UPCOMING author and filmmaker, Farai Mungoshi has challenged authors to read the fine print of their publishing contracts before appending their signatures to avoid problems in the future.
BY TINASHE MUCHURI
The first son to prominent author Charles and renowned actress, Jesesi, Mungoshi told the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) Press Club on Friday that failure to understand a contract could backfire.
He described how they had been struggling to claim their ailing father’s titles from various publishers, as some of his works were now out of print.
“You must not just be desperate to look for a publisher, so desperate that you don’t read the small print, so desperate that you can’t read the contract,” Mungoshi said.
“On the book that you are writing now or the manuscript that you are holding, you must know all stages that it is going to go through because they are very important, otherwise you are going to shoot yourself in the foot.”
Mungoshi said the contracts his father signed with several publishers were still binding, although some of the publishers were no longer operational or the books were out of stock, so they decided to open Mungoshi Press to publish their works.
Mungoshi recalled an incident when the family had to do a sit-in demonstration at one publisher’s premises to access royalties due to their father.
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“This publisher kept on telling us they would send the money. But they never did. We decided to go there. We told them we were not leaving without the money and they told us to collect my father’s book,” he said.
Mungoshi said in another incident, a publisher told them to bring their bed-ridden father to their offices because he was the signatory to the publishing contract after the book had been selected as a school text.
“We asked them how we could bring Charles Mungoshi, lying sick in a bed … We cannot go forward with such contracts,” he said.
Mungoshi said his father penned some poetry and short stories that were yet to be published.
He said in the past, publishers used to organise meet-the-author events, where readers in schools were given a chance to meet and engage authors.
Mungoshi donated copies of his father’s last novel, Branching Streams Flow In The Dark, and his debut short story anthology, Behind the Wall Everywhere, to the UZ library.
