Legitimate Questions
Mar. 23rd, 2011 01:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinThe question used to be "Can self-publishing ever have the legitimacy of traditional publishing?"
Now it's becoming increasingly apparent that the real question is: what is legitimacy?
Can I spread it on bread and eat it as a sandwich? Can I pay the rent with it? Can I burn it to provide heat, light, and/or energy to power the gadgets that run my life?
If not, then why is it worth giving up so much money, so much control, so much of the chance to make an actual living at one's craft that so many authors are still chasing after it?
I say again as I always say that self-publishing is not a surefire path to fame and fortune, but there isn't such a beast. Self-publishing is merely an alternate route. It perhaps requires a slightly different skill set, but that's not as true as it seems and it's less true all the time.
I mean, I've long wondered how I'm managing to succeed when I'm really not that good a marketer. I'm socially inept. I don't like putting myself forward. I have long rambling arguments with people I've never met. If you meet me in person, I probably won't smile much or look directly at your face. I'm just not a natural schmoozer.
But there's a phrase I'm seeing being bandied about that really sums up my success. I'm trying to find it, but I've seen so many links in the past few days on the subject... I believe it was Joe Konrath (publishes as J.A. Konrath) who said it, but I'm not going to swear to that. I may have seen him quoting someone else saying it. It basically boils down to the idea that the best marketing is writing. The best way to attract readers is to put more material out, in other words. Each bit you have is another thing that someone can stumble across, and more importantly, it's something that will keep them reading.
Again, there are no guarantees. You can't just start typing and throw it up and say "I wrote a million billion books, where are my readers?" But people... no matter what any doom-and-gloom Idiocracy-watching cynics say... are readers by nature. I don't mean to say that every human being is literate or that we all enjoy the habit of reading, but our brains are wired to seek patterns and connect with stories. We are a people of tales.
If you produce tales that are readable, people will read them.
That's it. I mean, that's really it. The most important marketing you can do is to make your work available. Put it where people can find it. If it's readable, some people will like it. Some people will love it. Some people will label it as the 90% of everything that's crap, but some people will see something in it that appeals to them. Think about the worst book you've ever read, the worst movie you've ever seen. Somebody loves that.
I'm not saying you should aspire to that level of crapulence. I'm saying that if you're better than that, you could be someone's favorite thing.
We have self-published millionaires. We have self-published authors who are outselling the industry-crowned "bestsellers". We have self-published authors who have signed movie deals. We have self-published authors who have signed trad-pub deals, for that matter, and that was supposed to be impossible. Even last year I was still seeing people saying that if you put a book on the internet kiss the idea of publishing it goodbye even though these people were already wrong last year. They're more wrong this year, and I'm sure they're still saying it.
Now, I'm not one of the self-published millionaires. I aspire to make boatloads of money but my strategy is not based on gambling that I can be one of the few people to reach the top of the pyramid. Remember: no matter what route you take, there's only going to be so much room at the top. The point is that the questions of whether the internet can support an author, whether self-published authors can have commercial success, whether a "tip"-based or "shareware" model can work... these questions are all answered.
Now that's not to say that there aren't still piles of failures abounding. If you want to find an example of someone who tried to make money using a pay-what-you-will model or putting their work up on Amazon without any gatekeeper's blessing or whatever and failed, you wouldn't have to look hard.
But the same is true of the trad-pub world. I say this a lot because if I don't say it then people will keep making the same mistake of comparing the failures of one model to the successes of another.
Forget for the moment that most of the books you see on the shelf are going to lose money. Forget that there are even more books put out by the publisher that didn't make it on the shelf. Forget that a tiny fraction of best sellers is keeping afloat an industry that regularly gambles hundreds of thousands of dollars on unknown quantities of unknown quality.
When you compare a failed self-publishing venture.. an e-book that sells three copies and two of them to the author's grandparents, a tip jar that sits lonely and unclicked... you aren't looking at the equivalent of the underperforming books of the trad-pub world. You're looking at the slush pile. You're looking at the drawer manuscripts. You're looking at the rejects and cast-offs.
And for every book that ends up on the shelf atyour local neighborhood bookstore Borders Barnes & Noble, how many books do you think weren't published?
Those are the failures. If we're going to compare the models, we have to start by disregarding the books that don't make it on either side of the fence and focus on the successes. If we're going to judge either route by the "typical" experience of an author who attempts to undertake it, we might as well discard both routes as failures.
