Work-for-Hire Contracts: What the Asimov’s Cover Fight Teaches Freelancers

A contract tells you what a client thinks you’re worth.

The fee is the number they say out loud. The contract is where they write down what they expect for it. Sometimes those two don’t match at all. One side thinks it’s selling a magazine cover. The other side has drafted a document that buys the cover, the painting, three free rounds of changes, the artist’s silence and the right to take the money back.

A famous science fiction artist ran into exactly that gap with Asimov’s, one of the oldest magazines in the genre, and he went public about it this week. Any freelancer who’s ever been handed a contract after the work already started should read what happened.

I write books for other people for a living, and every one of my clients owns the book I write. So I won’t tell you that giving up your rights is always wrong. I’ll tell you when it is.

What happened between Donato Giancola and Asimov’s?

Donato Giancola is a three-time Hugo Award winner and one of the top illustrators in science fiction and fantasy. In January, an art director at Asimov’s Science Fiction asked him to paint a cover for one of the magazine’s stories. The fee was $1,200, the same amount he’d been offered six years earlier. He took it anyway. Asimov’s is a small publisher that supports a genre he loves, and he assumed the terms would match his earlier covers.

He read the manuscript, gathered references and started sketching. Then the contract arrived. It was a work-for-hire agreement, and none of his earlier Asimov’s covers had been done that way. Those deals, he wrote, were settled “in a five minute digital handshake.”

The new contract demanded two to three rounds of sketch revisions and up to three rounds on the final art, all free. He wouldn’t own the original painting. He’d need permission before showing the art in his portfolio, on social media or on his website. And he’d have to sign an NDA letting the client claw back up to 100 percent of the fee if it decided, at its own discretion, that he’d broken it.

He offered a higher fee to cover the rights. He sent his own contract. The magazine’s legal department went five rounds with him over three months. That’s nearly as long as painting the cover would have taken. At the end of June, he told them to find another artist.

He said the art director was fine to work with.

The legal side, he wrote, “was not negotiating in good faith.” In his view, they were “looking for an artist to exploit.”

Is anyone else refusing Must Read Magazines’ contracts?

Plenty of people. Four-time Hugo winner John Picacio publicly urged writers and artists to walk away from the company’s magazines, calling the contracts “too predatory.” He was careful to aim that at the owner’s policies and to spare the editors and art staff.

Writers have walked too. Scott Edelman pulled a story Fantasy and Science Fiction had accepted last year after dozens of emails with the contracts department, though appearing there had been a lifelong dream. Commenting on Giancola’s post, he said he’d just been assured that the writers’ terms were fixed. He also said he’d never appear in a magazine that treats its artists this way.

Veteran cover artist Bob Eggleton said he got the work-for-hire language removed from a Fantasy and Science Fiction cover. It took two months for the publisher to approve his contract.

Who owns Asimov’s now?

In February 2025, Must Read Magazines bought Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Those are some of the oldest short fiction markets in the business.

The writers’ contracts blew up first. Authors reported clauses claiming merchandising and film rights, a waiver of their moral rights to credit and integrity, a morals clause, and no promise that unpublished stories would revert. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association issued warnings, and submission listing sites dropped the magazines. Must Read removed the moral rights waiver and the morals clause, added a 30-month publish-or-revert deadline, and made the merchandising clause removable on request. Picacio says the artists’ contracts he’s seen still carry moral rights and copyright waivers.

Whatever got fixed for writers didn’t reach the illustrators.

How much do science fiction magazines pay for cover art?

About what they paid thirty years ago.

Eggleton, whose first Asimov’s cover ran around 40 years ago, laid out the history in the same thread. In the 1980s, he recalled, a cover paid about $600. After Bantam Doubleday Dell bought the magazines in the early 1990s, the fee rose to $1,200. If his memory is right, Giancola was offered in 2026 the same money a cover paid more than three decades ago, with every right attached this time.

Prices have more than doubled since then. A flat fee for three decades is a pay cut, and a full buyout on top of it is a much bigger one. Another artist in the thread does plenty of work for hire himself. He takes those jobs, he said, because they pay him well. At Giancola’s level, $1,200 with no rights was “a joke.”

What does work for hire mean in a contract?

Under United States copyright law, a work made for hire belongs to whoever paid for it, from the moment it exists. The law treats the client as the author. The creator keeps no copyright and no right to reuse the work. In a commission like Giancola’s, they don’t even keep the physical painting.

A freelancer’s commission only qualifies if both sides sign a written agreement and the work fits one of nine categories in the law. A contribution to a magazine is one of them, so a cover can legally be work for hire. A standalone book usually can’t. I covered that in a piece on how ownership really transfers in a ghostwriting contract.

