As to worlds and such, Star Wars anthologies are letting other people come into the existing world. If I were to establish a world, it would be different to want to maintain rights to the characters. This is not what I want.
If you're creating a world in which the stories have to take place, then you're letting people play in your setting. Unfortunately, I don't know how rights work in shared-world situations.
Perhaps I phrased it wrong, but my desire was merely to be offered the story first (if I am going to try to publish more books). The author would be under no obligation to sell it to me, merely give me the first chance to make an offer.
It sounds like you're talking about "right of first refusal," which I've heard of when one author is selling a book to a publisher, but I've never heard of when it comes to short stories or anthologies. I'd say the best way to get an author to come back and publish with you again is simply to do a good job the first time around, and build a good relationship with them. Locking them into having to show their next story to you first (even if they don't have to take the offer) would set off alarm bells for me. If you buy a story from them for one anthology, you could always send them an email when you're planning the second to see if they have something they'd like you to consider.
The 90 day clause makes me uncomfortable. If I am only getting First Print rights, why would I want to pay rates this high? I am not trying to come across as greedy. I am trying to understand the industry. The author being able to put the story up on their own website bothers me greatly. Why would anyone in this day and age buy a book when they can get the content for free? Also, as part of publishing, I was going to try to put out an E-Reader version. If the best way to do that is to offer residuals on top of initial fee, I would be open to that.
Most authors probably wouldn't just put the story up on their sites for free; that was just an example of what they
could do. More likely, they'd turn around and try to sell it to another market that accepts reprints and get paid for it again. But the point is that the rights belong to the author, not to you, so what they do with their print rights is theirs to decide. They're not going to get 5 cents a word for the reprint, either. What you're buying is the right to put it out there for the first time.
And, from the writer's side of things, 5 cents/word
isn't all that high. It's the absolute minimum for SFWA professional rates, and yeah, I'd be ecstatic to sell a story at that rate, myself. But once a writer's established, that figure will usually go up. It also doesn't have to be 90 days. It could probably be six months, though I'd say that's about as far as I'd go. That's why I'm suggesting you take a look at some of the other anthologies out there that are putting out calls for submissions to see what they're doing. Here's the language from the submissions page at
Beneath Ceaseless Skies:Rights: For this payment, we purchase the following rights:
First World Serial Rights
First World Electronic Rights
An Option to buy Non-Exclusive World Anthology Rights
An Exclusive Period to buy Limited-Time Exclusive Audio Rights
(This means that our payment buys the rights to publish your story on the Beneath Ceaseless Skies website, as well as the option, at our choice, to pay you again at the reprint rate specified in the original contract (usually 2 cents per word) to reprint your story in any future anthology of stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies and distribute that anthology anywhere in the world. It also gives us a time period during which we have the exclusive option, at our choice, to buy limited-time audio rights to your story, at the rate specified in the original contract (usually 1 cent per word), and podcast your story from the Beneath Ceaseless Skies website.)
(You can't publish that story as a first-run or "new" story anywhere else in the world, and you can't have it appear anywhere else, in print or online or as audio, before or for ninety days after we publish it. But after that you can have it reprinted online and/or in a reprint magazine and/or in any reprint anthology, like one of the many Year's Best collections.)
(You also can't sell the audio rights to anyone else for ninety days after we publish the story. And if during those ninety days we buy the audio rights from you, you can't have the story appear in audio form anywhere else before or for ninety days after we podcast it. But after that you can resell the audio rights, including to one of the many fiction podcast websites.)
We also hope that you will let us keep the story in our online archives after ninety days.
That's pretty standard for what I've seen in other online magazines. But if you're taking all print rights, then yeah, you're going to lose some writers. The stories are theirs; you're simply buying the right to publish them before anyone else does. Again, I can't speak to how that affects shared worlds.
As for why someone would buy the book if the content is available for free, it's worked well for Cory Doctorow and The Baen Free Library. If I put up a story and said, "Hey, my story is in this anthology!" with a link to the anthology, then people who dig that kind of story might go ahead and buy the whole thing, because there's even more tasty post-apocalyptic goodness inside.