When I started down this road, I was fond of saying that I wouldn't consider "selling out" and taking my stuff to a trad-pub outfit unless they could give me a better deal than the one I could make for myself. Back then I was talking about control and self-respect more so than money. If I could make any money doing it my way, that was worth it. I was aware even then that if I was making a living at it I was doing well, but I really wasn't thinking in terms of self-publishing beating trad-pub at every level.
But that was 4-5 years ago. So much has changed since then.
I'm not predicting the death of publishing or of print. There are predictions out there that paper's going to be the niche and digital will be the default medium, though, and I think that prediction has legs in some regards. I believe the day is coming when electronic rights become the medium of exchange between publishers and authors and when a print deal is awarded to those authors who can prove their selling power in the digital world. That's become the bread and butter of small presses. They can put out any number of modest successes without breaking their nigh-unto-non-existent budgets, and those works can remain "in print" and on sale, and when and if the demand for one justifies it they can bring out a print edition already knowing that it will recoup its costs.
If the Big Publishers haven't outwardly adopted that approach yet, it's simply organizational inertia. It will happen, though. E-books will become their main line, with print being the "prestige" product, the premium. Already in discussions of e-book pricing people talk about print as a premium. They talk about the appeal of a well-made tome, beautiful cover, the weight and heft (or slimness, in some cases) of it. There are beautiful books out there, to be sure. Making a book is more often manufacturing, but it can be an art in and of itself.
So rather than envisioning the death of print, let's talk about the rebirth of the art of bookmaking. I see my friends who deal in small and medium presses talking about this. Papaveria Press puts out some very lovely books. Cat Valente sold one of her e-pubs recently and announced plans are afoot for a beautiful hard copy. That's her word, and I have no reason to doubt it. However we disagree about certain business matters, I would not argue with her about matters of aesthetics and not just because my eyes are tone deaf.
But here's why I think it's inevitable that e-printing will become the entry level tier and print books will be higher tier: buying the print rights is making a gamble. It's investing hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital in a venture that's probably not going to break even. The ones that do pay for the ones that don't, but they do everything they can to avoid the ones that don't, obviously.
E-book rights, though, are a gold mine. Not individually. Any given e-book right they purchase may or may not ever catch fire. But the cost of bringing it to market is smaller. It's a one-time investment, and then they have bandwidth and storage costs that are cheap and getting cheaper. E-books that fail to pay off the initial investment are going to be a smaller loss than print books. The aggregate of all the e-book rights the publisher owns is the 21st century goose that lays the golden eggs.
It's not quite a license to print money, but in some ways it's better. After all, printing is expensive.
So it makes more sense for publishers to aggressively pursue e-rights than print rights (though I imagine they'd lock the print rights down in the contract so the author couldn't go anywhere else.) If publishers haven't realized this yet, they will. I've already heard reports of authors who were told that selling the electronic rights was a non-negotiable part of getting published with them, and of contracts that seem to have an expiration date for the electronic rights but only say that if in two or three years the parties can't agree on terms then no one gets to use the electronic rights until they come to an agreement.
Who wins there? The publisher needs e-books for their library, but not this specific e-book. They can get another e-book. The author can't get another publisher for this one.
Pursuing e-books aggressively is going to be how Big Publishing survives the coming changes. I'm not suggesting that it's endangered as an entity. Quite the opposite. The changes we're seeing today are only new insofar as they're different from the changes of yesteryear. Any publishing house that's earned the moniker "Big" has distinguished itself by its ability to survive and even grow in an environment where its competitors failed.
Some people call the big publishers dinosaurs, but they're more like another extinct animal: sharks. Oh, sharks aren't extinct? Well, shit. You'd expect them to be since they're 450 million years old. How'd they last that long? Being sharks.
Now, when I talk about Big Publishing people who work with folks at the Big Publishing houses leap to their defense. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about people. I'm talking about corporate entities. The person isn't there to get rich. The person is there because they have a passion for the written word, or they fell in love with the glamor and romance of it all, or because they want to help the authors they believe in bring their works to market.
You want to tell me about your friends at Random House (to pick a house at random... well, not really. I thought "random publishing house" and there it was.) and I'm sure they're wonderful people and all. Random House, the company? It was founded in 1925. Half a decade before the Great Depression, which it survived. The number of companies it has absorbed, bought out, or out-competed is longer than a prolific author's bibliography.
