Bad Contract Alert: ByteDance's Reading/Writing App - Writer Beware

Panzer was shaken from his afternoon nap by crying and the gnashing of teeth coming from the Catosphere. Our brave kitty boy hopped in the Panzermobile and headed out. Following all the chaos took him to the Writer Beware site. There he found a post about the newest contract writers need to avoid.

 

I'll have nightmares about this.

According to Victoria Strauss' post, there's a new readers' app looking for writers. The app is ByteDance's  Fictum. You might recognize ByteDance as TikTok's parent company. The post dissects Fictum's writers' contract. The contract states on the first tier writers are expected to produce 1,000 words per day per month. That's 30,000 words per month. For this, the writer will be paid $200 per month. In total the writer is to produce 200,000 words. The post points out other problems with the contract including cancellation clauses, royalty payment clauses, copyright clauses, right of first refusal for anything you write during the contract, and there's even more. There are several links to other posts included.

 

Panzer says, "Everybody says cats aren't good at math. ... But ... 30,000 words for $200 is only $0.01 per word, right?"

 

Note: This is a v-e-r-y l-o-n-g post. Bring a big glass of lemonade, three chocolate chip cookies (biscuits) and a brownie. If you plan to follow the links, you decide what to bring.

 

To read the post tootle over to bad contract