Could major authors jump-ship on ebooks?

[nathan]

Could major authors jump-ship on ebooks?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/te...rticleBodyLink

[erazmus]

Well stealing the e-rights to their back-lists isn't going to inspire a lot of cooperation from any author.

The problem with the publishers assertions that they have the rights to older works in their catalogs in the new media is that many authors are loosing income because those publishers are not pursuing those rights. They claim they already have the electronic rights (patently absurd unless they hold a blanket right to all subsidiary media, which is the first thing any competent agent throws out of a contract) but they are not offering or trying to offer electronic editions of the back-list, in most cases.

It might be a different case if the major publishers were diligently processing the text of all those books into electronic format and offering them for sale. Look around, do you see a lot of older titles for sale digitally? Andre Norton, for example, had about two hundred books out. How many can you buy for your e-reader?

Not to mention that most publishers don't hold the electronic rights to the cover art-work either. Most working artists from the early eighties on were careful about retaining those rights.

Yes, some big authors might jump ship entirely with e-editions. I'm sure many in the business field have quietly been converting over to S-P all along anyway.

Mike

[Jaqhama]

Last week, Simon & Schuster said it would delay by four months the e-book versions of 35 titles being published in hardcover from January to April. Both the Hachette Book Group and HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide have also indicated they will delay e-book editions.

The publishers are worried about losing money as the ebooks are cheaper.Maybe the publishers should just forget about hardbacks and stick to good old fashioned normal paperback size?

I will certainly never pay upwards of $$35 plus for a hardback.

[erazmus]

No you wont because any major book store will have them heavily discounted. A new thirty dollar hardback is twenty-one dollars after my discount at my bookstore. Same with a big box retailer. Same Amazon. Usually, anyways.

Mike

[crystalwizard]

I smell lots of intellectual property lawsuits in the making...

[hughhowey]

This is going to be fascinating to watch. Very similar to what just happened with Hollywood writers as a new avenue for profits opened up due to emerging technology.

It's like watching a pack of wolves descend on a still-warm carcass. There's no way it's going to end pretty.

[erazmus]

Not if the established publishers all decide to try to steal the cheese. They really are in the best position, right now, to exploit the new rights created by the emerging technologies. But they get sidetracked by stupid, paranoid avenues of thinking like DRM, they are slow off the mark getting involved in any new technology, and to then turn around and try to just take rights they could not conceivably own from the authors whose work they depend on for the bulk of their entire business, that's just not smart.

A publishers catalog is its lifeline. Sure new books get the most attention, especially new best sellers, but its the fifteen year old paperbacks that are still reliably selling a couple of hundred thousand copies a year that keep everyone in business. The work is done on those, you just have to take orders, print and ship them. Just like an author's active back-list is the real bread winner for most writers, its the real money-maker for the publisher as well.

So, why piss off your writers by claiming something you don't have--electronic rights to the oldest part of their back-list--when you could just offer to pay for it, or to buy the parts you actually want and are going to use? It is silly to claim the digital/electronic rights, to claim you've had them all along, when you have made no move to exploit them for a decade and took steps to secure those rights in your newer contracts.

Not to mention that its the royalty rate they are really trying to dictate. If some judge were to agree that they have the electronic rights to all these books they are not, or have not been, publishing electronically and so they then bring out e-editions, what percentage of the price goes to the author? Normally that is spelled out in the contract but of course they are claiming these rights under the "competing editions" clause so no rate is mentioned. They want, I know this in my heart though I doubt anyone involved has been stupid enough to say so, they want to pay the same per copy royalty rate they pay on paper books.

But paper books involve thousands of times more up-front and on-going expenses than electric books. You don't have to print them, you don't have to warehouse them. You store one copy (plus back ups) and generate each copy sold at the point of sale. The "shipping" charges are minimal as you do all that over the internet. from the beginning publishers have greatly over priced e-books, basing their prices not on actual costs but on comparative costs of traditional books. Now they want to pay a royalty based on comparative royalties earned for traditional books. Or for as close to that as they can get away with.

The only way they can ever lock that down is to block out any competing electronic publisher from bidding in, by establish a claim on the rights to the millions of books written before electronic rights existed but still under copy right. I say this because not one of them has offered to secure the back list of their current authors with material predating standard e-rights language in contracts with an additional advance and a reasonable royalty rate based on the business model for e-publishing, which most of them have finally developed but try getting a look at it.