I'm not pointing fingers. I'm not suggesting it's EEEEVIL, like the FRU-ITS of the DEVIL. I'm just saying: this is a company that knows how to survive in an industry where it's notoriously hard to make a profit. People within the company might have your back, but the corporate entity is not your friend.
Of course, when we understand that this is an industry that generates close to $25 billion in net sales every year, and we consider how hard they apparently have making a profit... well, let's bring this back to self-pub and e-pub.
There's an amazing amount of money in digital publishing. An amazing amount. And digital publishing... especially in the more platform portable/minimalist formats like .epub and .mobi... really strips the business down to the basics: you have content, you have an audience for the content.
The words are the product. Not a book. Not a bright and shiny image of what literature is supposed to be. Not a space on a bookshelf. The words. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not a lot of room for a man to stand in the middle.
What will your publisher do in exchange for the e-rights? Well, they'll give you a share of the profits. Let's parse that: they'll take all the money that your content generates and give you a share of it.
What are they doing that entitles them to all the money in the first place? They'll do some editing but publishers don't generally accept unpolished manuscripts these days anyway. Typesetting/formatting? Not really a thing when you're trying to get on Kindle. I advise anyone who's selling a book to stop and look at the mobile formats. Get acquainted with what goes into them. Put one of your stories on Amazon Kindle using their upload conversion thingy. Put one of your stories on Smashwords. It can be the same story; they don't require exclusive rights. Spend an afternoon learning how these things work.
The publisher may do a bit more in order to justify their share. They might get you a cover designed by their in-house/contract people, for instance. Okay. This justifies them having 80% of the money your e-book gets forever? I guarantee you they paid the artist once. That's work for hire. They don't have to keep paying a royalty every time someone buys a copy. Why does them arranging artwork once give them the right to your money forever?
And it's your money. These are the terms you have to think in. Be like the music industry. Be like the movie industry. Not evil, but fierce in the protection of your rights. Do not give your rights away. Do not for anything in the world sell the electronic rights.
License them.
You are a licensor.
The publisher is a licensee.
When it comes to physical printing, it might be better to think of it in terms of you purchasing the use of their facilities and expertise, but in the electronic publishing world where the raw content is the product and you are the provider of the content? You're licensing to them. And chances are if you've already signed a contract then that contract is hideously lopsided, under the circumstances.
A fair contract for e-publishing has an expiration date with rights reverting to you, full stop, or else it gives either party the right to exit without penalty. A fair contract doesn't limit the book's earning power by locking it into a too-high price; it allows the e-book to be priced at a price that will move even if that price is markedly lower than print. Inflated prices for e-books isn't about valuing the author's work; it's a self-defeating attempt to undercut new media by old media even while the old media tries to profit from it. It's irrational, but human beings and corporations aren't perfectly rational entities.
As the economic appeal "premium/prestige print paradigm" becomes more apparent, I expect we'll see less resistance to cheaper e-books... though they will probably go for a little of that and a little inflation of print prices to make $10 an e-book seem cheap.
Now here we come up to the harsh reality of it all.
You're an unknown author, a first time author. Or maybe you're an established mid-list author. Maybe you're even a fairly reliable money-maker. And you have a deal on the table but you say, "I'm sorry, the terms of the transfer of electronic rights are not acceptable. I know I could make more money doing it for myself. I'll consider these terms if you agree to a smaller share and the rights revert to me after a year unless we both agree to continue the deal for another year."
You know what happens then? I predict: you lose the deal.
Because there's no hole in their publishing schedule they can't fill. If you're not a household name, they don't need your e-book. They don't want your e-book in particular. You might be able to negotiate a slightly better deal but you're not going to get anything that's anywhere close to being fair.
I'm not even convinced a publisher can offer a fair deal on e-publishing. I mean, Amazon's 30% off the top is already a big chunk but it's an amazingly low price because they have built an amazing content delivery service that is worth paying 30% of your value to get in on.
What does the publisher do, if it holds the electronic rights to your book?
Your publisher plugs you into that network. That anyone can get into. For free. With very little work or expertise.
What can your publisher possibly charge you for that "service" of putting itself between you and Amazon that would both be a fair price for you to pay (I'm not saying they do nothing there) but also worth their time as a major corporate entity? They'd have to throw away their gatekeeper badge entirely and just be a slush-shoveler if they were going to make money by putting stuff up on Amazon and charging a fair price for the service.
