Beware the baffle-grab
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.
Beware the baffle-grabbers. The facts are childishly simple and can be explained in simple English.
Meanwhile, we writers sit at our scribbly desks like schoolkids awaiting the arrival of the publishers and the scrape of chalk on blackboard. Hullo, here comes a publisher now. He (they’re mostly he) is brandishing a beaker. The magic numbers are swirling about in a murky liquid within. Eureka, says the publisher. I’ve got it! Writers can be given, um, 25%. We’ll keep the rest. We need to. See this murky swirling stuff here? This represents our risk. We simply don’t know how much e-publishing will earn. We aren’t sure how much epublishing will cost us. It’s so… electronic and mysterious and unproven and complicated. You writers couldn’t possibly grasp it. It’s about efiles and uploading and data storage. You’re adorably childlike about technical things like bytes and money. It’s one of the endearing things about you. Leave it to us, as you always have, to tell you what your creative efforts will cost us to lug into the marketplace.
We’re off to the government now for a grant to help subsidise our beaker work. Then on to our next national e-publishers’ conference to compare swirly murk. After which, we promise, fingers crossed, we’ll let you know just what we’re prepared to give you. Virtual storage is still storage, after all. Virtual pages are still pages. Don’t let any geek tell you otherwise.
Oh and would you mind dropping off your discs to us before you go? Or no, just email us your efiles. We need to convert them to … efiles. Converting is hard and expensive work. Watch we don’t charge you for that some day too. There now, don’t you feel lucky? How’s your author website coming along, by the way? Always Be Self-marketing, to paraphrase Mamet. ABM. Need we keep reminding you? It’s only you who will lose in the end being shy and reclusive. Chest out, mike in hand. Project yourself. Start a blog, do.
Must e-dash. Stay in touch. No, amend that. We’ll call you — or not. Book publishing is so wobbly these days.
