You’ve finally done it: you cracked the door of opportunity open, and you’ve got a bona-fide paying client eager to give you actual money in return for your writing. You’ve negotiated a fair rate and now all you have to do is deliver the agreed-upon content and collect your fee. Right? Wrong.

Stop.

Do you have a contract in place with this client? If the answer is no, I’m sure you have all kinds of reasons as to why that’s perfectly okay. “I have friends who’ve worked with them before, and they always pay!” might be one of them. Or “They paid me up-front, so I don’t need a contract.” Or my favorite, “Well, we negotiated everything in email, so I have a record just in case they don’t come through.”

Contracts aren’t just about getting paid for the work you do. They’re about setting terms for the protection of the client and for your protection. Any time you perform work without a contract in place, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to a host of issues beyond whether or not your paycheck shows up on time. And there is absolutely no such thing as, “I don’t have to worry about this stuff,” because—unless you have a crystal ball and an uncanny gift of precognition—there’s simply no way to know every possible “what-if” scenario if your bases aren’t covered.

You need to know how to read and understand any contract given to you, and you need to know how to draw up a contract in the event that the client insists they don’t need one.

Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. It’s always a good idea to consult a legal professional if you’re not sure. The following is based upon my experience but shouldn’t constitute legal advice for anyone, anywhere. It’s just to get you started. That said, there’s multiple issues involved when considering how a contract protects you, the writer, in a business situation.

Payment for services rendered. The first (and sometimes only) issue most freelancers think of in this realm is whether or not they’ll get paid. Hey, nothing wrong with that; we all want to be paid as promised, right? Ideally a contract specifies not only the agreed-upon rate, but also the terms for said payment. I generally default to invoicing the client at the end of the month, and then they have 30 days from invoicing to pay me. Depending on the size of the corporate hamster wheel involved at a given company, I’ve been asked—and have agreed, on occasion—to stretch that term to 60 days. In still other cases, it was negotiated that work be invoiced at project completion. This is all really up to you and the client, but having it in writing in a contract both parties have signed greatly increases the likelihood of payment being a reality. And in the unhappy event of payment not showing up when negotiated, well, a signed contract 1) is a stronger motivator to rectify the situation than a bunch of emails and 2) stands up a lot better in court.

Time limits and escape clauses. Again, a verbal (or email) agreement as to project scope is all good and well, but there’s a reason that most contracts have an entire section on how long the contract is good for and the fifty different ways/reasons either party is allowed to terminate. It’s no fun when a client suddenly emails you in the middle of a gig to say, “Oh, actually, we ran out of money. You can stop now.” A contract will typically specify that in lieu of failure to perform on your part (in which case—after specified terms, such as 7 days to rectify the issue—the client is free to fire you), the client needs to give you a certain number of days notice before terminating the contract. Similarly, a good contract will spell out that you also have to give the agreed-upon number of days notice to terminate for any reason, except in the case of non-payment, which (again, after specified terms, such as 30 days past due) allows you to quit immediately. This is good protection for both parties; it spells out the agreement, and clarifies that you both agree that failure of one party to deliver allows the other to end the business relationship.

Who owns the work? This one is, to my mind, the most important item a writer covers in a contract. Without a contract spelling this one out, you’re vulnerable to misappropriation of your work and little recourse to counter it. Similarly, if you don’t cover all your bases with this one even with a contract, you may still find yourself unhappy down the road.

Work-for-hire is a term you’ll likely see a lot. A contract that specifies your contributions are to be considered work-for-hire means, in short, that you agree to provide Product A for Payment B, end of story. You write, they pay, they now own your work. I cannot urge budding writers strongly enough to be extremely wary of work-for-hire contracts. I’m not saying never work this way, I’m just saying this is the least favorable positioning from the writer’s point of view, as it automatically transfers copyright of your work to the client, which they can then use in any way they want to. We’ll talk about this some more in a minute.

Licensing is the alternative to to a work-for-hire copyright assignment to the client. The typical verbiage I use with my clients is that I grant them a “Perpetual, royalty-free license to use the works on www.site.com and in related marketing materials.” This means that the fee they are paying me for my writing allows them to use my writing both on the site for which I wrote it and even in newsletters or other venues which promote that site, but not for any other purpose. It further means that I retain the copyright to my work, but the fee they are paying means they can use it forever in the agreed-upon manner without paying me any additional money.