And here's where we come to the soft underbelly of the harsh reality.
Before, the publisher didn't need you but you needed them.
Now? No. No, you don't. If the publisher tells you no, that's... well, you can make a better deal for yourself. That's why you stood up to them. This is true if you're a new author. If you're an established author. If you're turning down your first contract or you're turning down a half million dollar offer. You can get a better deal.
On the other hand, I fully understand that some authors just Do Not Want To Deal With That Stuff. I understand it. I'd urge any author who feels that way to take a look at Amazon and Smahswords and the like on a day when they're feeling adventurous and/or relaxed because they might learn that there's less Stuff to deal with than they thought. But I understand it.
So I'm not completely pooh-poohing the idea of the publisher as an intermediary between authors and e-book-stores. But really that's what they're going to need to position themselves as, in the long term.
And if your goal is to be in print, to have that "legitimacy"... whatever it is... then maybe you ultimately sign on the line that is dotted and you throw in the e-rights like they're an after thought. People have made worse business decisions. And it doesn't mean you'll never see any money from the e-books.
But authors owe it to themselves to think about what they're signing away. Does the music industry sell you music? No. It licenses the right to use it. does the movie industry sell you movies? No. It licenses them.
Think long and hard before you sell your words. If you say "Thanks, but no thanks," the publisher might not miss those words, but if you say, "Sure! Take them! Have them! I have more words, do you want them, too?" you might never get them back.
Now it's becoming increasingly apparent that the real question is: what is legitimacy?
Can I spread it on bread and eat it as a sandwich? Can I pay the rent with it? Can I burn it to provide heat, light, and/or energy to power the gadgets that run my life?
If not, then why is it worth giving up so much money, so much control, so much of the chance to make an actual living at one's craft that so many authors are still chasing after it?
I say again as I always say that self-publishing is not a surefire path to fame and fortune, but there isn't such a beast. Self-publishing is merely an alternate route. It perhaps requires a slightly different skill set, but that's not as true as it seems and it's less true all the time.
I mean, I've long wondered how I'm managing to succeed when I'm really not that good a marketer. I'm socially inept. I don't like putting myself forward. I have long rambling arguments with people I've never met. If you meet me in person, I probably won't smile much or look directly at your face. I'm just not a natural schmoozer.
But there's a phrase I'm seeing being bandied about that really sums up my success. I'm trying to find it, but I've seen so many links in the past few days on the subject... I believe it was Joe Konrath (publishes as J.A. Konrath) who said it, but I'm not going to swear to that. I may have seen him quoting someone else saying it. It basically boils down to the idea that the best marketing is writing. The best way to attract readers is to put more material out, in other words. Each bit you have is another thing that someone can stumble across, and more importantly, it's something that will keep them reading.
Again, there are no guarantees. You can't just start typing and throw it up and say "I wrote a million billion books, where are my readers?" But people... no matter what any doom-and-gloom Idiocracy-watching cynics say... are readers by nature. I don't mean to say that every human being is literate or that we all enjoy the habit of reading, but our brains are wired to seek patterns and connect with stories. We are a people of tales.
If you produce tales that are readable, people will read them.
That's it. I mean, that's really it. The most important marketing you can do is to make your work available. Put it where people can find it. If it's readable, some people will like it. Some people will love it. Some people will label it as the 90% of everything that's crap, but some people will see something in it that appeals to them. Think about the worst book you've ever read, the worst movie you've ever seen. Somebody loves that.
I'm not saying you should aspire to that level of crapulence. I'm saying that if you're better than that, you could be someone's favorite thing.
We have self-published millionaires. We have self-published authors who are outselling the industry-crowned "bestsellers". We have self-published authors who have signed movie deals. We have self-published authors who have signed trad-pub deals, for that matter, and that was supposed to be impossible. Even last year I was still seeing people saying that if you put a book on the internet kiss the idea of publishing it goodbye even though these people were already wrong last year. They're more wrong this year, and I'm sure they're still saying it.
Now, I'm not one of the self-published millionaires. I aspire to make boatloads of money but my strategy is not based on gambling that I can be one of the few people to reach the top of the pyramid. Remember: no matter what route you take, there's only going to be so much room at the top. The point is that the questions of whether the internet can support an author, whether self-published authors can have commercial success, whether a "tip"-based or "shareware" model can work... these questions are all answered.
