Reedsy's Contest Terms Take From the Writers They're Meant to Help
Reedsy runs a weekly short story contest. The community around it is genuine. Real readers, real feedback, prompts that are actually interesting. I've watched a lot of writers use it and the platform does what it says it does.
I read the contest terms recently. There's a clause in there that I haven't been able to shake.
What you're agreeing to
When you submit a story to a Reedsy writing contest, you grant them:
"a non-exclusive, irrevocable, perpetual, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, publish, edit and otherwise use the entry...in all media now known or hereafter discovered"
Reedsy Prompts Terms of Use
That licence never expires. It can't be revoked. Not when you delete your account. Not if your story gets published somewhere else. Not ever.
Reedsy can edit your story, compile it into an anthology, and sell that anthology. They can pass the licence to a third party or sublicense it to whoever they like. You get no share of any revenue that comes from it. The rights extend to formats that don't even exist yet.
You also pay $5 to enter.
Why it bothers me
Reedsy positions itself as a platform built to support writers. The contests, the community, the editorial services are all genuine parts of that. But taking a permanent commercial licence from someone, without compensation, while they're paying for the privilege - that isn't supporting writers. That's extracting from them.
There's a practical problem too. Some literary magazines won't accept work that already carries commercial licensing. The terms also require you to permanently credit Reedsy in any future publication of that story. So every time that story appears somewhere - in a collection, in another magazine - it has to name the platform it came from. That's a significant restriction on a piece of work a writer might want to do more with.
Most writers clicking submit won't read a terms document. That's not naive, it's just normal. The reasonable assumption is that a free weekly writing contest is low-stakes. These terms make it higher-stakes than that.
What I built Novellier around
This kind of thing was exactly what I was thinking about when I built Novellier.
The principle I kept coming back to was simple: your writing is yours. Novellier doesn't store manuscripts on our servers. There's no licence over your work, not for publishing, not for AI training, not for anything. You write in Novellier like you'd write in a document on your desktop. The content belongs to you and nobody else touches it.
That felt like the baseline to me. Writing software should be a neutral surface. It holds your work while you're using it. It doesn't get a stake in what you produce.
Writers already have enough to deal with. Query letters. Rejections. Rights negotiations with actual publishers when the time comes. The tool you write in shouldn't be one of those negotiations.
Reedsy's terms are public and not hidden. The issue is that they're also not the first thing you see when you decide to enter a contest. Read them before you submit anything.
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