Gon on.
Read this and tell me the publishers would all be taking great care of the authors in their stables if only Amazon wasn't such a bully.
Maybe I am naive about the publishing industry, but I doubt she'd have editors breathing fire at her if she'd had a story come out in a major zine or an anthology put together by some suitable Respectable Editor. I understand why publishers are afraid of Amazon in general, but why upend their own apple cart over an author's personal little venture there?
To expand on that a little: the e-book that's being treated as a sticking point is currently ranked #27,094 in sales on Amazon's e-book store, and that's with whatever boost this brouhaha has given it. It has all of three reviews. So in the first place, what is the publisher afraid of in terms of competition here?
In the second place, since when do an author's books compete with each other? Since when is a $2.99 e-book of short stories competing for the same dollars as a hardback novel from a major publisher? Is the publisher afraid that people will think that books by the same author are an interchangeable, fungible quantity and go with the cheaper "knock-off"? If they understand the business in even a little (and I think they do), they'd know that anybody who becomes a fan of hers via her e-books would be excited to know she has a big book deal lined up and a novel coming out.
If the publisher wanted a piece of the e-book action, they could have said so instead of going straight for hardball and trying to kill it.
This is troubling on so many levels. Writers are expected to carry the weight of their own promotion, and as others have observed, the best marketing is to write more. A bunch of stories spread out over a series of prior publications aren't going to attract very many new fans, but an always in print, readily available collection of them at a great price? That's extending a feeler outwards, and Amazon will lead readers of it right to her next release. Oh, yeah, Amazon will get the sale and it will therefore be on Amazon's terms, but that's still a sale the publisher wouldn't have got without the author and Amazon.
This is clearly an ideological move. From the way Davenport describes selling electronic rights in her post (and she's spot on!), I wonder if she didn't try to negotiate for them when the deal was signed. Every time an author tries to get out of giving over the e-book rights, the publisher can trump them. But every time they do that, it's got to be a little more worrying to them that an author didn't jump at the chance to wrap up those pesky the e-rights as a bonus.
So maybe they already thought of her as a troublemaker, and maybe they thought that when she signed anyway that meant she was totally cowed, she was In The System. She was On Their Side.
And then they find out that she's taken her back catalogue into her own hands and is making money with it without them. Their reaction makes no sense whatsoever from a business standpoint, but it makes perfect sense when viewed as ideologically fueled and unreasoning panic.
Publishers are increasingly only going to be able to survive using one of two models.
One is a glorified book mill that operates by selling people on obsolete dreams of legitimacy and celebrity, selling them these dreams in exchange for outrageous and never-ending fees in the form of cuts of the author's earnings.
The other is by selling authors a suite of valuable and useful services, taking a story and making it into a marketable product. The fact that the services a publisher provides are increasingly available to individuals as work-for-hire means that publishers are going to have to be really creative to make this work, which is why most of the big publishers seem to be trending towards the first option where they can get by on razzle-dazzle and... when razzle-dazzle fails... brute legal and financial force. The amount of actual value added by a publisher (in terms of promotion, substantial editing, etc.) is falling all the time.
(Small presses, on the other hand, seem to have more agility when it comes to embracing the "service-based" approach. Or maybe they're just more willing to.)
As the distinction disappears, so does the difference between "real" publishing and vanity publishing. In the end, the biggest remaining distinction is that with a vanity publisher, you only have to pay once and you still control your work.
The best model for writers to use when entering into a negotiation, of course, is the licensing model. That's what you do when you sell a story, you license the rights to it. In what other industry is the entity who holds the rights to something and licenses it to another entity the one that gets put over a barrel? In what other walk of life is the licensee the one dictating terms to the licenser?
Imagine phoning up Major League Baseball and saying, "Okay, your game seems like it might be pretty enjoyable with the right kind of help. It just needs a couple of changes. Oh, and by the way, while I'm accepting the rights to view it in my home, I'll
also be taking the re-broadcast and exhibition rights. What? Don't be naive, it's a standard deal. Anyway, I'm doing you a favor."
Of course, that can't happen because there's only one Major League Baseball and millions of viewers. And there are countless author aspirants with perfectly acceptable manuscripts waiting to take the place of anyone who says to a publisher,
"The terms you're offering are unconscionable. This is a scam and I will take no part of it."But as hard as it is to believe that it could make a difference, that's what it's going to take to change things. A mass willingness to stand up and refuse these terms starts with an individual willingness. Authors walking away from deals on the table, authors publicly naming and shaming publishers who use these tactics, the open labeling of open-ended electronic right "deals" being attached like a limpet mine to print deals as the scam that it is... that's what it's going to take.
Purely self-published authors crying in the wilderness won't do it. A few high-profile "exceptions that prove the rule" aren't going to do it. Some
really high-profile condemnations wouldn't hurt anything, but in the end, it's going to take a lot of people getting really angry to change anything.
Be angry. Be fierce. Be the RIAA and the MPAA of protecting your rights. Own your work. Own your rights.
Own everything you do, and sell it as dearly as you love it.
Don't tear down the people who walk away from the deals the industry is offering and take the one Amazon is making. Suffering in solidarity isn't going to change anything and it's not going to make anything easier or better.
Only change can do that.