Now that's not to say that there aren't still piles of failures abounding. If you want to find an example of someone who tried to make money using a pay-what-you-will model or putting their work up on Amazon without any gatekeeper's blessing or whatever and failed, you wouldn't have to look hard.
But the same is true of the trad-pub world. I say this a lot because if I don't say it then people will keep making the same mistake of comparing the failures of one model to the successes of another.
Forget for the moment that most of the books you see on the shelf are going to lose money. Forget that there are even more books put out by the publisher that didn't make it on the shelf. Forget that a tiny fraction of best sellers is keeping afloat an industry that regularly gambles hundreds of thousands of dollars on unknown quantities of unknown quality.
When you compare a failed self-publishing venture.. an e-book that sells three copies and two of them to the author's grandparents, a tip jar that sits lonely and unclicked... you aren't looking at the equivalent of the underperforming books of the trad-pub world. You're looking at the slush pile. You're looking at the drawer manuscripts. You're looking at the rejects and cast-offs.
And for every book that ends up on the shelf at
Those are the failures. If we're going to compare the models, we have to start by disregarding the books that don't make it on either side of the fence and focus on the successes. If we're going to judge either route by the "typical" experience of an author who attempts to undertake it, we might as well discard both routes as failures.
When I started down this road, I was fond of saying that I wouldn't consider "selling out" and taking my stuff to a trad-pub outfit unless they could give me a better deal than the one I could make for myself. Back then I was talking about control and self-respect more so than money. If I could make any money doing it my way, that was worth it. I was aware even then that if I was making a living at it I was doing well, but I really wasn't thinking in terms of self-publishing beating trad-pub at every level.
But that was 4-5 years ago. So much has changed since then.
I'm not predicting the death of publishing or of print. There are predictions out there that paper's going to be the niche and digital will be the default medium, though, and I think that prediction has legs in some regards. I believe the day is coming when electronic rights become the medium of exchange between publishers and authors and when a print deal is awarded to those authors who can prove their selling power in the digital world. That's become the bread and butter of small presses. They can put out any number of modest successes without breaking their nigh-unto-non-existent budgets, and those works can remain "in print" and on sale, and when and if the demand for one justifies it they can bring out a print edition already knowing that it will recoup its costs.
If the Big Publishers haven't outwardly adopted that approach yet, it's simply organizational inertia. It will happen, though. E-books will become their main line, with print being the "prestige" product, the premium. Already in discussions of e-book pricing people talk about print as a premium. They talk about the appeal of a well-made tome, beautiful cover, the weight and heft (or slimness, in some cases) of it. There are beautiful books out there, to be sure. Making a book is more often manufacturing, but it can be an art in and of itself.
So rather than envisioning the death of print, let's talk about the rebirth of the art of bookmaking. I see my friends who deal in small and medium presses talking about this. Papaveria Press puts out some very lovely books. Cat Valente sold one of her e-pubs recently and announced plans are afoot for a beautiful hard copy. That's her word, and I have no reason to doubt it. However we disagree about certain business matters, I would not argue with her about matters of aesthetics and not just because my eyes are tone deaf.
But here's why I think it's inevitable that e-printing will become the entry level tier and print books will be higher tier: buying the print rights is making a gamble. It's investing hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital in a venture that's probably not going to break even. The ones that do pay for the ones that don't, but they do everything they can to avoid the ones that don't, obviously.
E-book rights, though, are a gold mine. Not individually. Any given e-book right they purchase may or may not ever catch fire. But the cost of bringing it to market is smaller. It's a one-time investment, and then they have bandwidth and storage costs that are cheap and getting cheaper. E-books that fail to pay off the initial investment are going to be a smaller loss than print books. The aggregate of all the e-book rights the publisher owns is the 21st century goose that lays the golden eggs.
It's not quite a license to print money, but in some ways it's better. After all, printing is expensive.
So it makes more sense for publishers to aggressively pursue e-rights than print rights (though I imagine they'd lock the print rights down in the contract so the author couldn't go anywhere else.) If publishers haven't realized this yet, they will. I've already heard reports of authors who were told that selling the electronic rights was a non-negotiable part of getting published with them, and of contracts that seem to have an expiration date for the electronic rights but only say that if in two or three years the parties can't agree on terms then no one gets to use the electronic rights until they come to an agreement.