So the contract was legal. Legal and fair are different things.

Is a work-for-hire contract always a bad deal?

No. Every book I ghostwrite belongs entirely to my client. They own the copyright, the name on the cover and every future use of the text. I don’t get a byline. I can list the book in my portfolio only if the client acknowledges me in it or says I can. Clients are under nondisclosure from our first call.

Look at that list again. Full ownership, no credit, permission to show the work, confidentiality. It’s almost exactly the list Giancola refused.

The difference is the price. My clients pay a ghostwriting fee that assumes I’m handing over everything. The rights are part of what they buy, and they pay for them.

Giancola was offered the old fee for a limited use and then handed a contract that took everything.

When he offered to sell the rights for more money, the magazine wouldn’t pay. It wanted the ghostwriting deal at the freelance price.

Which freelance contract terms are red flags?

Unpaid revisions come first.

Revisions are normal. In ghostwriting, one or two rounds is standard, and I include one because we revise as we go. Six free rounds across sketches and finished art means working until the client gets tired of asking.

A rule against showing your own work is the second. In ghostwriting, that rule makes sense, because the client’s name goes on the book and they’re presented as the author. A magazine cover carries the artist’s name, and an illustrator’s portfolio is how the next job comes in. Making a credited artist ask permission to show a published cover protects nothing.

Then there’s the clawback. An NDA that lets the client take back the whole fee, on its own judgment, turns payment into a loan. My clients have real secrets to protect, and none has ever asked for that.

Watch the scope of the rights, too, because some contracts reach well past the job you were hired for. One artist in the thread warned about clauses claiming rights to past work or to anything made outside the job, common in game design contracts. Another noted that some publishers buy all reproduction rights but let the artist keep the original painting. That’s better than work for hire, because the artist can still sell the physical art.

Last, watch for a contract that shows up after the work starts. By then, walking away costs you the hours you’ve spent.

Why would a publisher want to own the original art?

Nobody outside the company knows. A digital file prints the cover. Owning the painting adds nothing for the magazine except one more thing the artist can’t sell. Several artists in the thread suspect AI. Their theory is that a publisher holding every right can feed the art into a training set, or point to artists who refuse and switch to generated covers. That’s speculation, and the company hasn’t said anything like it. It shows how little trust these terms have left.

The duller explanation is money. One veteran illustrator said second-use fees have shrunk or disappeared across publishing. Grabbing every right up front costs less than paying for each use later.

How should a freelancer handle an exploitative contract?

Do what Giancola did. Read every clause, decide what you can live with and say so in writing.

Offer options. If the client wants all rights, price all rights. If it wants more revisions, cap them and charge for extras. Send your own contract if you have one. A client acting in good faith will meet you somewhere. A client who answers every proposal with the same terms in different words is telling you who it is.

Get the contract before you start.

And be ready to walk. That’s hard when it’s a magazine you grew up reading. But a bad contract doesn’t improve after you sign it. Walking away cost Giancola the time he’d already spent. Signing would have cost him that painting forever.

Speaking up works, too. The writers’ contracts changed because authors compared notes in public and the SFWA got involved, and the magazines lost listings until they moved. Freelancers who stay quiet about bad terms leave the next person to sign them blind, and the person after that, until the bad terms become the normal ones.

What should writers check in a magazine or publishing contract?

Find out exactly which rights you’re granting, where and for how long, and ask about anything you don’t understand before you sign. First serial rights for a magazine story are normal. All rights, forever, in every medium, including film and merchandise, aren’t. Look for a clause that returns your rights if the work isn’t published by a set date.

Check when you get paid and what happens if the client cancels. A kill fee pays you when a project dies through no fault of yours. Check the revision limits, the NDA’s scope and any waiver of your moral rights. If a contract takes all your rights, have a publishing lawyer read it first. Writer Beware and the SFWA both track problem publishers, and I covered the basics in copyright law for writers.

A fair price for what you’re buying

Work for hire is a tool like any contract term. A fair version lets a client own something outright and pay properly for it. The version Giancola describes takes everything a creator has and pays for a sliver.

Know what you’re selling before you sign. The publishing and marketing hub covers more of the business side of writing, and if you’d like to see a fair work-for-hire arrangement from the inside, my ghostwriting services lay it out.

From the author

Build a Profitable Consulting Practice
Freelancers live and die by their contracts. I wrote Build a Profitable Consulting Practice about the part of consulting nobody teaches, from my first job onward.

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