Forty percent of the sale price would not be unreasonable. Sale price under twelve dollars would still be more profitable on a per unit basis than any product they produce, with forty percent going to the authors. That would mean ten thousand units sales of a twelve dollar e-book would produce a payment to the author of forty-eight thousand dollars. Why not? There are no returns, little overhead. Just a lot of cash coming in. The publisher's seventy-two thousand remaining dollars should cover their expenses and still leave profit. especially if they are selling it themselves rather than farming it out to a third party (like amazon) that brings little to the table.

Instead what they'd like is for a book to sell near its hard-back price, say twenty dollars. And a royalty rate near book rate, say fifteen percent, which is what most authors get on hardback sales after the first ten thousand units sold. So if they sell ten thousand electronic copies under this model (harder to do with that price) the author will earn thirty thousand dollars and the publisher one hundred and seventy thousand. Well duh, and I'd like to set the rate I earn based on what I want as well. I'm sure my boss would prefer to pay me three dollars an hour, but I won't work for it, and neither will anyone else capable of doing the work.

Of course the idea may well be to tie the royalty rates to the rates of similarly priced paper books, because the public isn't going to keep on buying into high, hardback prices for electronic books. Sooner or later they are going to catch on that if a paper back can be sold for seven dollars, they shouldn't pay more than that for an electronic edition (in point of fact they should be paying about half, as that is saving of cost, e-book to paper). Once publishers finally give in to the facts and start pricing e-books like this, they aren't going to want to pay hard-back royalties. They are going to want paperback royalties.

That is seven percent, on average, of the sale price, after a hundred thousand units sold. (we'll leave the ridiculous returns reserve system out of it, for simplicity). So a writers measly ten thousand units sales at seven dollars earns them forty-nine hundred dollars. Instead of the twenty-eight thousand it should.

Of course the trick is to get the courts to go along with this reapportionment of electronic rights of older works. With the kind of money at stake down the road, publishers will almost certainly fight for it tooth and claw.

mike

[Tomolan]

It is hard to track digital material whither it's protected or not in the hands of their buyers.
The minute a buyer or hacker gets his hands on it, they have the potential to either giving the digital file away or resell it.
Sony went as far as having a little code on their CD's for a while until a threatening joint lawsuit by their buyers occurred.
So will someone tell me what’s the solution to protect the rights of the artist when the distribution or publishers are either unwilling or unable to guarantee or properly monitor it?

[Greybeard]

So will someone tell me what's the solution to protect the rights of the artist when the distribution or publishers are either unwilling or unable to guarantee or properly monitor it?

The only solution is not to publish or allow yourself to be published electronically. Any hacker can break any DRM in a matter of minutes, so DRM only harms law-abiding customers. Hackers will hack your work and give it away or resell it. But you have advantages.

First, it's a copyright violation and is illegal. Get together with two hundred other writers (all the other ones hacked by the same criminal) and sic your lawyers on them. The site will be shut down fairly quickly.

Second, they have small time sites. We have Amazon, Sony, B&N, Smashwords. Legitimate publications are easier to find.

Third, most of those free downloads aren't lost sales. People who download free material generally don't read it and wouldn't have bought it anyway. They grab it because it's free, mean to get around to it, and never do because by the time they've read what they're reading they've downloaded three hundred other free ebooks. Some of those downloads are lost sales, but relatively few.

Fourth, some writers prefer to think of it as free advertising. Someone reads a free ebook, like it and goes back for more, finds us on Amazon and buys the next book.

I think it was Neil Gaiman who pointed out that the real threat to a new writer isn't theft, but obscurity.

[Tomolan]

So far, I have no regrets of publishing an e-book (and later printed books) through Amazon.
I figure if people are going to make that much of an effort to steal my shit they are going to do it regardless. So long as the person read and love it, then goes and seeks to buy a hard copy I do not care.

I am not going to stop doing what I love because of a few self-righteous freaks that want something for nothing. They are not fans, but hoarders and need therapy.

I just want to see if my stories have merit and gain readership. So using e-publishing is a perfect medium before approaching an agent or New York Publisher.
We cannot have global readership if we keep live in fear of losing what is ours (or what we think was ours).


I agree with Greybread.

:-)