Who wins there? The publisher needs e-books for their library, but not this specific e-book. They can get another e-book. The author can't get another publisher for this one.
Pursuing e-books aggressively is going to be how Big Publishing survives the coming changes. I'm not suggesting that it's endangered as an entity. Quite the opposite. The changes we're seeing today are only new insofar as they're different from the changes of yesteryear. Any publishing house that's earned the moniker "Big" has distinguished itself by its ability to survive and even grow in an environment where its competitors failed.
Some people call the big publishers dinosaurs, but they're more like another extinct animal: sharks. Oh, sharks aren't extinct? Well, shit. You'd expect them to be since they're 450 million years old. How'd they last that long? Being sharks.
Now, when I talk about Big Publishing people who work with folks at the Big Publishing houses leap to their defense. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about people. I'm talking about corporate entities. The person isn't there to get rich. The person is there because they have a passion for the written word, or they fell in love with the glamor and romance of it all, or because they want to help the authors they believe in bring their works to market.
You want to tell me about your friends at Random House (to pick a house at random... well, not really. I thought "random publishing house" and there it was.) and I'm sure they're wonderful people and all. Random House, the company? It was founded in 1925. Half a decade before the Great Depression, which it survived. The number of companies it has absorbed, bought out, or out-competed is longer than a prolific author's bibliography.
I'm not pointing fingers. I'm not suggesting it's EEEEVIL, like the FRU-ITS of the DEVIL. I'm just saying: this is a company that knows how to survive in an industry where it's notoriously hard to make a profit. People within the company might have your back, but the corporate entity is not your friend.
Of course, when we understand that this is an industry that generates close to $25 billion in net sales every year, and we consider how hard they apparently have making a profit... well, let's bring this back to self-pub and e-pub.
There's an amazing amount of money in digital publishing. An amazing amount. And digital publishing... especially in the more platform portable/minimalist formats like .epub and .mobi... really strips the business down to the basics: you have content, you have an audience for the content.
The words are the product. Not a book. Not a bright and shiny image of what literature is supposed to be. Not a space on a bookshelf. The words. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not a lot of room for a man to stand in the middle.
What will your publisher do in exchange for the e-rights? Well, they'll give you a share of the profits. Let's parse that: they'll take all the money that your content generates and give you a share of it.
What are they doing that entitles them to all the money in the first place? They'll do some editing but publishers don't generally accept unpolished manuscripts these days anyway. Typesetting/formatting? Not really a thing when you're trying to get on Kindle. I advise anyone who's selling a book to stop and look at the mobile formats. Get acquainted with what goes into them. Put one of your stories on Amazon Kindle using their upload conversion thingy. Put one of your stories on Smashwords. It can be the same story; they don't require exclusive rights. Spend an afternoon learning how these things work.
The publisher may do a bit more in order to justify their share. They might get you a cover designed by their in-house/contract people, for instance. Okay. This justifies them having 80% of the money your e-book gets forever? I guarantee you they paid the artist once. That's work for hire. They don't have to keep paying a royalty every time someone buys a copy. Why does them arranging artwork once give them the right to your money forever?
And it's your money. These are the terms you have to think in. Be like the music industry. Be like the movie industry. Not evil, but fierce in the protection of your rights. Do not give your rights away. Do not for anything in the world sell the electronic rights.
License them.
You are a licensor.
The publisher is a licensee.
When it comes to physical printing, it might be better to think of it in terms of you purchasing the use of their facilities and expertise, but in the electronic publishing world where the raw content is the product and you are the provider of the content? You're licensing to them. And chances are if you've already signed a contract then that contract is hideously lopsided, under the circumstances.
A fair contract for e-publishing has an expiration date with rights reverting to you, full stop, or else it gives either party the right to exit without penalty. A fair contract doesn't limit the book's earning power by locking it into a too-high price; it allows the e-book to be priced at a price that will move even if that price is markedly lower than print. Inflated prices for e-books isn't about valuing the author's work; it's a self-defeating attempt to undercut new media by old media even while the old media tries to profit from it. It's irrational, but human beings and corporations aren't perfectly rational entities.
As the economic appeal "premium/prestige print paradigm" becomes more apparent, I expect we'll see less resistance to cheaper e-books... though they will probably go for a little of that and a little inflation of print prices to make $10 an e-book seem cheap.