Exclusivity is something you’ll need to address if you are merely granting license to the client for your work. Obviously it behooves any client to have an exclusive on your work for some period of time. If they’re allowing you to retain copyright, that means whatever you produced for them you may end up reproducing somewhere else, so you need to spell out how long they get to be the only ones who have that content before you’re allowed to use it elsewhere. In the area of online writing, content turns over pretty quickly; most of my clients are okay with 30 days of exclusivity. In other cases, they want 6 months or a year. If you’re dealing with work you’re likely to want to repurpose elsewhere, bear in mind that there should be a corollary relationship between the length of exclusivity and the fee you’re paid; the longer the client gets to be the only ones with that material, the more they should be paying. So now the line suggested above actually would get tweaked just a little, plus given an accompanying qualifying preface, like so: “The Works shall be licensed exclusively to Client for 30 days after submittal. Thereafter, Client is granted perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use the works on www.site.com and in related marketing materials.”

Why does ownership of your work matter? If you’re getting paid, aren’t they buying it? Again, I can only speak to this from my experience, but here’s a few things to consider.

If you give away copyright, that means your work can now be used for absolutely anything by the client, and for nothing at all by you. To give you the most extreme example of why you might not want to do that: Say you agree to write a column for an online site about… oh… butterflies. Maybe you’re a total butterfly expert. And you love writing about butterflies, and this is your first paying gig and you’re just so excited to be getting paid for writing about something you love. You agree on a fee and sign a work-for-hire contract and merrily write along for years, gathering a bigger and bigger audience for this site, and an agent approaches you to write a book about butterflies. Not only can you now not use any of the material you contributed to the client site, but guess what! The site owners can publish a book about butterflies composed entirely of your writing, with your name on it, even, and not pay you a single cent.

I do a lot of writing about my family, as I know a lot of my readers here do, as well. As horrifying as the above scenario should sound to you, now substitute “your family” for “butterflies.” Yeah.

Should I ever give up copyright? It is my position that there are certain kinds of work that most writers are going to hold dear and personal for which they should never be willing to give up copyright. That, of course, is going to vary from writer to writer. On the other hand, sometimes a client is going to hire you to write about wallpaper paste, and maybe that doesn’t matter so much to you, and you’re willing to let them have that. There are cases where giving up copyright makes sense; the thing to remember is that full copyright costs more. You may even be willing to give up copyright on a very personal piece of writing if the price is right, but that’s between you, the client, and whatever guiding force you use to determine these things. Without resorting to actual numbers—because those will vary, too—I can tell you that my mental yardstick is that copyright assignment is going to cost my client roughly ten times what non-exclusive licensing will. I’m not saying this is The One True Way, but that’s how I do it.

If a client is pushing for copyright, ask them what else they think they’d like to use your material for. Maybe they want the freedom to put your content on their sister site, for example. If you can get them to articulate what other usage they have in mind, you can probably negotiate additional licensing rather than giving up copyright entirely. If their position remains “We just want it,” well, then you have a decision to make.

But I would never reuse this content anyway! It doesn’t matter! Again, if you feel pretty strongly that you’d never use the content, it may make sense to go the work-for-hire route (provided you charge accordingly, of course). On the other hand, if your reasoning is “and they’ll never use it for anything else because I’m a nobody,” consider the possibility that in ten years you’ve written a New York Times bestseller; might a client for whom you wrote an entire series on some topic—particularly if it’s done in the style for which you’re being lauded (humorous or poignant or whatever)—decide to package a book of your past work, cover sporting a great big “From NYT bestselling author” and make a boatload of money? I know it sounds silly. But is it?

But the client won’t budge. They say it’s total copyright or nothing. If it’s work you desperately want to retain rights to, or if the fee being offered doesn’t jive with your requirement for copyright relinquishment, it might be time to consider that this is not the right client or the right gig for you.

Writing isn’t like serving burgers. You’re not just performing work, you’re creating something that probably means something to you. If you’re in this business for the long haul, there’s a very real possibility that your work will increase in value over time. Don’t leave yourself vulnerable in the future because you were in a hurry to make a few bucks today.