Writers’ Roundup

The jury’s still deliberating at The Writers’ Union of Canada on ebook rights and how much to ask for. While we’re waiting, let’s peek through the fence  at what other writers’ unions in the English-speaking world are posting on their sites. What they seem to agree upon as fair to writers is at least 50/50 and to lease your erights for a limited time only. This post is a bit quote-dense but I think worth it. Pace yourself. (The boldface decisions herein are mine.)

Authors’ Guild of America

The Authors Guild Legal Services Department offers the following advice, along with a recommendation that your e-rights agreement be periodically reviewable: Although electronic publishing is still an evolving industry without clear standards, not long ago, Random House announced an intention to evenly split ebook sales revenue with authors. Before this announcement, Random House had been offering authors royalties of no more than 15% of the retail price of an ebook. Many other publishers, including Harper Collins, have started to offer a 50-50 split of net proceeds also. Therefore, you should negotiate to receive no less.

Random House has now dropped its royalty offering to 25% of net, and presents the familiar baffle/grab for doing so.

“The way the market is developing, the publisher’s list price will soon no longer be a relevant basis for calculating royalties in the digital environment…  The electronic formats are not as inexpensive to produce and publish as many believe … We have made substantial investments …  in related digital infrastructure, such as the creation and maintenance of a digital archive  … The new ebook rate continues to compare favorably to the rates we pay for other formats in which books are made available.” Continue reading

What baffle-grab?  The baffle-grab from publishers.  They claim not to know how much to pay writers for their creative property in the ebook age.  They claim not to know the mysterious costs of epublishing.  The only solid fact they can see through all this fog is that epublishing is so very expensive, they should get the lion’s share of  the royalties.

What makes this bafflegab, is that epublishing is not at all expensive compared to printed books and publishers know it.  If they don’t know it, they could find it out in ten minutes’ conversation with the geek who built their website.  It’s bafflegab because they are using it to befuddle writers into taking an even smaller percentage of after-cost profit than they do now.  The numbers make a very simple and unbaffling statement:  the lion’s share of the royalties belong to the writers.  Continue reading

Imagine you’re a writer. You create an original work. You create an electronic file of it. You decide to lease paper-print rights only to a “tradi-pub”  who publishes a paper version of it and ships it to tradi-bookstores for sale.

You separately lease ebook rights to an electronic publisher to post it online for a period of time.

A reader comes along who pays a fee to download it onto her iphone. She reads it in transit, to and from her job. She likes it enough to swing by a bookstore on her way home and grab a paper copy to give her Aunt Zelda who is not an iphone kind of gal. Two sales. One purchaser. Continue reading