But normally, unless an author has done an astonishingly poor job, the advance is not repaid. That’s what publishers are trying to change.

I’m not a fan.

I’m not a fan of my publisher deciding when my behavior is or isn’t acceptable. (It’s their job to decide this about my manuscripts, not my actions.) I’m not a fan of writing clauses so broad and sweeping that they apply to a wide range of behavior and speech when the publisher (for now) is only trying to combat a narrow one.

Mostly, I’m not a fan because what these clauses do is take power out of the hands of authors and hand it to publishers. Considering that the children’s book field is made up mostly of women, this is especially ironic. Taking power away from individual women and putting it in the hands of large corporations (mostly controlled at their highest levels by men) is really, really not what the #MeToo movement is about.

So what’s the answer, if it isn’t a morals clause? I’m not really sure. Except to remind publishers that humans beings are messy, unpredictable, and sometimes dreadful. And so any enterprise that involves making contracts with human beings is going to involve some risk that they will behave in ways you don’t like.

Perhaps that’s just a risk that publishers have to live with.