Now here we come up to the harsh reality of it all.
You're an unknown author, a first time author. Or maybe you're an established mid-list author. Maybe you're even a fairly reliable money-maker. And you have a deal on the table but you say, "I'm sorry, the terms of the transfer of electronic rights are not acceptable. I know I could make more money doing it for myself. I'll consider these terms if you agree to a smaller share and the rights revert to me after a year unless we both agree to continue the deal for another year."
You know what happens then? I predict: you lose the deal.
Because there's no hole in their publishing schedule they can't fill. If you're not a household name, they don't need your e-book. They don't want your e-book in particular. You might be able to negotiate a slightly better deal but you're not going to get anything that's anywhere close to being fair.
I'm not even convinced a publisher can offer a fair deal on e-publishing. I mean, Amazon's 30% off the top is already a big chunk but it's an amazingly low price because they have built an amazing content delivery service that is worth paying 30% of your value to get in on.
What does the publisher do, if it holds the electronic rights to your book?
Your publisher plugs you into that network. That anyone can get into. For free. With very little work or expertise.
What can your publisher possibly charge you for that "service" of putting itself between you and Amazon that would both be a fair price for you to pay (I'm not saying they do nothing there) but also worth their time as a major corporate entity? They'd have to throw away their gatekeeper badge entirely and just be a slush-shoveler if they were going to make money by putting stuff up on Amazon and charging a fair price for the service.
And here's where we come to the soft underbelly of the harsh reality.
Before, the publisher didn't need you but you needed them.
Now? No. No, you don't. If the publisher tells you no, that's... well, you can make a better deal for yourself. That's why you stood up to them. This is true if you're a new author. If you're an established author. If you're turning down your first contract or you're turning down a half million dollar offer. You can get a better deal.
On the other hand, I fully understand that some authors just Do Not Want To Deal With That Stuff. I understand it. I'd urge any author who feels that way to take a look at Amazon and Smahswords and the like on a day when they're feeling adventurous and/or relaxed because they might learn that there's less Stuff to deal with than they thought. But I understand it.
So I'm not completely pooh-poohing the idea of the publisher as an intermediary between authors and e-book-stores. But really that's what they're going to need to position themselves as, in the long term.
And if your goal is to be in print, to have that "legitimacy"... whatever it is... then maybe you ultimately sign on the line that is dotted and you throw in the e-rights like they're an after thought. People have made worse business decisions. And it doesn't mean you'll never see any money from the e-books.
But authors owe it to themselves to think about what they're signing away. Does the music industry sell you music? No. It licenses the right to use it. does the movie industry sell you movies? No. It licenses them.
Think long and hard before you sell your words. If you say "Thanks, but no thanks," the publisher might not miss those words, but if you say, "Sure! Take them! Have them! I have more words, do you want them, too?" you might never get them back.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2011-03-23 08:53 am (UTC)I guess it might be a bit like photography in a way...as more people go digital, fewer prints will be made, and more thought will go into the ones that are. Some types of books still do work best in print; e-readers can not (yet?) duplicate the effect of things like paper texture, die cuts, embossing, or foil stamping, and it would be wonderful if some of the resources that currently go into printing textbooks and mass producing paper books that are read once (if at all) and then discarded could be redirected so we can have more art books and well crafted story books!
no subject
on 2011-03-23 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-03-23 09:30 pm (UTC)I've got two books that Sigler (shaddup, I know I mentioned him in the other post, but he's relevant to a lot of this stuff) self-pubbed (Crown didn't want this particular series). There's an e-book copy, an audiobook for sale, a podiobook for free, and the hardcover copies (limited runs).
The hardcover copies are beautiful. They're high-grade paper, excellently bound, awesome dust jackets, and each have a 12-page colour insert (like a little in-universe magazine).
Even fanboying aside, these are two of my favourite books, just by how they're put together. I mean, I know there's that small press (if they still exist, I cannot remember the name of them) that puts out prestige-uber-awesome copies of like Gaiman and the like, but they're extra-uber-expensive and you'd feel guilty reading them, they're more like shelf-only copies.
If, on the other hand, I could walk out and pay $34.95 for a hardcover edition of Neverwhere that had, like a 12-page insert of "A Walking Tour of London Below" with photomanips/illustrations of the various parts, I would throw down my money in an instant.